Good morning from the thankfully air conditioned press center in Tel Aviv! We’re at the beginning of the longest rehearsal day, with the two remaining second rehearsals of semi 1, second rehearsals of the first 9 countries in semi 2, and the first rehearsals of all the direct finalists.

This means you can expect several posts covering the second rehearsals and a running blog for the direct finalists. You can also follow us on Twitter for comments throughout the day.

Greece

Good news first: the singing sounded great, both Katerine’s vocals and the harmonies worked perfectly this time around. And on the staging front, much of the extra excessive backdrop use have been dropped in favor of more generic elements which become the full on blooming garden flower only in the last section.

The bad news: the staging is still both overly artsy and overly kitschy and feels like a mismatch to the song. It does nothing to elevate it or even help the viewers notice the strong parts of the song. The artsy part actually makes it feel very alienating as there’s something that feels very elitist and snobbish about it. All in all: love the song to death, really dislike this staging.

San Marino
Credit to whoever worked with the Sanmarinese team for making the vocals work really well without actually having to hide Serhat’s voice. It’s all colorful and cheerful and actually quite pleasant, but it’s still so horribly outdated (and Serhat still can’t sing, clever vocal arrangement or not) that I can’t see any juries picking this out of the lot.