It’s late January and it’s “American Idol” Showcase Week on the beach fronting Disney’s Aulani resort in Ko Olina, but the week is a showcase in more than the showbiz sense of the word.

Beyond the nearly four-hour concert — in which 40 singers who have advanced through five or more rounds of competition showcase their talents for the “Idol” judges — the filmed event provides a showcase for Hawaii. The beach setting and clear, blue skies are set to be broadcast to 7 million viewers at 7 p.m. tonight on ABC (KITV). An hour or so into filming, the sun creates a brilliant backdrop as it sets behind the stage.

“American Idol” is the granddaddy of television singing contests, and this marks its first return to the islands more than 15 years after open auditions were held here. Given how fruitful those auditions in 2003 were — producing four of that season’s top nine finishers, including Hawaii residents Jasmine Trias and Camile Velasco — this has been a long time coming.

The inland-facing performance platform has the approximate square footage of a carport, but with a ceiling twice as high, dozens of stage lights and speakers hanging from its metal frame. Three hundred or so audience members — friends and family of the performers, hotel guests, cheerleaders from area high schools — are herded into the taping area.

The massive stage structure, the cameras on cranes, the control tower and the gazebo about 30 feet away for judges Lionel Richie, Katy Perry and Luke Bryan create a sense of the scale of the event, but it’s the audience, already buzzing with anticipation, that brings electricity.

“I have to say that the audience that we got in Hawaii is the best audience we’ve had in one of these shows in the last few years,” executive producer Trish Kinane said in a phone conversation from Los Angeles last week. “I wish we could import them to our studio in Los Angeles.”

Kinane, who joined the show late in its run on Fox (this is its second season on ABC), is aware of the show’s Hawaii connection, but talking with her it’s clear the visit left an even stronger impression than she expected.

“It was amazing,” she said. “In fact, it was so good that we decided to make a three-hour episode out of it (instead of the normal two hours).

Especially emotional for the entire “American Idol” ohana was a ceremony performed by Lanikuhonua kahu Auntie Nettie.

“She not only blessed the set for safety and to wish us good luck,” Kinane said, “but she blessed the crew as well, and they were very, very moved by that. It was 6 in the morning and the crew stood there and she did the blessing and it was really special. … Everybody felt like it was a good luck charm on them and everything (with the production) went perfectly.”

She pointed to the contrast the beach setting offers sandwiched between Hollywood Week and the celebrity duets episode, both of which are set in luxurious theaters.

“I know our crew would give their right arm to be coming back,” she said.

She didn’t rule out a return if enough interest is shown through the online auditions, but noted that the spread of the internet has made it such that anyone can audition.

If a producer likes an online submission, that can lead to an invitation to one of the tryouts held before the show’s producers across the mainland (there were 29 this season). The next step is to sing before the judges, who saw potential contestants in five cities this season and issued about 175 tickets to Hollywood.

Three more levels of auditions in Hollywood — at the legendary Orpheum Theatre — pared the field to the 40 who made it to Hawaii.

Kinane points to the group session during Hollywood Week as especially important to the process, saying the test there “is really to see can they collaborate, can they work with other people, can they still keep their own identity even though they’re with a group of people? Can they stay up all night? Have they got stamina? It’s not so much a test of singing. … It’s more about these other qualities that the judges are looking for.”

Hawaii connections

Contestant Walker Burroughs, speaking from his hometown of Birmingham, Ala., also pointed to the rigor of Hollywood Week as pivotal and credited his studies at Belmont University in Nashville for preparing him.

“I couldn’t have done Hollywood Week if I didn’t go to Belmont, because it prepared me to be tired and still have to perform and sing and take care of myself. It gives you a structure … so now I’m more consistent in my practice.”

Burroughs, who has been spotlighted enough in the season’s first month to tip off how strong a contender the judges and producers view him to be, said college introduced him to more intensive piano and classical voice lessons and also taught him “how to practice” because he’d grown up with little formal musical training. Aside from piano lessons, his instructors were his dad and YouTube, including videos of Hawaii ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro.

