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I finally got my first dose of Vegas callbacks and it certainly was a show. I’m sure this has happened every season so I’m pretty confident they did a great job repeating the format. Not as much dancing as I’d like to see but the drama was high and they took us on an emotional roller coaster. The panel of Judges (Lil’ C, Debbie Allen, Adam Shankman, and Tyce Diorio plus Mary and Nigel) tied it all together for us. There was much praise and also a lot of let down. 181 dancers went through eight grueling rounds during the callbacks. It was difficult to really cover each and every dancer so we’ll just try and highlight a couple things. For a full recap (and video) you can find it at Fox.com.
As per the usual format solos happened right off the bat and 51 dancers were eliminated. After that we went into the first Choreography round. The remaining dancers had to learn some very hard Hip Hop moves from tWitch and Comfort (past contestants). Already some of the talent were struggling with the steps and a few people voluntarily left. It looked like a very hard routine. Only 103 people made it through the Hip Hop round.
Next was the Broadway round followed by the Jazz round. Only 82 remained for the Jazz round. Of highlight here was Rachel the burlesque dancer. She had to dance for her life but unfortunately didn’t make it through. Not surprising, her whole schtick was based on sex and not so much technique. I didn’t think she was bad per say, just not show material. Amelia also danced for her life and blew it away.
Next came the group routine and the twist this year was that they got to pick their own teams. I thought that this would make for some great routines as they’d all be supportive of each other and there’d be a lack of controversy. Some groups were good. The group that called themselves the Highschoolers was great and then there were just some bad groups. The Wolfpack group all got through the whole round and was full of Vegas callback vets but I just didn’t like it. Maybe it wasn’t my taste, it just seemed off. Oh well. Other groups were just plain bad and uncoordinated.
Then there was the ballroom round and we were down to 61 people. It was indeed our favorite round and they did a nice Cha Cha routine. Nothing too spectacular out of there and only 9 people got cut. Cyrus (1/3 of the pop and lock trio) had to dance for his life and blew away the judges. He’d never had any formal dance training before and I thought he did the choreography well all things considered. He just needs some training and we think he’ll be awesome. The last round was the contemporary round – nothing crazy there.
Then we had our final solo round. None of the female dancers were eliminated in the final round and only a handful of men. At the end of the week we has 35 dancers left. Next week we cut 15 more to get to the magic number. We’ve got our picks for who’ll make the top 20. Check back after the next episode to see if we were right or wrong.
