Blame Bon Jovi — Vivica exits ‘Dancing’

It’s a little too easy to spend an entire season of “Dancing With The Stars” (ABC, Tuesdays/Wednesdays, 8 p.m. ET) making observations like this:

“Bet you never thought you’d see Joey Lawrence do a waltz to ‘Take It To The Limit.’”

“Bet you never thought you’d see a dance about bullfighting performed to ‘Phantom Of The Opera.’”

But try this one anyway: Bet you never thought, years ago when she was dating Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, that in 2006, you’d be watching Willa Ford asked to repeat her waltz to “You Light Up My Life” in a narrow victory over Mario Lopez.

But she did repeat it, and it was once again a surprisingly capable performance. It’s hard to justify repeating a dance that was seen 24 hours ago and is more likely to represent the work of a good sport in a weak and untrained field than any sort of great art, but that isn’t Willa’s fault, after all. Like most of the celebrities have done when favored with the encore, Willa beamed through the entire dance, making her angelic, all-in-white presentation even more eerily corny.

And back to the filler...
Musical guests Los Lonely Boys appeared and performed, but the connection to this particular show was a bit lacking. Sure, there were women shaking their shoulders in red dresses in the background, but they weren’t the professionals from the show, they weren’t doing ballroom dancing, and they were barely seen during the number except for brief moments at a time. The performance had little to do with dancing or stars, and it isn’t clear that those performances are good enough — despite last week’s interesting catch of the actually hip Scissor Sisters. This is a perilous path the show is on, going to straight musical numbers with random dancing, because it is the path that leads to “Solid Gold.”

The filler continued as the audience again proved that it cannot be trusted to provide commentary. While most of the “Joey was great!” and “Willa was sexy!” comments were merely generic and uninteresting, one gentleman stepped up to tell us that in the paso doble, Mario was “saved by the bull.” When the audience starts to make puns out of years-old teen comedies, it’s time to get the hook and leave the comedy to the professionals.

When the time came to save the first couples from elimination, it was no surprise to see Mario safe. What was a surprise was the next announcement: Jerry Springer was not going home, and was not even in the bottom two. Jerry seemed pleasantly surprised, but the real comedy came from his partner, Kym, whose mouth hung conspicuously open. She never doubted it for a minute!

Next was a performance from Ashly DelGrosso (the ejected Harry Hamlin’s partner) and her sisters, who are named Amber, Autumn, Afton, Averie and Abrea. Not only is it not surprising that they all ended up as a dance team, but it seems like they had no choice. As endearing as Ashly is — and remember, she was stuck with Master P — a wall of sisters dancing to a lifeless cover of “Heat Wave” is not good enough for network television during the heated opening of the fall season. The DelGrosso sisters undoubtedly worked a heck of a lot of school talent shows in their day, but even on “Dancing With The Stars,” there is such a thing as “too amateurish.”

Remember Tysonia, who’s tackling the Slim-Fast Dance Challenge and trying not to embarrass herself in front of increasingly intimidating audiences? This week, her job was to learn the samba. Her partner explained that it would be a great workout, then proceeded to hound her about how she would get her formerly size-12 body into a size-8 dress by the end of the week. This kind of obnoxious “motivation,” incidentally, went out with cabbage soup diets, but no one seems to have mentioned it to the coach. When Tysonia finally performed, we saw almost none of the dancing, as usual. We did see the dress, of course. It’s all about priorities.

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