TV, film veteran Barbara Eden hosts ballroom dancing spectacular Hit the floor with local ballroom classes

By BETSY PRICE • The News Journal • January 14, 2010

There's one little thing that Barbara Eden will not be doing in "Ballroom With a Twist," the dancing spectacular that opens Tuesday at the DuPont Theatre in Wilmington.

Dancing.

"No, no, no," says a heartily laughing Eden, who didn't hesitate to pop out of a magic bottle wearing a fetching pink Aladdin-inspired outfit on "I Dream of Jeannie" from 1965 to 1970. "I would not dare. Oh, my god. No."

Instead, she hosts the show, which will include dancers who will be familiar to fans of "Dancing with the Stars" and "So You Think You Can Dance." Among them are: Dmitry Chaplin, Chelsie Hightower, Jonathan Roberts, Anna Trebunskaya and Louis van Amstel of "Dancing With the Stars," as well as Ashleigh and Ryan DiLello from "So You Think You Can Dance."

Eden was asked by producer Scott Stander, a longtime acquaintance, to host the show when it ran in Chicago, and she loved it.

"It's absolutely stunning," she says. "I'm a huge fan of the ballroom dancing shows on TV. ... I love them. But to see them in person is a whole different thing. It's very impressive."

Eden says she doesn't have a favorite part of the show. All the dancers, she says, are "so wonderful and so accomplished at what they do, and so beautiful in their movements, it doesn't matter what kind of a dance they're dancing."

This is her second round with the show, which goes on hiatus while the television shows are running, because the stars can't be two places at once.

Eden has several costume changes herself as she goes through the show. She welcomes the crowd at the beginning and talks about the acts as they're coming up. During the second half of the program, she and the cast take questions from the audience. They often bring people up on stage and dance briefly with them.

It might be some audience members' favorite part of the show, she says. "People really want to know about these dancers."

Eden lives in California with her third husband, Jon Eicholtz, and their chocolate-brown labradoodle named Djinn-Djinn, like the dog on "I Dream of Jeannie."

It was not her choice.

"The dog on 'I Dream of Jeannie,' was nasty," she says. "He didn't like uniforms. My Djinn-Djinn is very sweet and very smart."

They traveled to Hawaii for the holidays, and she joked that the show wanted her to do interviews before she left so that the show could be sure she was going to come back.

If so, they shouldn't have worried.

Even at 75, she's not ready to call it a day and stay home. She still does stage work and appears now and then in commercials and cameos that poke gentle fun at her role as Jeannie.

"She's easy to live with," Eden says, "and I guess that's because I did so many other things. It's really only now that I've been so strongly associated with that role."

Eden has starred in three sitcoms, including "Harper Valley P.T.A.," in the early '80s, had a Vegas show, appeared in numerous TV series and movies and toured in "South Pacific" with Robert Goulet and, more recently, with Hal Linden in "Love Letters."

"I like my work," she says. "I've been very lucky and I enjoy it. There isn't as much now for an older person, but ... I do what comes up."

That includes appearing in Chicago at a Dining in the Dark fundraiser to fight macular degeneration, which can cause blindness.

When Eden does watch TV, she really likes "The Closer," "Law and Order," "NCIS" and "Criminal Minds," although she admits to being disturbed by it sometimes. She says she also likes "The Mentalist," but after the show's time was changed to 10 p.m, she found it too late for her. "We get up very early here."

This is Eden's second trip to the DuPont Theater. She performed in the female version of "The Odd Couple" in March 2002 with Rita McKenzie, who Eden says plans to return to Delaware, too, to see her in this show.