The roughly 16 trillion singing competitions now showing on network television sort of blend into one another for me these days, but this clip that’s going around from the Russian version of The Voice makes it seem worth watching. It features an Armenian soprano named Vika Ogannesyan (Viktoria Hovhanissyan) singing the opera from The 5th Element.
The original, sung by “Diva Plavalaguna” in the film, was voiced by Albanian opera singer Inva Mula.
Hovhannisyan, with her five-octave range, has also been known to favorite the “Diva Dance” tune (the first part of the song comes from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor). [TheMarySue]
Apparently the song is pretty popular over there, because I found another version of it from a year earlier, sung by a Ukrainian on a kids show. Neither of them did the dance though, which kind of makes it.
Apparently this song is the Eastern Bloc’s favorite thing behind calmly walking away from horrific accidents on dashcam videos. “In Soviet Russia, 5th element is bread.” If Chris Tucker ever runs out of Brett Ratner movies to be in, he should just move to Belarus and start a resort called Fhloston Paradise. That’d be super green.