Five New Yorkers get their shot at the big time on NBC show 'The Voice'

If you can make it here, you can truly make it anywhere — and these five young New York City residents have made it through the blind audition stage of the hit reality singing competition on NBC's“The Voice.”
This week, they enter the show’s make-it-or-break-it “battle rounds.”
They’ve all got serious vocal chops — and enough Big Apple brass to try out on one of television’s most-watched stages. The News sat down with these potential superstars, who have started the show’s third season on such a high note. Here are their stories.

Dominque Rosario, better known to millions of “Voice” viewers now as the flamboyant performer DOMO, has already conquered China.
Now, she hopes, it’s America’s turn.
She says she knew she had made it when she arrived for a show in China with her dance troupe, Rhythm City – and discovered her visage looming over the arena.
“When I had first seen my picture on the billboards, I was like ‘Oh my God, that’s me,’ and the people outside who were going to see the show, they were pointing like, ‘Oh my God, that’s you!’
“I was such a loser, I was taking pictures of myself next to that billboard,” she says, laughing. “I had never experienced anything like that.”
At a midtown Manhattan dance studio, Rosario comes across as shy and sweet, a far cry from her stage performance on “The Voice.” She landed her spot in the show’s battle rounds with a steamy, hip-shaking rendition of The Pussy Cat Dolls’ “Don’t Cha” that had her eventual coach Ceelo mouthing, “I do! I do wantcha!”
She wasn’t crazy about the song chosen for her, but when life gives you lemons, squeeze them as hard as you can, she says — a lesson she learned at an audition for MTV’s “Making the Band” a few years ago.
“I (arrived) with this regular shirt on, some Army pants and some flip-flops and I go to the audition and I see the line of these girls, they have their hair done and makeup and heels,” says Rosario. “So that actually taught me that your look is everything; your image is everything.
“You have to come ready.”
Adriana Louise, 22, Brooklyn
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Compared to the hostage ordeal
Adriana Louise endured with her family, the pressure of competing on “The Voice” is nothing.
On June 16, 1999, an armed gang kidnapped and threatened to kill her father, a worker at Romar Check Cashing in Park Slope, in an attempt to get the combination to the store safe. When he told the would-be robbers he couldn’t open the safe they stormed his apartment and took his family hostage.
Louise, then just 9 years old, was duct-taped to a chair and blindfolded.
“When we were all reunited, I found out that they had told my parents that they had killed us,” says Louise in a quivering voice. “They told me that they killed my father already and dumped him in the Gowanus Canal. So when we were all reunited, it was the best feeling in the entire world.

“I heard banging on the door, and I heard, ‘Police! SWAT Team!’ and that’s when I knew we were getting out.”
Though the family emerged from their hellish night physically unharmed, Louise says the event changed the trajectory of her life. She found solace in music, particularly in the songs of Christina Aguilera. She still owns her first Aguilera doll.
Even though she graduated as a vocal major from the prestigious Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, she’s been waitressing the last few years instead of actively auditioning.
“I was scared for a lot of years, even after high school, to put myself out there and do it,” she says.
A friend convinced Louise to attend an open call for “The Voice” at the Javits Center — and a few weeks later she found herself in Hollywood, getting all four judges to turn their chairs for her foot-tapping rendition of Jessie J’s “Domino.”
She chose Aguilera as her coach. “I didn’t bring the doll with me to the audition,” she says. “That might have been a little weird.”
Bryan Keith, 23, The Bronx
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If Bryan Keith had any doubts that the soaring, raspy rendition of Bruno Mars’ “It Will Rain” notched more adoration than just from the four famous judges on “The Voice,” they were dispelled recently outside a downtown Manhattan bar.
“The bouncer was looking to my ID, and he kind of took a double-take,” he says, laughing in the Locust Manor recording studio that’s his second home. “I’m like, ‘It’s real, it’s me.’ He says, ‘No, you were on ‘The Voice’ weren’t you? Listen man, if you ever need protection, a bodyguard or something …’ he gave me his card.
“I’m like, ‘This is crazy.’”

What’s even crazier is that Keith — the son of Ray De La Paz, a singer in the Grammy-winning Spanish Harlem Orchestra — was until recently working in a deli, refusing to use his father’s connections for a shortcut into the music business.
The highlight of his “Voice” experience wasn’t landing a spot on Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine’s team, he says. It was making his dad proud.
“When I got backstage, I could see in my dad’s eyes, he was looking at me like I was a different person,” says Keith.
But Keith, who cites everyone from Queen and Eric Clapton to salsa singer Hector Lavoe as inspirations, remains philosophical about his 90 seconds of glory on national television.
“If this didn’t work,” he says, “if I went back to the deli, I’m still a good deli guy.”
Amanda Brown, 27, The Bronx
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Singing before a national audience on “The Voice” was Amanda Brown’s second-biggest gig this year — she also shared the stage with Adele at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theatre at the Grammy Awards in February.
“It was kind of a surreal moment after the last note finished,” says Brown, sitting on a couch in Manhattan’s Village Underground nightclub, where she performs every week. “Everyone kind of stood up and there was this overwhelming hoorah. It was this ridiculously amazing performance.”
That performance inspired the backup singer to take a shot at stepping to the front of the stage. Especially after seeing her friend Jermaine Paul — a fellow background singer whom she performed with on Alicia Keys’ tour – win “The Voice” last season.