Paula Abdul dropped in as a guest judge on “Dancing With the Stars” on Monday just in time to witness a near-perfect performance by Peta Murgatroyd and hunky actor Gilles Marini.
Abdul showed her appreciation for the performance by doing a Bruno Mars-ish impression, you know where he stands up, leans over the desk and kind of snarl/growls? Mar’s gives Abdul a hint of the stink eye and switches it up by delivering a decipherable and straight forward comment: “A Bollywood star is born! Stylistically, that was perfection.”
Gilles and Murgatroyd did, in fact, go Bollywood big time–and well. Dressed in an Aladdin-inspired outfit, Gilles is in perfect sync with Peta as they energetically move around the stage. Both performers hit the stage with some apprehension as Gilles had last week’s low scores haunting him and Peta was a Bollywood virgin. Too try and ease their respective fears, and score better than last week, the two trained with a Bollywood expert, which, from the looks of the rehearsal, was no day at the Ashram.
The training paid off, however, with the two scoring 39.5 out of 40 points.
On the low-scoring end, were Kirstie Alley and Maksim Chmerkovskiy who performed a chunky, no, clunky Charleston. Alley said in rehearsal that the goal was for the dance to be comical, which it was even without the cartwheel she’d hoped to execute during the performance. She told “E!”: “I wanted to do a cartwheel. I saw it on YouTube.”
“It’s hard word. It looks like it’s fun and easy, but it’s not so easy to do the Charleston. I haven’t found a dance that is easy to do yet,” Alley said. The pair scored a total of 30 points.
Alley did impress the judges with her look, however. “You’re just a vision,” Abdul told Alley.
Bristol Palin and Mark Ballas scored just two point more than Alley and Chmerkovskiy. They danced, according to C-man, a “dumbed down” Rock and Roll. Other scores for the night were 35.5 for Sabrina Bryan and Louis Vam Amstel; 36 for Emmitt Smith and Cheryl Burke; 37 for Melissa Rycroft and Tony Dovolani; a second near-perfect score of 39.5 for Shawn Johnson and Derek Hough; 34.5 for Apolo Anton Ohno and Karin Smirnoff; and 37.5 for Kelly Monaco and Val Chmerkovkiy.
