Blake and Luther, unsurprisingly, are judges for top 4 night.
All four: cabaret. Bland Tony-n-Mel ™ routine that was pretty straightforward and therefore should have been pretty easy for the dancers to execute, which makes Everett’s weak performance here all the more glaring.
Vincent and Everett: hip-hop. Everett kicked it up a notch towards the end, which made him tolerable. Vincent was bad throughout this entire piece. I am out of synonyms for “bad” now so I will stop. It was bad on all levels, even after the fairly obvious breaks Sho-Tyme inserted into the routine to let them do “hey”-waves at the crowd and have a few seconds’ worth of not dancing. This wasn’t close to top 4 quality; this wasn’t even close to top 20 quality.
Tara-Jean and Everett: jazz. This was genuinely quite lovely and an excellent final effort from Sean Cheeseman, who’s had a great season. Everett was a forklift for large chunks of this, but at least he wasn’t a bad forklift. Tara-Jean was excellent. These two still have great chemistry, which is the only reason I think they survived the early rounds (well, that and the “they’re both from small towns” factor, which in Canada means “more votes”).
Tara-Jean and Jayme-Rae: mambo. Interesting to see them give the all-girl pairing a ballroom number, and I like the experimentation, but it came off a lot as “two girls doing the girl half of ballroom” rather than a pairing proper. Performance quality from both girls was excellent: timing, less so, as Tara-Jean frequently jumped ahead of the beat and Jayme-Rae fell behind it more than once.
Jayme-Rae and Vincent: contemporary. Stacey Tookey can do no wrong (or at least has not done so yet in two seasons plus a couple of American appearances). This was intensely sexy and danced just about flawlessly by both Vincent and Jayme-Rae; Vincent in particular deserves kudos given his lack of formal training, but Jayme-Rae’s pure sultriness is likewise deserving of mention. Just fantastic.
Tara-Jean and Vincent: hustle. At first I was all “oh god Melissa Williams” but then it turned out it was the person who choreo’d Kameron and Lacey’s hustle from season three, and that is just fine. As was this: Tara-Jean started out very weak in ballroom (which this basically is) on this show, but improved dramatically over the course of the show, and Vincent is Vincent and kills ballroom every time.
Jayme-Rae and Everett: samba. Well, if you wanted proof that Everett doesn’t belong in the top four (heck, the top ten), this is it: he was absolutely terrible in this. Just awful: stiff, awkward, barely coordinated, lacking rhythm… you name a common dance flaw and Everett exhibited it in this. Jayme-Rae was very good and made the piece watchable: she commanded attention with good technique and flair, and for the most part got it, but even she couldn’t save that horrible bridge where Everett had the tricky leg lift he really, really couldn’t do, no matter how much Tre claims otherwise.
Solos: All the usual stuff, except for Jayme-Rae, who almost stole one of Jeanine Mason’s solos outright.
First through fourth should be: Jayme-Rae, Vincent, Tara-Jean, Everett.
First through fourth will be: Tara-Jean, Vincent, Jayme-Rae, Everett.
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