Project Lotus Finale Event... "Blush" is born!

Last night I went to see the Project Lotus Finale!  Despite your opinions of 'boybands' or 'girlbands'... because it had some competition element to it,  it was actually pretty exciting!

For those who don't know,  Project Lotus was a regional project to make a girl band with members from different countries. Talent searches were performed in China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and India.   After several rounds of eliminations, the top 10 girls (2 from each country) were flown to HK for this finale.  Of course they are filming the whole process and I'm sure this will make a great reality TV show in the end...  (think 'multi-national American idol', except with no dudes...)

It was a slow start,  a lot of introductions of the people involved in the process.  Included are the guest performers tonight,  Hanjin Tan and Jonathan Wong, as well as performers and celebrity judges Karen Mok, Coco Lee and yes, the one and only Lea Salonga.

Because we helped to do marketing for this finale event, they forced us to sit in the front...  but we had good neighbors!  (actually Hanjin never came to his seat the whole night i think...)

Speaking of which, they did a group performance of a Spice Girls song.  The buy guy w/ the bass was one of the original songwriter/producers who worked with the Spice Girls back in the day,  he is one of the people behind Project Lotus. 

Doh,  Jonathan can't join in the clap-along!

After much waiting,  we finally got what we wanted... the first set of 5 girls came out and did a dance number -

Very Spice Girls-esque...  each girl gets a few solo lines to sing (their chance to make an impression),  a lot of dancing.. 

That's Korea, Philippines, China (from HK), India and Japan from L to R.

Then it was the 2nd group. 

Philippines,  Japan, India, Korea and China.   Korean girl looks like a giant compared to the rest of these girls... actually she's not that tall I think.. the others are just that small!

These five performed the same song with the same choreography as the first group,  and each girl sang and danced the same part as the other girl from the same country...   so in reality each girl was only competing against her country-person...  (the final band would have one from each of the 5 countries no matter what I think)

A second number performed by each group.    Actually as a group the second five girls performed better... they seemed to have more 'pizazz'  and energy... but individual by individual the first group seemed to be better in most cases.

They brought all 10 out for a final line-up and the judges showed their respect for the hard work that got the 10 this far.

even though there weren't any decisions yet, some of the girls got emotional...   (because they knew they clinched it?  because they knew they were not going to be able to beat their opponent?!?)

While the judges deliberated, we got some more entertainment from the special guests:

Having just seen Jason Mraz perform live in HK a few months ago,  I thought Jonathan had some big shoes to fill!   Well done!

Hanjin performed in Mandarin.

Karen Mok performed en piano... 

Super star Lea Salonga,  you may remember her from such Disney films as Mulan and Aladdin.... and/or Miss Saigon.

OK, you can guess from the multitude of photos comprising the rest of this blog the real reason I came... yes I wanted to see COCO LEE perform in person.   I have been a fan of hers since back in the day, but despite my life in the periphery of Hong Kong's Entertainment industry,  I have never had a chance to see her in person before.  Until tonight!  (next target... Faye Wong!)

What presence!  What style!  I hope the Project Lotus girls were paying attention... this is a how-to for being one woman musical sensation!

Anyway, back to the finale of the competition...  They announced the winning girls one at a time and had them come on stage -

Winners were:

Angeli Flores

Alisha Budhrani

Lee Ji-Hae

Danjo Natsuko

Victoria Chan

The girls on the far left,  Angeli Flores from the Philippines was by far the most outstanding in my mind (in terms of looks, stage presence, singing, etc).  The other outstanding ones in my mind were the two Korean girls, Lee Ji-Hae and Park Soohwa.... it really is unfortunate that they weren't both able to be selected (if it was me I would have made them a trio w/ Angeli...) ;-)

Despite being from different 'teams' and not having practiced together as a group before,  they had all five of them perform together as a final act.  This is why it was a good idea to have each country's girls learn the same part... interchangability!

They also announced that the girlband's name will be 'Blush' (I assumed it was going to be 'Lotus'!)

Congrats to the winners.  The runners up never came out afterwards, I'm sure they were very disappointed not to make it....  (the downside of these competitions... the broken dreams!)

Some post-show goofing off -

Hanjin is losing a little weight!

"Coco Lee" groped Patrick Lee's a$$ that night...