Good morning from a still-sleepy press center! It’s been a long day away from the press center yesterday with Memorial Day and Independence Day celebrations, but I’m back here, brave woman that I am.

We have 15 delegations rehearsing for the second time today, in 3 sessions – 5 countries each. I’ll be here after each session to tell you about all the new things we learned! We will finally get to see a complete run throughs from Cyprus and Estonia and some countries definitely need to adjust some things, so we’ll see where everyone is at the end of today. Come back at the end of each session to see what’s new and check us on Twitter for live updates!

Cyprus
Starting with one of the most anticipated rehearsals of the day, having had no audio for her first run throughs, Tamta has the misfortune of suffering both the early morning rehearsal syndrome and the “well, she’s a fairly capable singer, we don’t need to put that much effort into her backing vocal mix” effect. She has only one (hidden) backing singer who wasn’t really used in the first run through, in which Tamta was also particularly off and generally exposed. That was quickly adjusted for the second run through, with the backing vocal contributing more doubling throughout the song and a better mix preventing it from sounding too thin.

Opinions are divided on her fashion choices – I’m personally not a fan but also not too bothered, because it seems like a standard pop-performance outfit, really – but visually it looks as slick as always, even though they did change a couple of my favorite shots from the first run through (but if you didn’t see them, you won’t miss them).

Montenegro
Montenegro is pretty much exactly as it was in the first run throughs – adorable kids, good vocals, pointless staging, questionable color scheme, and cringeworthy song and at times, staging. But at least I had the added bonus of seeing this particular one in the hall as well, and apart from the stage itself being even more gorgeous in person, it also meant I got to see the kids sprint through the bridges on stage to get to their cues in time. Gotta love backstage production geekery.

Finland
By some miracle, Sebastian was actually sort-of on key for one of the run throughs, but that’s not very helpful when the rest of it doesn’t really work (not to mention the song). I spent much of the rehearsal looking at the dancer and the backdrop, essentially looking away from both credited names for the duration of the three minutes – which is not what they were going for, one would hope.

They are attempting some stage dynamics by having Sebastian run around all over the stage – he gets good mileage in, visiting the catwalk on one side and the bridge on the other – but I was having a hard time caring about him as it is, and trying to figure out where he was on screen at any given moment was too much of an effort.

They do have some nice backdrop/dancer and camerawork moments, but again: not really the point of this.

Poland
Here’s a delegation that did its homework. The veils have been upgraded to red, which actually work really nicely on screen and make a difference despite being such a small item. The camerawork for some of the problematic parts was changed to something that makes more sense and the girls are in great voice and get their cues right, making this into a spectacle different from anything else. It’s static but has a lot of character and charm thanks to the girls just being interesting as performers. And the stage for this is one of my favorites in this semi.

Slovenia
Still unable to keep my attention on this for more than a minute, even though at least they adjusted the first minute to have some more intimate effects of spotlights and close camerawork on them before going back to the galaxy backdrop. But too little ever happens in the staging of this to make this beautiful but mellow song come across as anything else than a soundtrack to a kitchen break for the viewers.