Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is… but you might.
For days now entertainment news shows have been making a huge production out of a relatively innocuous switcheroo that took place on stage at a recent “Hannah Montana” concert. Now, several mainstream media outlets have jumped on the story and the “Hannah Montana” body double brouhaha has seemingly taken on a life of its own.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the pat few weeks here’s what the controversy is all about: It centers around a video posted on YouTube (surprise, surprise) that shows Miley Cyrus (the 15-year-old actress/singer who plays “Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel show of the same name) singing and dancing onstage with a group of others during a recent performance on the “Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus ‘Best of Both Worlds'” tour.
If you watch the video carefully, during the song, someone ushers Cyrus offstage via a trap door. Then a split second later another girl dressed like “Hannah Montana” wearing the same pink trench coat with blonde hair dances around for less than a minute then darts off the stage.
So what’s the big deal?
Reps with the tour say the body double was only used for costume purposes.
“To help speed the transition from Hannah to Miley, there is a production element during the performance of ‘We Got the Party’ incorporating a body double for Miley,” according show producers.
“After Hannah has completed the featured verse on the duet with the Jonas Brothers, a body double appears approximately one to two minutes prior to the end of the song in order to allow Miley to remove the Hannah wig and costume and transform into Miley for her solo set. Other than during this very brief transitional moment in the show, Miley performs live during the entirety of both the Hannah and Miley segments of the concert.”
Sounds reasonable to me. However, some fans (make that some parents of “Hannah Montana” fans”) were outraged by what they described as “fakery.”
While choreographers not affiliated with the “Hannah Montana” tour have publicly stated that the use of body doubles is not uncommon in touring shows, and there is nothing dishonest about it, parents, who in some cases dropped a month’s worth of their salaries to pay for tickets to the sold-out concert (while others sacrificed their dignity for tickets) say they expected more from show producers.
As I mentioned before I am eternally grateful that my young daughter doesn’t know “Hannah Montana” exists. However, even if she did and we had gone to the concert I don’t feel as though my daughter would have been negatively affected by the switcheroo.
One of the show’s producers said this about the concert controversy: “It takes a few moments at least to change costumes, and they are trying to do it to give you the almost ‘David Copperfield gee-whiz’ effect. There are absolutely laws of physics that prevent you from doing gee-whiz things without some hocus-pocus.”
I agree and don’t see how the use of a body double in this capacity compromises ethics in the world of entertainment especially when you consider what people like Britney Spears have done on stage in the past.
What do you think?
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