Frenchie Davis: Dreamgirls, Ain’t Misbehavin

Frenchie Davis: Dreamgirls, Ain’t Misbehavin, Franchelle “Frenchie” Davis (born May 7, 1979; Washington, D.C.) is an R&B singer and former contestant on the second season of the American reality television show American Idol. Davis performed in Rent on Broadway in 2003. In 2011 Davis became a Top 8 semi-finalist and came in Second place on Christina Aguilera’s team on the first season of The Voice.
Davis was a semi-finalist on the second season of American Idol but was disqualified due to topless photos taken earlier in her career.

According to Davis, she was up-front about her pictures:

“When I first discovered that I had made it to Hollywood and found out I would be competing to get into the top 30 and then later in the top 12, they had given us all this paperwork to fill out, background checks and that whole thing. So when we were doing that I had a discussion with some members of the production staff and I exposed to them a piece of my past; that when I was 19 years old, I took some pictures and that’s not the person I am [anymore]. I wanted to be up-front about it. We talked about it and then nothing happened”.
The Idol staff took no action then, but two months later, they decided that Davis’s participation would be inappropriate. “They had decided that because American Idol was a family show, that they could not have me on the show because of the pictures I had taken – though they had never seen the pictures,” she told EuroWeb. She also added that no one was able to find the pictures in question as the website that featured them had been taken down.

After revealing pictures of season six American Idol contender Antonella Barba surfaced on the internet, many drew parallels to a similar situation involving season two contender Davis. In an interview conducted for The New York Post on Monday, March 5, 2007, Davis said,

“I couldn’t help but notice the difference between the manner in which she was dealt with and how I was dealt with…. I think it’s fantastic if Idol has evolved, and I think it’s fantastic she won’t have to go through what I went through four years ago but if the rules have changed, I believe there should be something to make up for the fact that I was humiliated needlessly.”
Project Islamic H.O.P.E. activist Najee Ali has accused the show of racism: “It’s obvious that it’s a racial bias… when you have a situation where a black contestant is punished and a similar situation happens to a white contestant and there is no punishment and they’re allowed to continue on the show”. According to EuroWeb, Ali staged a protest in front of The Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, CA on Tuesday, March 6, 2007. Protesters are seeking another chance for Davis at the competition. Former talk show co-host Rosie O’Donnell has commented on the Idol scandal; on The View, Tuesday, March 6, 2007, co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck used the justification that Davis was paid for her pictures whereas Barba was not. Rosie’s response: “I think it’s racist. I do… I think it’s because she’s black”.

Frenchie Davis performing at Broadway on Broadway in 2006.
After American Idol, Davis appeared in the Broadway musical Rent in 2003. She sang the solo in the opening song of Act Two, Seasons of Love, and in ensemble roles such as Mrs. Jefferson (Joanne’s mom), a woman with bags, a coat vendor, Mrs. Marquez (Mimi’s mom) and others. She also occasionally played the part of Joanne. On June 1, 2005, Davis returned to her previous role in the Broadway production of Rent. Davis had previously announced that she would leave Rent in May 2007, but announced her final performance following a mid-April 2007 show. During the weeks leading up to the April 29 performance of Rent’s 10-year reunion, Davis appeared in an iTunes Podcast (Rent: The PodCast). She also joined the original cast for a special encore performance.

In 2004, Davis was cast in the role of Effie in a West Coast-touring production of Dreamgirls, which appeared in Sacramento, San Jose, and Seattle, and later went to Pittsburgh.

From August 3-19, 2007, Davis starred alongside Miche Braden and JMichael in the role of Mahalia Jackson in the Hartford Stage production of Mahalia: A Gospel Musical, written by Tom Stolz and directed by Jeremy B. Cohen.

In 2008, Davis, along with fellow second-season American Idol participants Ruben Studdard and Trenyce Cobbins, starred in the 30th-anniversary national tour of the musical revue Ain’t Misbehavin’; the tour ran until May 2009.

Dream Girls

Dream Girls, Hollywood is generally impervious to embarrassment, but maybe one of those moments when the signal that the industry should engage in a little introspection on the image he projected to the outside world. At the time of the Oscar, the projector is on show business, which in a country increasingly proving to be a multicultural company that is as white on the outside as it is inside.
Latino and black actors can get parts as soldiers in an action movie or comic sidekicks in a comedy, but when it comes to the nature of dramatic roles that attract Oscar attention, they need a helping Luckily, as one Mo’Nique got to have a black filmmaker making the right choice of casting. Or that of Jennifer Hudson won with her role in “Dreamgirls” imposed on the scene. Or that Morgan Freeman won, landing an Oscar nomination last year by Nelson Mandela in “Invictus,” because he has a long experience of working with Clint Eastwood.

What does this have to do with the Oscars? Films that end up being nominated for Oscars are usually works of love and are rarely the kind of action hero easily accessible or widely comic characters that respond to a studio on the sensitivity of baseline. If you do not have a person of color in the room where the decision goes, fervently arguing why a film should be introduced into the world, it is extremely difficult for a project revolving around characters Afro- U.S. to emerge with a green light or any substantial financial support.
For a change of pace, in Dreamgirls, Bill Condon’s novel in 2006-a-key musical starring Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles and Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, shown tonight in all its glory of three hours. (ABC, 8 ET / PT.
There are moments of genuine emotional majesty in Jeremiah Johnson, a relatively little-known 1972 American western directed by relative unknown and Sydney Pollack and starring a young Robert Redford.

Redford plays the title character, a veteran tired of the war 1846-’48 Mexican-American who seeks refuge and solace in becoming a recluse in the Rocky Mountains remain as a trapper and guide for the occasional rental in the snow in the mountains smothered password.

First, Jeremiah Johnson today may seem old and worn: He played in theaters at a time when the West had a difficult time. Classic westerns of John Ford and John Wayne were a distant memory, replaced by the more cynical, stylish westerns of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.

Jeremiah Johnson was written by John Milius and Edward Anhalt by Raymond Thorp and Robert Bunker historical biography Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, the 1840 real-life mountain man “Liver Eating Johnson.”

The story is both traditional – the theme is good, old American independence in the face of physical suffering and danger – and forward-thinking: Jeremiah Johnson was one of the first of a new wave of movie Westerns to represent In crude terms and painfully realistic, tension between the difficult early settlers of the western United States and the Crow and indigenous tribes of the Blackfoot in the region.