With a wave of the "American Idol" light sticks, Mellon Arena was transformed into "AI-7" central Tuesday night as the tour steamrolled into town -- and all but fell flat on its face.

This year's show featured a cheaper stage than last year's and brought each performer out for a three-song set, in the order that they were eliminated from the show. And they all -- with the exception of "The Davids" (Archuleta and Cook) -- did a note-for-note copy-cat performances of top 100 songs that were fan faves on the show.

The night opened with Chikezie, who surprisingly enough had a nice little connection going on with the audience. He was followed by Ramiele Malubay and then Michael Johns, whose set included Queen's "We Will Rock You/We are the Champions."

The trio of girls were next, beginning with Kristy Lee Cook's country-flavored musings; Carly Smithson, who took no prisoners when she came straight out of the gates with Evanescence "Bring Me to Life;" and Brooke White's neo-hippy (barefooted) presentation of "Let It Be."

Overall, these performances were lackluster and flat as the singers went though their ever-so-scripted concert. What happened to all of the charisma? Without a doubt, it fell in the lap of the 17-year-old wunderkind Archuleta, who in the second half of the show managed to give a genuinely nice and untainted performance in the middle of this debacle.

Say what you want, that kid just puts a smile on everyone's face.

Jason Castro and Syesha Mercado sang well, looked good and did everything they were supposed to do (yawn). And American Idol winner David Cook cranked out his mini-set of restyled hits into a power-ballad lovers paradise with covers of "Billie Jean" and "Hello" in the mix -- clearly, he was rightly picked as the American Idol.

What can you say about the rest? It's hard to tell. While last year's show gave us the opportunity to see the finalists perform on instruments with each other and mix it up a bit -- not all of it worked, but it was the next step in the natural progression of these performers and it was interesting -- we didn't get that this year. What we got, instead, was an overblown karaoke routine.