That was the summer of 1987, when the words “dirty” and “dancing” suddenly became synonymous. When overnight, Patrick Swayze became a heart-throb, or an indeterminate throb of some kind, to women the world over. And when I, in the throes of an enthusiastic 13th year, broke my brother’s wrist trying to re-create the film’s “lift” scene in a small, muddy pond, somewhere in the Norfolk Broads. Dirt was had in abundance; the dancing, alas, remained elusive.
For anyone who happened not to know a girl during the twilight of the 1980s, Dirty Dancing was the story of Frances “Baby” Houseman who, in the fateful summer of 1963, went on an unassuming family holiday and met Johnny Castle. She was a geeky, primly principled teenager, in love with her doctor dad. Castle was a gruff, monosyllabic dance teacher from the wrong side of Kellerman’s resort, with a past darker than his black leather jacket. Baby carried a watermelon and said so. He danced a lot, stupendously, and to blisteringly brilliant music, and said little. The rest was hugely addictive, kitsch as could be, hip-wiggling history.
Or rather, it was. Until 1996, when Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and co-producer of the original, decided the time was ripe to bring “the classic story” to the stage. Not a “musical reworking of”. Not a “dramatisation of”. The film, word for word, scene for scene (and then some), rendered live and high-kicking on stage: lake, log, lift and all.
After an initial workshop in New York in 2001, the Australian producer Kevin Jacobsen picked it up and the show had its premiere, to predictable critical bemusement and audience delirium, at the Sydney Theatre Royal in 2004. In March this year it opened in the Theatre Neue Flora in Hamburg, where it broke every ticket sale record, and continues to sell out.
And walk today through the West End of London and there it is, nudging up to its sister hoe-down Footloose. The iconic pink and grey poster, reproduced in glitter, announcing that “the phenomenon” has arrived in Britain. This is not the usual puffed-up bumf of media-hungry producers. Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage has clocked up more than £6 million in ticket sales, six weeks before it opens. It is the biggest, fastest advance sale of any show in West End history. Preparations are currently underway for productions in Paris, the Netherlands, Toronto, Chicago and Spain. Dirty Dancing is fast shaping up to be the biggest theatrical event not just in London but in the world.
Phenomenal indeed, and doubtless a tad perplexing to the uninitiated. After all, it was only the fifth highest grossing movie of 1987 (Three Men and a Baby and the bunny boiler epic Fatal Attraction, taking spots one and two). The film’s potential appeal completely bypassed Hollywood at the time. Bergstein tried to sell the concept to movie execs by dirty dancing on their desks. Either she lacked the crucial Castle-factor, or they weren’t interested in a teen market, but every major studio turned her down, and it was eventually released as an indie.
But the modestly impressive box office takings tell only half, or even a third, of the story of Dirty Dancing. That’s probably because, like me, a large swath of the film’s audience was too young to get into the cinema to see it (it was rated 15). We rented the video instead. Then we forced our parents to buy us the video, and Dirty Dancing became the first film to hit the million mark in video sales. Then we bought the awesome soundtrack, which promptly went multi-platinum, making it one of the bestselling film soundtracks in history. The more ardent of us then proceeded to break our brother’s bones in ponds in Norfolk.
Why? Because Bergstein understood her market. No complicated sub-plots, cluttering up proceedings. No messy, nuanced endings, where things remain unresolved. Fantasy, pure, palatably sexual and eminently re-enactable (which was the pressing flaw of Top Gun. Nobody we knew had an F16).
And Bergstein understands the demands of her seemingly indefatigable fan base now. The fluffy haired, softly spoken New Yorker is in London to oversee the show’s staging. She explains that the film’s appeal is down to the fact that “everybody has a secret dancer inside them.” And the show’s appeal, since most people also have a DVD player? “Well I’ll tell you. I heard that in some countries channels were showing Dirty Dancing on a loop, for 24 hours, and people watched it. They didn’t dip in and out, they watched it, over and over again, and I thought why? And I decided it’s because they want to be there, at Kellerman’s. They don’t just want to watch, they want to experience it. To push through the screen. That’s why the show has had the incredible reaction it has in Germany, not just for fans of the film, but for everybody who sees it. It’s a stronger, more immediate way of saying what I wanted the original to say, that you can connect yourself to the world through dance.”
