It’s 1963 in America, and the seeds are being planted for two musicals. But you’d be hard pushed to find any other common ground between them. On the one hand we have Caroline, or Change, Tony Kushner’s highbrow, Tony-awardwinning musical, which uses the lot of a black maid to a Jewish family in 1963 Louisiana as a study of the American civil-rights movement. Then there’s Dirty Dancing. It too is set in the year of Martin Luther King’s march on Washington and Kennedy’s assassination, and its producers claim it also has something to tell us about American society on the eve of change.

If you ask me, it doesn’t. But at half-time I turned to my female companion, embarrassed at having brought her to such tosh. “It’s okay,” I said manfully. “You don’t have to stay. I’ll stick it out.”

“What do you mean?” she cried, her eyes shining with unfathomable joy. “I’m loving it.”

Clearly, I had missed something. And it is this: Dirty Dancing is soft porn for girls. That is why it works. Me, I came staggering out feeling I needed a pint and a game of pool, but the 95% female audience came out floating on clouds of their own pheromones. As for Josef Brown, the Aussie hunk who plays the stud-like Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze in the movie), he must have come out feeling like a male stripper who had only narrowly survived a hen night.

Soft porn for girls? Yes, said my companion: the characterisation is nonexistent, the story line risible, the dialogue unspeakably awful, indeed, virtually unspeakable — but it doesn’t matter, because, as in porn for boys, stuff like mere dialogue is only there to link the rude bits. And as it is porn for girls, the rude bits mean dancing.

Dimly, I began to comprehend. So that is why, while the girls remain fully dressed, Johnny keeps stripping half-naked? Yes! And even when he is dressed, he is wearing the male equivalent of stockings and suspenders: tight black trousers and matching vest? Yes! And that is why there is a full hour of dancing before Johnny and Baby actually hit the sack together. It is a metaphor for a full hour of foreplay? Yes! Yes! Oh, yes! Having said that, the dancing was good, especially between Johnny and Penny Johnson (Nadia Coote). Georgina Rich as Baby has a kooky charm: a shy and awkward everygirl, she stands out from the slick and swivelling troupe of dancing pros. And I concede the show tells you something, after all. It tells you about what might delicately be termed “female desire”. Who would have thought it? Caroline, or Change focuses on an altogether different kind of frustration. Caroline Thibodeaux (Tonya Pinkins) is the black maid to a middle-class Jewish family, the Gellmans, working all day in the laundry in the steamy, swampy basement. One day, she discovers young Noah Gellman (Perry Millward) has left some change in his pocket. What does she do with it? Divorced, with four children to raise, her life one long tale of “gettin’ hit and turnin’ cheek ...”

On this slender premise rests a wonderful musical, held together by Jeanine Tesori’s music, a breezy, but hugely skilful mix of gospel, Motown, klezmer and even a cheeky hint of Mozart. Among the standout performances are Millward as Noah (three actors play the role on different nights), an elfin fellow with a voice that carries the theatre with him; Pippa Bennett-Warner as Emmie Thibodeaux, Caroline’s eldest; and Hilton McRae as Stopnick.

At the heart of the show is Pinkins as Caroline: an ordinary-looking, middle-aged woman with a voice that is a work of nature, with its cracked harmonics and extraordinary range. At first, she seems typecast as a salt-of-the-earth black woman, put-upon, yet kindly. Later, her character reveals its own complexities, tired, despairing, and finally breaking when Noah taunts her about a bomb that kills only blacks. “Hell’s so hot it makes flesh fry,” she flies back. “Hell’s where Jews go when they die.”

The pretence of racial harmony is broken, along with her self-respect, and it leads into a 10-minute sequence when she holds the stage solo. You would never think to hear a moment that matches Paul Robeson singing Ol’ Man River as an expression of the black American experience, but you do here. Pinkins runs through a tempest of emotions, from sardonic bitterness to coruscating anger, self-loathing, outright despair, and then, most affectingly, her quiet plea to God: “Don’t let my sorrow make evil of me.” It is one of those moments when you want to press the rewind button immediately and see it all over again. Few shows boast a high point like this.

Dirty Dancing
Aldwych, WC2
His Two stars
Hers Four stars

Caroline, or Change
Five stars
National, SE1