Jordin Sparks is set to sing during the “Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular” show in New York, NBC said Monday.
Also slated to perform at the event, which is to be televised on NBC, are Kenny Chesney, Natasha Bedingfield and Katharine McPhee.
Natalie Morales, NBC’s “Today” national correspondent, and Tiki Barber, “Today” correspondent and “Football Night in America” studio analyst, are to preside over the Independence Day festivities.
“Macy’s 2008 Fourth of July Fireworks will kick off a season of special events nationwide celebrating Macy’s 150th Birthday. The nation’s biggest fireworks show begins with a resounding musical fanfare accompanied by a dazzling pyrotechnic salute to the world’s largest store,” Robin Hall, Macy’s Fireworks executive producer, said in a statement. “Macy’s Fireworks is always rated the No. 1 show in America by the American Pyrotechnic Association, and we’re convinced the 2008 show will be no exception.”
Former American Idol finalists are dropping like McPhlies in the Sony BMG recording family.
Katharine McPhee is the latest former Idol to part ways with the recording company, a representative for her now former RCA Records label confirmed to Entertainment Weekly on Wednesday. The fifth-season runner-up joins fifth-season champ Taylor Hicks and second-season winner Ruben Studdard — who recently left Arista and J Records labels respectively — as no longer having a label.
“Katharine is going to record her next album on her own,” an RCA representative told EW.
McPhee was signed to Idol creator Simon Fuller’s 19 Recordings Limited and Sony BMG’s RCA Records two weeks after she finished second to Hicks during Idol’s May 2006 fifth-season finale.
Her self-titled RCA debut dropped at No. 2 on The Billboard 200 album sales chart in its February 2007 first week of release, selling 116,000 copies. However since then the album has sold only 366,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan.
While McPhee had previously stated her sophomore effort would be “a much different record” — “maybe more like the female version of John Mayer” — the 23-year-old has also begun to focus on an acting career. This fall, she finished production on I Know What Boys Like — a comedy produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions that she co-stars in alongside Scary Movie actress Anna Faris — which is scheduled to premiere mid-2008.
In addition, EW reported “we hear [McPhee is] already in talks with another label.”
According to Entertainment Weekly it looks like Katharine McPhee is set to co-star in an untitled comedy produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison.
McPhee will appear in the film alongside Scary Movie actress Anna Faris, who according to Entertainment Weekly, will play the role of a Playboy bunny who gets evicted from Hugh Hefner’s mansion. She then finds herself teaching a group of sorority girls at a nearby college how to be cool and hip, with McPhee reportedly playing the role of one of the sorority girls.
The 22-year-old first began gushing about wanting to become a big screen actress after last year’s Idol, and she received her first real chance at attaining that goal in early June when she reportedly signed on to star in the dark romantic comedy The Last Caller. McPhee will reportedly play a self-obsessed woman in-search of love and the hope of finding herself in the “coming-of-age” independent film.
The Last Caller is reportedly scheduled to begin filming in and around New York in the fall, with Sony “aiming for a late summer start date” to begin shooting the Happy Madison production, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Last August it was rumored that McPhee was being considered for a film version of Wonder Woman, but she discredited those reports shortly thereafter, claiming the prospects for a Wonder Woman movie weren’t very good.
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