Contestants Are Violating Their NDAs to Denounce/Praise Nathan Fielder’s Fake Singing Competition

After last week’s detour into the Evanescence-filled life of Captain Sully Sullenberger, the newest episode of The Rehearsal began with Nathan Fielder’s bogus singing competition Wings of Voice. Several finalists belted out royalty-free covers of “Amazing Grace” in various musical styles ranging from country to pop punk to hip-hop. All inside of a partial replica of the George Bush Intercontinental Airport, naturally.

And while the production was full of red flags, the Wings of Voice contestants seemed to genuinely believed that they were part of a reality singing competition, and not a comedy series that just aired an episode in which a guy put on a wig and fake mustache to masturbate inside the cockpit of a grounded plane, all in an effort to prevent future commercial airline crashes. 

Obviously not everyone was happy about this. Variety recently spoke with New York-based singer Lana Love, who had previously appeared on The Voice. After being promised that the winner of Wings of Voice would get the chance to “perform with a Grammy-winning artist,” Love claims that she “flew from her home in New York to Los Angeles three times, on her own dime.” And while she made it to the top 50 finalists, she wasn’t thrilled to discover that she had spent $5,500 on “travel, lodging and hair and makeup” for a bogus show-within-a-show created just to train co-pilots to be more assertive. 

“I signed up to be a singer, not a lab rat,” Love told the outlet. After Googling crew ’ names and realizing that they had all worked on previous Fielder projects, Love uncovered the truth before her final day. She reportedly drafted an angry letter to the producers, but didn’t send it at the request of her fellow singers, who still saw some benefit to the TV exposure. 

Love even recorded a song about the experience, and her anger over the inclusion of teenage contestants, with a chorus that includes the phrase “Please don’t torture kids anymore. Adults are okay to torture.”

The reason why Love is one of the few people to publicly speak out about her experience making The Rehearsal is because Fielder has subjects sign non-disclosure agreements, a practice that he’s employed since Nathan for You. “I’m legally not allowed to have this conversation with you right now, because I signed an NDA,” Love told Variety, before noting that HBO doesn’t “really have ground to stand on.”

Conversely, another Wings of Voice contestant recently posted about The Rehearsal on Reddit, and actually had positive things to say. Musician Arii Myles also appeared in this week’s “Amazing Grace” performance, and wrote that, while the show wasn’t what she expected, it was “incredibly fun and everyone working (there) was so nice and really worked hard to make us look good.” She also said that the show “crushed it,” adding, “I personally didn’t feel uncomfortable once!”

In fact, Myles was more critical of other, “real” singing competition shows. “I should add that personally I’ve been rejected from every singing show even after being invited by casting directors and I was even told by American Idol (that) I was too ugly for TV… So I very much enjoyed getting to be ‘on’ a ‘singing show’ finally.” Although she did clarify that her “urge to do one has been squashed so thank you Nathan LOL.”

Of course, it’s also possible that all of these people are professional actors, and none of this is real — or perhaps our entire reality is just a fleeting dream inside the mind of Captain Sully during those fateful 23 seconds.