Burroughs said he took up the instrument in middle school “before the whole mainland ukulele craze.”

“I went out and bought one, and I became genuinely obsessed with it. I carried it everywhere I went. I walked around the house with it, and I would just play the entire day. I annoyed the crap out of my family.”

That obsession led him to study videos of Shimabukuro online.

“I just loved his classical arrangements of all these cool songs (such as Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’), so I would watch him play them and learn how to play those.”

Along with Dakota Cohen, a part-Hawaiian high school student from Los Angeles who spent part of her childhood on Kauai, Burroughs is one of two singers in the final 40 with Hawaii ties.

Burroughs — whom Perry has taken to calling “Harry Potter” for his bespectacled and unassuming appearance (though his red locks are more evocative of Ron Weasley) — has a twin sister, Milligan, and an aunt and uncle, Cindy and Emory Gaskins, who live in Hawaii, which made the trip all the more special for him.

“When I found out the next round was in Hawaii,” Burroughs said, “that was literally the first moment that I felt that I was in the right place. I think that all through Hollywood Week, all through the first audition, I was still debating in my head whether or not I should be here. I was sad that Milligan couldn’t come because it’s so expensive to fly her out … and then we literally went to her.

“I told her about it, and she’d never cried to a piece of news in her life (but) she was just sobbing on the phone.”

The story was made to order for “Idol,” which goes for tear-jerkers, whether it’s contestants raised by single parents such as Wade Cota and Drake McCain; or someone like Kai the Singer, whose church in South Carolina collected money to buy her a guitar and send her to her “Idol” audition; or the heartbreak of Nick Townsend, who lost both his brothers to suicide.

Advancing on “Idol” reunited Burroughs with his twin nearly a year after she’d moved to Hawaii to establish residency to attend the University of Hawaii (she starts at Manoa in the fall). That alone made the experience priceless, he said.

“This was the first time I got to see Milligan in her home, in her element. … I got to see her friends, see where she lived, and see the islands through her eyes for the first time.”

‘Home-field advantage’

The show’s late decision to hold the Showcase Week in Hawaii — contestants learned of it at the end of Hollywood Week, and it was announced to the public in December — also worked in Burroughs’ favor competitively. Having a Hawaii contingent gave him a “home-field advantage.” Milligan brought about 20 fans to the taping at Aulani, all holding signs that read “Walker 4 Idol.”

His aunt, a campus minister at Hawaii Baptist Academy, gave him access to a piano to practice on at her school.

“Of course we couldn’t tell anybody,” Haskins said. “They knew ‘American Idol’ was here, but we weren’t saying anything because we weren’t supposed to say anything.”

Burroughs’ pursuit of music is no surprise to Haskins, who said, “When he was really young, he would sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and just about any song he would sing, he … finished with a little octave slide up.”

Milligan Burroughs, who teaches robotics for Bricks 4 Kidz at five Oahu elementary schools, said her brother’s love for music goes back as far as she can remember.

“Every second of the day from my earliest memories to graduating high school,” she said, “he’s singing or he’s playing the piano, or he’s playing the guitar or he’s drumming on the table, or he’s conducting with his hands while he’s thinking a song in his brain. … It can be annoying, but especially toward the later years of high school, when I knew that we were both gonna be graduating, probably going to different colleges … that’s when I was like, ‘Oh, I need to enjoy these moments while I can because I miss it now.”

The judges were taken with Burroughs instantly. Perry called him “top 10 material” the first time she saw him perform, and Bryan, who has had 23 No. 1 country hits, told him, “You remind me how untalented I am.”

Kinane sees Burroughs as a true contender in an unusually strong and diverse “Idol” class, noting that his “sort of Billy Joel, Randy Newman style is very different from (fellow competitor) Uche, who is a complete performer. … I think the top 10 is gonna be a really strong top 10.”

Only 20 will emerge from Hawaii, and the field will be reduced to 14 next week, with viewers then picking the top 10. Kinane said she “genuinely (doesn’t) know how America’s gonna vote on this because they’re all pretty different.”

“American Idol” Showcase Week airs 7 p.m. tonight on KITV.