But how, exactly, do you stage a film? Some scenes are only 75 seconds long. In a traditional play, it takes most actors that long to get on set. James Powell, who is directing the London run, explains that this cinematic briskness is achieved through “a marriage of multimedia”. A series of LED screens displays video, stills and live-feed film, adding depth and a sense of movement, both in terms of space and time. This is augmented by a static set with two revolves, which can accommodate the montage sequences. With sound effects, video and lighting, the set can be transformed into a lake and then revert instantly to Kellerman’s resort.
Perhaps the greatest challenge would be to recast the killer Patrick Swayze-Jennifer Grey combination. Kenny Ortega, who choreographed the original (and, now, Disney’s High School Musical, see page 7), describes Grey as “the spirit and the heart of the movie”. On the phone from LA, Ortega says, “Patrick had this extraordinary dance background, his mother is a brilliant choreographer, but Jennifer wasn’t a trained dancer at all.
That’s why it’s so special. There was a lot of Baby in her at that point in her life. When we saw her in audition there was this fun awkwardness about her dancing, and we wanted to keep that, so we worked from that unpolished, improvisational place.”
The 29-year-old Georgina Rich will have to unlearn her dancing skills every night on stage as Baby. She describes the audition as coming “completely out of left field”, having done a rash of classics at Rada, and then performed with Diana Rigg in Joanna Murray-Smith’s Honour earlier in the year at the Wyndhams theatre in London. “My agent was frighteningly excited about it, but I was completely sure I wouldn’t get the part. I went along mainly so I’d have a good story to tell my friends.” Like Grey, Rich has had dance training, “but I’m by no means a dancer. I’ve had to learn a lot, and I’m still learning a lot. Believe me, it’s not going to be a problem for me to do the early, awkward scenes. Call it a natural talent.” And like Grey, although she is flawlessly beautiful, Rich does possess the unaffected quality of innocent approachability that Powell and Bergstein were looking for.
“Good casting, I think, is a little like love. You just know,” Bergstein says. And when Josef Brown, an impeccably chiselled former soloist with the Australian Ballet, pitched up to the initial meeting on a motorbike and in an unresponsive mood, she knew. He played Johnny in the Australian run, and will do so again in London. Preternaturally fresh after a day’s gruelling rehearsals, he says that far from being bored with the role, “London is like a new beginning.
Georgina’s taught me a lot. She has such a different way of working, it’s been brilliant. And I like returning to it, discovering new things; the part is inside me now.”
Alarmingly enough, I can testify to that. The 39-year-old was oddly brittle in conversation, as though our chat were a game of poker and I out to steal his chips. But when we danced (yes, danced; don’t blame me, it was the editor’s idea, and I hadn’t even told him about the wrist incident) he was completely, unnervingly charming.
Almost 20 years after I’d finally accepted that the dance teachers of Cromer would never, even in a good light, even in no light at all, resemble Patrick Swayze, I was shown how to cha cha cha by Johnny Castle himself. The surreal experience taught me three things. One, that the cinematic montage is a wonderful thing. In a matter of minutes, a gawky, ungainly clod can flower before your eyes into a co-ordinated, nubile sylph. In real life, after half an hour you simply become a more embarrassed gawky, ungainly clod. Two, that sometimes, particularly if a photographer is present, a corner is really not such a bad place to be. And three, and take heed, people, unless you are a trained professional, the only place to practise lifts is on the floor.
Dirty Dancing opens at the Aldwych Theatre, London WC2, on October 24 (www.dirtydancinglondon.com)
