You had to see this one coming: Sabrina Bryan’s secret partner for Tuesday night’s “Viewer Designed Dance” will be – tah, dah! – none other than her old partner on and off the dance floor, pro Mark Ballas.
Sources tell
TV Guide Magazine that the audience has voted to re-unite the talented twosome, who caused an uproar season five when the Cheetah Girl was voted off the show week six, way too early for someone of her dance ability and ballroom charisma. But that was also the season of Marie Osmond and Mel B., and eventually won by Helio Castroneves.
Tuesday’s “Viewer Designed Dance” will be the paso doble, the perfect dramatic showcase for someone who would like to express a little hostility. “Sabrina wants revenge,” joked one source, who added that the dance is so good, “it will light up the stage.”
The people lighting things up on Monday night were model Joanna Krupa and her pro partner, Derek Hough. They performed a futuristic paso doble wearing costumes that emitted light. “The second I found out that we were doing a dance of the future, I said, ‘I want LED lights,’” says Hough. “I don’t care what we have to do. I don’t care what the costumes look like. I want those lights.”
The results were spectacular, but came at a cost: Head costume designer Randall Christensen lost sleep for three nights, trying to figure out how he was going to hide two battery packs (including six triple A batteries) in each of their costumes. That’s in addition to the microphone pack that also has to be hidden somewhere within the fabric. And don’t forget, these people have to move, so the wiring for the lights had to be constructed in such a way that the dancers didn’t turn out to be human Christmas trees: Blow one light, and the whole costume would go dark.
“The electrician lady put triple the amount of lights in the costumes so if one set did get torn, the other two would stay lit,” says Christensen. “But it was awful because we couldn’t put the battery packs on their spines, next to their ribs, or on their waists because if they fell on them, they could get hurt. And we had to have the wiring sewn in between the layers of the costumes so the wires wouldn’t touch the skin.”
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Don’t forget, the women’s costumes are extreme form-fitting, so there aren’t many places to hide. Krupa shows off the sides of her corset, where the battery packs add to her bust size. “It’s not pretty,” she says, “but at this point, it’s mind over matter.”
Says Hough, still glowing, “This is season nine. So to hear the producers say that it was one of their favorite dances that they’d ever seen, that was amazing. Forever in time, we’ll always have that.”