When we last left The Voice, Season 18 had been completely thrown off-kilter by the coronavirus — forcing the finalists to remotely perform next to ring lights and green screens in their living rooms, with eventual champion Todd Tilghman celebrating his finale night victory at home in Mississippi via a wonky Google Teams connection. Five months later, the show returned to the Universal Studios lot this Monday… but things weren’t totally back to normal on the Season 19 premiere.
The red chairs were spaced much farther apart; the virtual audience was a wall-sized Brady Bunch grid of Zoom squares; and the coaches, unable to give their newly recruited team members congratulatory hugs (this was especially an existential struggle for the gregarious Kelly Clarkson), had to resort to more socially distanced displays of camaraderie. Blake Shelton had his contestants cuddle up to a man-sized Blake cardboard cutout. John Legend shook his contestants’ hands using some creepy rubber dishwashing glove affixed to a 6-foot wooden pole. And this season’s returning coach, Blake’s offscreen quarantine partner Gwen Stefani, shot old-school, KLOS-style “Team Gwen” tees at her contestants out of a T-shirt cannon.
But one thing that definitely had remained the same, after 18 seasons and counting, was the gender-flipped element of surprise. When 35-year-old John Holiday stridently belted the Ella Fitzgerald version of “Misty,” the slack-jawed, bug-eyed look of utter shock on Kelly’s face when she spun around and saw a man onstage was truly a classic Voice moment. “I didn’t know you were a dude!” she gasped. “Did you see my face? That will be a GIF.”
Of course, that was nothing compared to the look of anger on Kelly’s face once she realized that John Legend — who’d turned around literally within the first three seconds of hearing this song stylist’s exquisite, of-another-era tone — had used his one Block of the season on her. But surely she couldn’t blame John for wanting to secure the contestant who’d just delivered what he called “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen on this show.”
John Holiday, a professional Texas opera singer whose fans have included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, went on The Voice to cross over to jazz and gospel. As a gay man who was bullied as a child for his high, girlish voice, he also signed up to “inspire other young boys.” And he certainly succeeded in both missions. This flashy crooner’s performance was bold and stupendous and totally memorable; he looked and sounded like a superstar. As Holiday closed night one of Season 19, he really made it feel like The Voice was back in a big way. “You forget how much you miss hearing people sing live, till you get it taken away for a while,” mused the always-eloquent John Legend. And he was right. I missed this.