So You Think You Can Dance: Results Show, 7/22/10

E: Unprecedented!  Mr. Nigel Lithgoe, Executive Producer, what have you unleashed upon us?

Folks, that was definitely unexpected.

To start the show, we have a Broadway routine starring the top six minus Billy, and six All Stars – Mark, Ade, Allison, Courtney, Lauren and Neil.  Mark starts as the lead, standing on a couch when everyone else is draped over it.  He’s got on a sleeveless white shirt, black high waisted pants, suspenders, a bowler hat and red gloves.  Everyone else is wearing a variation of this (there are some striped tops) except they’ve got black fingerless gloves over their red ones, which they rip off half way through the performance.  They’re dancing to an unrecognizable version of “All That Jazz” by Lea DeLaria; if you don’t know the lyrics and didn’t see the song title on the screen, you won’t know what’s playing.   It’s really fun, actually, although I’m not sure I love the All Stars dancing in the group routines. Much as I’m thrilled to see Mark, I also feel like the contestants are getting robbed of their chance to shine. Or some of them are, anyway. There’s an odd moment when everyone runs back to the couch, Kent stands up higher than the rest and they give him jazz hands of adulation (winner!  in case you were wondering!), and there’s another where Ade and Neil toss Kent impossibly high in the middle of the stage.  It’s not even showing off his impressive dancing so much as it is showing us Kent.  Is the show going to sabotage itself by anointing him the winner so soon, what with all the fawning from the judges and studio audience, or is the tide so unstoppable as to render any objections useless?

Don’t get me wrong. I think Kent is a deserving winner.  If Alex was still in the competition, that would have made things harder for me, but I accept that Ashley and Alex are gone, and people don’t really connect with Billy and Robert, so yeah, Kent is good with me.  I expect Lauren and Adechike will be at the top with him (how many of them will be in the finale this year, does anyone know? and which one will be the runner up?), but I’m not sure either of them can win. Sorry for the digression, but I wonder about these things.

So.  The number tonight was choreographed by Kelly Abbey, a friend of Kenny Ortega’s.  Cool.  I liked it a lot.  Cat’s wearing a vintage-looking cream paisley dress with ruffled sleeves and a longer skirt than I can remember her wearing on something that isn’t floor length.  She looks very 1930s to me, and gorgeous with her hair in a loose knot and a pink rose over her ear.  It’s all very romantic. Nigel puts a somber note in the evening with a tribute to Denise Jefferson, the director of the Alvin Ailey school who died over the weekend.  It’s very sweet, but he does manage to make it more about him and how welcoming she was the one time he met her than it really should have been.

Cat calls all five dancers out to the stage. The boys are looking  sporty, and Lauren’s got on a dance bikini in glittery raspberry.  Lauren is immediately declared safe (Cat lets her read it off the card) and Kent right after.  I know it can’t mean anything – it made sense when it was just them on stage and wouldn’t now – but I’m bummed they aren’t holding hands.  The other three are left to sweat out the perfectly obvious question of which one of them will be safe while we watch two soloists from the American Ballet Theater, Jared Matthews and Yuriko Kugia (sp?) perform the grand pas de deux from the third act of Don Quixote.  I’m a huge fan of ballet (Cat calls it a little girl’s fantasy, and she might be right) and I think their combination of strength and lightness is astounding. When they’re done, we get the absolutely unsurprising news that Adechike is the safe one, and Robert and Jose land back in the bottom three.  Clearly, Jose is the weakest dancer, but will that be enough to counter Nigel’s resentment that Billy didn’t dance when the doctors cleared him to?  I know he said that Billy was the best judge of his own body, but he didn’t sounds very supportive when he said it.  So I just don’t know.

Up next we have a rather surprising act – the full audition of a guy named DJ Smart (or something like – why don’t they put this up on the screen?) who didn’t make it through to the show for some reason unknown to man.  He does this bit with chains, wearing only striped briefs, and he can’t have an ounce of fat on his superbly muscular body.  Really, it’s insane.  He dances to Kanye West’s “Say You Will”,and it’s very emotional contemporary as well as ridiculously athletic.  There’s a point where he goes down into a split and comes back up, just on the strength of his massive thighs, and repeats maybe 4 times. Once is insane enough!  When he’s finished, Cat waves him off the stage, saying she’s left him the key to her dressing room.  Heehee!

