Entertainment

Matinee with the stars

‘Dancing With the Stars” has wrapped for the year, but that doesn’t mean that the show’s professional dancing cast is just taking it easy by the pool now.

Kym Johnson — who helped usher Donny Osmond to the No. 1 spot — and Maksim Chmerkovskiy have partnered up and are hoofing it on Broadway, putting in eight performances a week in “Burn the Floor.”

Both ballroom pros say that there’s no comparison between dancing in front of a live audience on Broadway and dancing on TV live.

“On ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ we do a minute-and-20 second routine with a celebrity, so you’re not reaching your fullest potential,” says Johnson, who toured with “Burn the Floor” for six years before joining “DWTS.”

“You have to hold things back a little bit sometimes, but dancing with Maks in a proper Broadway show . . . the limitations are not there, you can just go as crazy as you want.”

As far as Chmerkovskiy is concerned, “DWTS” is more of “a social experiment” than the serious ballroom dancing competitions that the pros are familiar with.

“Two people are put in a room together — one is a dance professional and the other has never done it before — with a camera and it becomes a kind of ‘Big Brother‘ experience,” he says.

“Now, you’re not just their dance instructor, but, at times, their shoulder to cry on, their psychiatrist, their teacher, their mentor and vice versa.”

With this kind of relationship between pro and celeb, you’d think that they have a say in who they get partnered up with — but they don’t.

“We have no idea, we find out last minute, just before we walk into the door practically, before the first rehearsal,” Johnson says.

Sometimes, “we talk about it afterwards — ‘I wish I had your partner,’ ” Chmerkovskiy admits.

Neither of the dancers can share any details about the next season of “DWTS” because they’re not even sure if they’ll be asked back.

“We don’t find out until just before if we’re on the season. They keep it very tightly under wraps,” Johnson says.

“It’d be nice to do another one — I did just definitely have the most amazing season, so I don’t know if I’ll have such a good one ever again, but it’s such a fun show and it does showcase ballroom dancing in such a great way.”