Dancing With The Stars Live Tour Opens Up With High Energy And More – Review, Photos

A personal review (and it’s a goodie! 😀 ) of the Dancing With The Stars Live show last night in Buffalo, New York coming up by John as he was there. In the meantime, the Buffalo News has a review up with a picture with Sasha Farber, Kym Johnson, and Paul Karmiryan. Below is a take (though not sure if this person understood that there wouldn’t be celebrities at the show. I also question the “substance” comment). If you’d like to see a beautiful gallery of photos from the show, see this link.

ETA: Witney Carson Fan has a lot of photos from the night as well. Sasha Farber has some instagrams too.

The “Dancing with the Stars: Live!” tour opened its seven-week tour Saturday night in the Seneca Niagara Events Center. The capacity crowd reacted enthusiastically to the dance pros from the ABC show. They were excited to meet the most recent DWTS winner, Alfonso Ribeiro of “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” fame, who served as the host.

They laughed at the jokes (most, anyhow) and squealed at the sight of the bearded, square-jawed Chmerkovskiy (especially when he was shirtless, which was virtually the whole show).

By every measure, the crowd walked out happy. But if they came for a night of intensive dancing, or if they came expecting to spend an evening with celebrities who they came to know more intimately from the show’s 10 years on air, the evening didn’t quite match up.

Let’s start with the stars – or star, as in singular: The tour show’s sole non-dance celebrity is Ribeiro, who spent much of the evening engaged in banter with Witney Carson, the dance partner with whom he won DWTS’ mirrorball trophy.

Ribeiro, who still projects his circa-“Fresh Prince” Carlton persona, is comfortable on stage and has the give-and-take presence of a stand-up comedian. Not all of his punch lines got gut laughs from the crowd, but many did, and we can give him a pass on those that missed. This was the first night of tour, and from my end, it was interesting to see a show that is still developing.

Any rawness in presentation – and there wasn’t much – was complemented by energy that gave the show a fresh feel. To me, this was especially apparent during a Q&A session Ribeiro held with the seven headlining dancers: Chmerkovskiy, Carson, Kym Johnson, Emma Slater, Mark Ballas, Keo Motsepe and Sasha Farber. Admittedly this is the inquisitive journalist in me speaking, but I enjoyed seeing the dancers struggle a bit to describe their favorite celebrity partners and characterize their competitiveness.

More at Buffalo News.