Thousands Show Off Gifts At NBC's 'Got Talent' Tryout

Robert Young waited quietly yesterday for his 90-second shot at fame -- quietly, that is, until he started channeling Elvis.

Young, dressed in a silver-sequined suit and fresh off a bus from Philadelphia, was among the masses who showed up at National Harbor for the Washington area auditions for the NBC show "America's Got Talent."

Surveying the competition, the 54-year-old man who uses the stage name "Topess," for "The Only Philly Elvis Soul Singer," pronounced himself unafraid.

"I'm unique. I can do ballads. I can do the old stuff," he said, suddenly belting out "Don't be cruel! To a heart that's true!"

More than 2,000 people turned out Friday and yesterday for the first Washington area auditions, said Jason Raff, one of the show's executive producers. At stake in episodes that will air this summer is $1 million.

Anyone who walked through the doors of the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. yesterday got an audition -- as long as they were willing to wait, in some cases more than seven hours.

Rockville resident Abdul Sutton, a tire store owner, hoped the judges would take note of what he said was his own invention: a two-headed instrument he built by combining a guitar and a bass guitar. Falls Church resident Anne Harrison, a Library of Congress librarian, said her group of Bulgarian folk singers won encouraging smiles from two judges. And 7-year-old Taylor Kennedy, who's been watching the show since she was 4, rode up from the Richmond area with her father to dance -- with a green broom as a partner.

Add to them the teenage rock bands, opera singers and little girls in heavy makeup with gear-toting mothers and the cavernous rooms of the convention center took on the schizophrenic feel of a high school talent show crossed with a Las Vegas lounge. Sequins and stilettos ruled the day.

A group of students from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond performed a northern Indian folk dance in bare feet and bright-colored costumes and turbans. They said they took heart in being asked to film a group interview.

"We're just doing this to have fun," said Amandeep Sandhu, 21. "We don't expect more than that."

Raff said the Washington area auditions drew contestants from the Carolinas, West Virginia and New Jersey, including a 5-year-old singer and a 95-year-old tap dancer.

"The thing about our show is you never know who will come through that door," Raff said. "We don't even dare define it. Yesterday, we had a woman who styled hair and claimed she was the fastest up-do artist in the world. In Atlanta, we had a barber who cut hair in 26 seconds."

Some of the contestants might have been quirky, but the show's staff treated the auditions as serious business.

Anyone trying to enter a "holding room," where hundreds of people waited to be called to audition rooms, was checked for a blue wristband. Only the performers -- no reporters or outside photographers -- were allowed to watch the auditions.

Large posters warned contestants that anything they said, sang or did could be caught on camera and aired on television or the Internet and could "be edited, in all media, throughout the universe, in perpetuity."

Maryann Rainey, 11, of Annandale planned to sing an a capella version of the 1980s hit song "Alone," by Heart. She said she wasn't nervous. She had tried out once for a school play and done fine, she said. So why is she taking a shot at national television?

"I think I have a good voice," the sixth-grader at Wakefield Forest Elementary said, giggling. "And I need the money."