Fun not enough to win ‘Dancing With the Stars’

“Dancing With the Stars” (ABC, Mondays/Tuesdays) gave us a Latin round on Monday night and threw in a group dance, meaning that it was the first week that the celebrities had more than one routine to learn. This is one of the signs that the season is getting serious, and indeed, a couple of strong performances and a couple of weak ones demonstrated that the short-track-speed-skating wheat is now being separated from the formerly-on-“Cheers” chaff.

The week opened with Joey Fatone, who was trying to rebound from last week’s devastating pronouncement that his rumba was “feminine.” This week, his partner, Kym Johnson, was determined to make the samba as masculine as possible — which, if you’ve ever seen the samba, you know is no small task.

She brought a most unlikely ally along to help her: Jerry Springer, her partner from last season, famous for making dances neither “masculine” nor “feminine,” but simply “keee-razy.” Jerry gave Joey a few pointers for the camera, but Joey was clearly aware of the importance of not inadvertently absorbing anything Jerry Springer told him.

The dance itself was largely successful. A samba tends to be an easy dance for a ham like Joey, provided he has a good baseline level of talent. A couple of Joey’s moves looked impressive, and he put more energy into the famed “samba rolls” than most celebrities do. Near the end, though, he stumbled and fumbled the footwork, which was the reason he only scored 9s from the judges, all of whom loved the routine.

Joey was followed by Heather Mills, who was coming back from a fall last week — a real, literal fall, not just the pain of being called “feminine.” She and partner Jonathan Roberts were seen rehearsing during a trip she made to London, and they even practiced the paso doble on the plane.

Unfortunately, they were saddled with a terrible, exceedingly weird toreador-ish arrangement of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” which robbed the song of every iota of its natural appeal. Their dance wasn’t bad, exactly, but the music was horribly distracting, and Heather seemed to be having trouble relaxing. Indeed, the judges once again congratulated her on the tricks she incorporated into her routine, saying that her real problems came from her upper body, rather than anything having to do with her much-discussed leg.

A cut above the norm
John Ratzenberger said what a lot of the audience was thinking when he expressed surprise that he was still in the competition and admitted that he made plans for this week long ago, figuring he’d be long gone. But he looked in practice like he was beginning to have fun, and that did translate in his mambo.

While there were certainly significant footwork issues, if you saw John do the mambo at a wedding, you would remember him as the grandfather who could actually dance, at least sort of — not as the Jerry Springer grandfather who was nothing but a buffoon. While the choreography overmatched him at times, John had the basic rhythm of the mambo down, and he had enough flair to his steps that the dance did have the basic kicky feel that it’s intended to have.

Laila Ali carried big expectations at first, and then she seemed to have a slump, and then she roared back last week with a sexy rumba. This week, she was set for a cha-cha that partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy seemed to think would be right up her alley, since it was, as he put it, “cheeky.”

In rehearsal, Laila pressed to put a bit more of her own stamp on the choreography, specifically telling Maks to get a little more “funky.” This led to Laila throwing in a few beats of her own distinctly non-cha-cha dancing late in the routine. While judge Len Goodman didn’t care for that part of the routine, all the judges liked the rest of it, and she scored two 9s and a 10, putting her ahead of Joey, then the frontrunner.

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