Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Hmm, if I bomb on American Idol, why not try “Glee”?

Apparently, that’s Todrick Hall’s line of thinking these days.

In what has to be a first for an American Idol contestant, Todrick spent a good portion of his exit interview with the media Friday afternoon lobbying for a role on FOX’s hit musical comedy.

“I’m making it my personal job now to be my own campaign manager to get myself a role on ‘Glee,'” the 24-year-old from Arlington, Texas said. “I think I would be perfect for that show.

“And so every time someone asks me what I’m doing now, I’m just telling everyone I would just love, love, love being the next cast member on Glee.”

He spent the rest of the interview saying he was hurt by the African-American stereotype of a singer, by American Idol judges who aren’t really sure what they want and trying to explain away the Oz controversy that has haunted him since he got a golden ticket to Hollywood.

Whew.

First the steroetype. As soon as he made the semifinals, Todrick said he started getting messages from people asking his to sing Usher, or Chris Brown, or Neo or Stevie Wonder.

That’s not what he wanted to sing. So he stayed true to himself and rearranged songs by Kelly Clarkson and Tina Turner instead (rearrangements that flopped in the minds of the judges).

“I kind of sadly feel that if I had just sang the cookie-cutter songs people had expected me to do and not gone out there so far with the clothes and the performing and just been a normal guy that got up there and sang semi-decent, I think maybe I would have done better,” Todrick said.

Then there were the mixed signals from the judges: Change up a song. Do something unexpected. But don’t change it up too much.

“I just told someone today that I feel if Lady Gaga, who is one of the most successful artists out right now, if she was on American Idol, I don’t think they would have good things to say about her,” Todrick said.

“To a certain extent, I think they do want you to be out of the box, but they kept telling me I was changing things too much. But then I would hear them tell other people they weren’t changing things enough and making it their own. You have to try to find that line of when is it not changing it too much and when is it too cookie-cutter and doing a karaoke version, which sometimes they’re OK with and sometime they’re not.”

Ah, as for Oz … for those not familiar, it’s a show Todrick launched last summer of an original musical he wrote. Parents were charged for their children to play the role of munchkins. Except shows in at least four cities, Nashville, Lakeland, Jacksonville and Indianapolis, were canceled.

Says Todrick: “I do want everyone to know I’m not a scam artist. I’m a nice person. No 23-year-old that I know in the history of the world has ever tried to put on a show, and I think that if people think about that they’ll realize I’m just an ambitious kid that got wrapped up with a producer that he didn’t know what he was doing and I didn’t really know what I was doing and I allowed my name to be attached to that.

“But I’m going to get on the phone on Monday and hopefully call a lot of those people because I do want to go there and I love kids and I wouldn’t want people to think negatively of me in that way. I think the show is going to happen again and we’re going to be able to fix that situation and there will be no more negative press.

“But just for the record, I was just the writer and director and choreographer of that show. I was not the producer, and I never dealt with the money side of that show.”

Of course, one could understand if people are confused because this is what Todrick’s MySpace says right now: “I started a company called Drama’l Musicals and produced a tour of an original musical that I wrote called “Oz, the musical.”

But, hey, let’s give the guy the benefit of the doubt.

I say let him follow through with his promise and fix the “Oz, The Musical” mess.

Then maybe the producers of “Glee” could consider that audition.

(Oh, and an editor’s note: Simon Cowell, in an interview earlier this year, said Lady Gaga would be his first pick for a guest artist in season nine because she’s the most relevant artist today.)