Joey finds the right steps on ‘Dancing’

This week, “Dancing With The Stars” (ABC, Mondays/Tuesdays) started with an admonition from judge Len Goodman, who accused the stars of not dancing quite enough. Specifically, he hauled out a statistic claiming that last season’s couples averaged 19 weekly hours of rehearsal, while this season’s couples are averaging only 13. This, he argued, was why no one has really jumped out into the lead. Under that dark cloud of ominous tsk-tsking, the couples set out to perform their paso dobles and waltzes with as much passion and romance (respectively) as possible.

Laila Ali started strong, but in recent weeks, there’s been some drop-off in the quality of her work. Confronted with the paso doble, Laila seemed positioned to bring the passion and strength that come naturally to her. But somehow, Laila and Maksim Chmerkofskiy had a hard time delivering a convincing paso doble — a dance described as one in which the man is to be the matador and the woman is to be the cape. It looked like Laila’s physical presence was too powerful for her to seem like anyone’s cape, but for whatever reason, the dance fell flat. The judges weren’t crazy about it, and Laila took home straight 7s.

Apolo Anton Ohno and his young partner Julianne Hough have developed an adorable chemistry that, as Apolo pointed out, is quite sibling-like in nature. Thus, the waltz presented some challenges of the “I can’t look at you all sexy without laughing” variety. Interestingly, the dance was lovely, and actually had more openly lingering looks than any other all night.

Apolo’s hesitation about delivering a dance he thought of as “older and slower” turned out to be unnecessary, and their performance looked good. While Len marked them down for some technique mistakes and only gave them an 8, Carrie-Ann Inaba and Bruno Tonioli gave them 9s, making it one of the better-scored dances.

She gives the paso doble a bad name
Leeza Gibbons was coming off last week’s near-elimination, and she presumably needed a good performance to stay in the game. Her paso doble to “You Give Love A Bad Name” was not that performance. While it was hard not to admire the way Leeza’s 50-year-old body looked in the very Bon-Jovi-appropriate leather costume, her dancing remained slow and ungraceful. She’s simply running out of people who are likely to be eliminated ahead of her, and her work is too boring to keep her in the competition. The judges were hard on the routine in general, giving her only 16 points total.

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Ian Ziering has seemed on the brink of a breakout, but he didn’t seem confident that the waltz was the right dance for him, given his tendency to play around during rehearsal. At one point, partner Cheryl Burke stopped him and said, “I need more Fred Astaire and less Goofy.”

But he shaved and got himself a tux, and he did in fact look terrific. The dance itself was lovely, although Cheryl’s signature pixie hair was distractingly festooned with unconvincing extensions that would have been better left in the dressing room. Carrie-Ann only gave the dance a 7, concerned that Ian looked tense, but Len surprisingly came out with a 9. The pair got an 8 from Bruno, who raised a few eyebrows when he told Ian that his performance went from “McDreamy” to “McStiffy.”

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Next up was John Ratzenberger, who took quite a beating right in front of his 91-year-old mother after delivering a muddled, shapeless paso doble. He looked wildly uncomfortable throughout, and the choreography simply made him appear to be stomping around without a lot of purpose. In one of the toughest comments ever delivered by a judge, Carrie-Ann said she thought maybe John was trying to be funny, which it doesn’t appear he actually was. There wasn’t a lot to say about the dance except that it was bad, and John was probably lucky to escape with a 6 and two 5s, the same score as Leeza, who did a better job than he did.

Just when it seemed like the scores had gotten as low as they were going to, along came Clyde Drexler, whose rehearsal footage suggested that he wasn’t working as hard as his partner would have hoped, and wasn’t even coming to practice on time.

The lackadaisical attitude displayed in the footage was unfortunately reflected in the waltz. While Clyde has those long legs that allow him to move across the floor more smoothly than most (thus “The Glide”), his arms and hands rarely have any shape, and he rarely puts anything other than his two feet in the position that’s intended. The judges pulled out the harshest criticism of all for Clyde: that he wasn’t even trying. It honestly looked like he wasn’t. He got even a point less than John and Leeza, giving him the lowest score of the night.

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