In an interview after Eurovision 2023, Romania’s Theodor Andrei says broadcaster TVR gave him no control over staging or a music video.
We were lucky enough to see him sing live for the SF2 afternoon show and honestly his voice was fantastic. But the changes to the song and that staging! Absolutely deserved better.
He was really done dirty by TVR - the song wasn’t one of my favourites but he’s obviously talented, it’s almost like they sabotaged him on purpose (although I’m not sure why they’d do that). It’s grim, so I’m glad he’s angry and speaking out about it all.
I think it was some good old corruption. According to TVR, his performance cost a crazy amount of money, even though it looked cheap and was much worse than the NF performance.
It definitely seems possible. The thing is they could have had a cheap but good staging! He was a guest act on the moldovan NF and there wasn’t really any stging, he was actually dressed well for once, it was the most effective performance of that song I’ve seen - they could have just gone minimalistic and it would have been fine… but instead they chose chaos