'So You Think You Can Dance' recap: Top 14 Performance

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So You Think You Can Dance

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The pre-show
Readers of my from-the-audience reports from American Idol are well familiar with Cory the Warm Up Comic and Debbie the Stage Manager, and both were in top form last night, Cory still getting tween girls to "show me that Beyoncé" — i.e. gyrate their booty in front of the entire audience, which they always happily do — and Debbie still cheerfully barking orders at the production staff and audience, as well as showing off her righteous scar from her seriously scary fall on the Idol stage earlier this year. (She even happily plugged the Ryan Seacrest video where you can see the post-fall stitches for yourself. When I stepped up to my seat, Cory was just wrapping up getting three quite energetic young African-American boys to show off their best Michael Jackson moves to "Working Day and Night." My sister — full disclosure, the Fox rep for the show graciously snagged a last-minute ticket for her so I could fulfill my (completely unreasonable) promise to take her to the show for her birthday — got to her seat on the other end of the studio before me, and says the youngest of these boys had some serious M.J. style. All I know is they all subsequently sat two rows in front of me and behaved pretty much as one would expect three pre-10-year-old boys without any obvious adult supervision to behave while seated next to each other. (Read: Slaps, punches, and general roughhousing during the ad breaks. Ah, youth.)

Before Debbie had Cory bring out the judges, she had fans hold up their respective signs for all seven couples while the cameras caught the rest of the audience cheering around them, indicating that the audiences' on camera enthusiasm for the dancers isn't always precisely coordinated with what those dancers happen to be doing on screen themselves. (That's television magic right there, people.) Then 11 minutes after the show was scheduled to start taping, Cory introduced the judges, starting with Mia Michaels, whose wickedly '80s acid-wash jeans and asymmetrical pirate shirt suggested she didn't get the memo that the evening's color would be electric pink, given Mary Murphy's shockingly unshocking pink silk dress, Nigel Lythgoe's smart grey sports jacket and sharp pink pocket square, and host Cat Deeley's pink strapless dress with black studded belt and matching heels. That Mia, ever the iconoclast.

The show begins
The dancers filed in and took their marks for the opening, a few women throwing up some last minute leg stretches. Cat Deeley started the show, the dancers all began moving to the SYTYCD theme the moment it began playing, and the audience just about exploded with cheers, besieging poor Cat and the judges with a wave of squeals that overwhelmed the tiny, tiny sound stage housing the show. (Yes, as with most every TV set ever that isn't the Idol Thunderdome, the SYTYCD stage looks significantly smaller in reality than it does on TV. Cute, even.)

NEXT: Brandon and Janette