I usually gloss over the stuff about National Dance Day, but in the weekly montage of people attempting the official Nappy Tabs routine there is some genuinely cute stuff – a girl of maybe 9 who’s a really good dancer, for one thing, but also a little boy in feetie pajamas wiggling his butt at the camera, and three girls on a dock who have signs that read “we” “heart” “Alex” and then “get” “well” “soon” and end by jumping in the lake, and I really have to mention them.

The next portion of the show is for the All Stars. I only started watching So You Think You Can Dance consistently midway through season 3, so I’d never seen Neil and Lauren’s Wade Robson routine to Roisin Murphy’s “Night of the Dancing Flame”.  Very cool.  And if I’m counting right that the third classic routine Wade has done for the show using Roisin Murphy’s (“Ramma Lamma Ding Dong” and “Ruby Blue” being the others).   That’s a nice partnership.  Neil seems to be some sort of magician attempting to control Lauren, who’s wearing a white nightie and runs around screaming when he briefly loses control.  In the end, she turns the tables on him.  It’s pretty cool.  Love Wade.  More Wade, please!

Finally, we get to see Robert and Jose’s solos – after Cat admonishes Kent to stop stepping in the audience, that is.  Robert’s picked Ron Pope’s “Fireflies” and while it’s not as astounding as what he did on the performance show, it’s still really good.  Jose leaps out with a huge joyful grin to the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “It’s Just Begun” (love your music, dude!).  Again, it’s all floor work, but it’s pretty cool – there are some huge air flares, and a really long bit at the end where he’s just standing on one arm, doing tricks like he just doesn’t care.

Nigel tells us the partial cast of the tour after the next commercial: All Stars Allison, Dominic, Courtney and Ade.  Now, I like the four of them immensely, but I’m wondering what routines they’re going to be doing, and I can’t really think why they’ve picked them.  Allison had Halleliah with Alex, who won’t be able to tour.  Ade hasn’t done anything for a few weeks.   Anyone else puzzled by this?  No Comfort or Twitch?  Russell and Kathryn will represent season 6 as the top guy and girl, and whoever the top guy and girl of season 7 will be there, too.  Why not just say Lauren, then, since she’s already the top girl? Does that make sense?  There will also be four dancers named later.  Who else is confused that Ashley – who was loudly promised a spot last week – isn’t mentioned?

Next up, Enrique – who’s apparently dropped his last name? – singing his autotuned but bouncy fun new single “I Like It.”  I like it.  It doesn’t hurt that there’s a sample from Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long”.  Lauren and Allison do some background dancing, and when Pitbull comes in for a rap section, Dominic also comes in to do some tricks.  (I hate to be repetitive, but he’s so much flashier, at least, than Jose and so much more exciting that it kills me.)  The filming is terrible here; they can’t keep Dominic and Pitbull in the same shot.  What is up with that, guys?  We all know you had to rehearse it for the cameras.  There’s just not excuse for this shoddiness.  You’re professionals!

Finally, it’s results time.  We haven’t made up our minds, says Nigel, who tells Robert that some of the other judges  feel he isn’t growing enough. He tells Jose that all of the judges feel he isn’t growing enough in new styles, but they think he’s actually improving in his own style, which puzzles and impresses him.  Then Nigel lets lose on Billy a little; Billy chose not to dance when the doctors told him he could and Nigel is definitely annoyed with that, because no one has ever done that before and it’s set a precedent Nigel can’t abide.  And if they keep Billy, he’s going to have a week of rest which will give him an advantage.  That’s so unfair – you didn’t say that to Noelle or Ashleigh last season, Nigel, and it’s hardly been rest, has it, when he’s injured?

At any rate, the judges can’t pick (um, Jose!) so they’ve decided to do something unprecedented in the long and storied history of So You Think You Can Dance;  not to send anyone home this week at all.  So next week, we’ll actually see the whole top six dance (assuming the curse of season seven doesn’t assert itself again and injure someone else) but two people will go home.

So, wow. I know it’s a cop out, but  I’m actually thrilled by the idea of getting the entire top six to perform.  Please, please please don’t let anyone else hurt themselves!  Swaddle them up in bubble wrap and keep them safe for me, Nigel, will you?