“I want to see Dirty Dancing on the Great Wall of China,” cries Eleanor Bergstein. She is joking. Unesco objections smoothed over, however, you begin to worry that it could just happen.
Dirty Dancing is shaping up to be the live theatre phenomenon of our globalised age. In London, it has broken all box-office records in advance ticket sales. The West End show that will open on October 24 has not been fully cast, yet already the first six months are selling out. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins flew; Dirty Dancing’s aim seems to be to go through the roof.
And its ambitions do not start and stop in London. A first stage production of the surprise 1987 hit film that starred Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey opened in Sydney in November 2004, to a rapturous audience response and record takings. In March this year, the German-language version opened in Hamburg. “It looks set to run and run there,” says the producer Amber Jacobsen, a 31-year-old can-do, beach-blonde Australian. “Returned tickets sell immediately. Our house seats are sold nightly. We’re regularly taking 103%. And there are repeat viewers, too. You see people coming out of the show and going straight to the box office.” In April, Variety’s German correspondent wrote: “Anyone who ever stereotyped the Germans as buttoned-up should observe the unique spectacle of a couple (of) thousand Teutons rhythmically clapping along to I’ve Had the Time of My Life.”
So, today London, tomorrow the world. The talk is of Paris and Holland next, then Broadway in 2008. Bergstein, the original writer and producer of the rites-of-passage movie, which follows a young woman’s sexual awakening with a holiday camp’s dance instructor in the summer of 1963, also mentions Spain, Italy, Austria, Japan and Russia. Jacobsen, who admits it was “a huge coup” for her Australian family firm to be entrusted by Bergstein with the worldwide stage rights, adds: “Everybody’s talking about Dirty Dancing. We’ve had requests from Dubai, Mexico, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Slovakia... It’s more a case of, where hasn’t asked for it?” If you didn’t spot this coming, then don’t worry. Neither did Hollywood in the 1980s. Bergstein spent years hawking her script — loosely inspired by childhood holidays at the Grossinger’s resort in New York state’s Catskill Mountains — around La-La land. When Vestron, a small independent, stumped up a minuscule $5m budget, the plan was to give it an opening weekend at the cinema, then put it straight to video. It was made with unknowns and released to underwhelming reviews. During that opening weekend, however, something extraordinary happened: through word of mouth, it became a slow-burn sensation. Two decades on, it remains the most successful independent film of all time and a bestseller on video and DVD. Its multi-platinum soundtrack was inescapable in the late 1980s.
Bergstein recalls that during the week of the film’s release, she and her husband, Michael Goldman, a poet and Princeton professor of English, toured New York’s multiplexes observing the film’s audiences: “A group of black boys heading into the auditorium were stopped by an attendant who said, ‘Hey, RoboCop’s that way.’ They answered, ‘Nah, we’re gonna to see Dirty Dancing again.’ Of course the key word was again.
“Four schoolgirls sat behind us singing along to the Kellerman’s anthem. Michael was delighted, which I thought was because he’d penned the lyrics. But he said, ‘Eleanor, you’re missing the point. If they know the words, they’ve already seen it at least four times.’” In Spanish Harlem, during a pivotal scene in which the heroine’s doctor father takes back a cheque from a college kid exposed as a cad, a predominantly male audience whooped their approval. In Tuscany, a decade later, Bergstein was invited into a village home to watch Dirty Dancing on television. That same scene prompted elderly Italian men to throw their hats in the air. “I thought, ‘Now, I have been to the mountain,’” she grins.
So, to play on one of the film’s most celebrated lines, nobody but a fool puts Bergstein’s baby in the corner. In the two decades since it first invited audiences to come dancing, its hold on the popular imagination has remained firm. Bergstein believes that, like recent successes such as Strictly Dance Fever, this is because it “connects to the secret dancer within all of us”. Stephen Brimson Lewis, the designer of the Hamburg and London show, adds that it is because “it has such a classic, universal story”.
He, like many of the production’s key players, was shocked at the invitation to be part of this enterprise. All his recent work has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company. His only foray into musical theatre was with A Little Night Music at the National. “But there are Shakespearian resonances,” he says. “As with Romeo and Juliet, there’s a father trying to choose a partner for his daughter, and her rebelling. And it’s like A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its setting, and the way she goes off to a dangerous place and comes back having had a sexual discovery. Of course, none of that is heavy-handed,” he adds hastily. “What’s clever is the way Eleanor has these things bubbling beneath the surface.”
One of the surprises of Dirty Dancing is that it has such strong social and political moorings. A backstreet abortion is the catalyst that sparks off the plot. Nor is its temporal setting casual. For Philip Larkin, sex “began in 1963... between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP”. For Bergstein, a hippieish, blue-stocking baby-boomer named after Mrs Roosevelt, sex was just a part of it. Like her heroine, Frances Houseman, she never dreamt of questioning being nicknamed “Baby” until her early twenties. The events of Dirty Dancing coincide with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. “I think of 1963 as the last summer of liberalism,” Bergstein says. “It was where the 1960s began. But that summer it still had one foot in either camp. Later, Kennedy was shot, the Beatles came and radical action started.”
Like Baby Houseman, Bergstein is the daughter of a Jewish Brooklyn general practitioner. Kellerman’s, where Dirty Dancing is set, is based on the chichi resort of Grossinger’s, where she spent childhood summer holidays. The African-American academic Cornel West has praised the film’s depiction of six social classes at Kellerman’s, from black underlings through its white working-class hero to its wealthy clientele. Bergstein remembers it as a special place: the first American resort to desegregate its swimming pool and the first to, get this, allow women to tee off on the golf course in the morning. Her family were not wealthy but, like the Housemans, they got a special rate thanks to medical services rendered. Back in Brooklyn, the teenage Eleanor was also a prizewinner at “Dirty Dancing” competitions. Yes, it’s a technical term.
For years after the film’s surprise success, producers plagued her to do a stage version. She resisted, because they all wanted to do a musical in which Baby and Johnny sang. She felt this would not be true to the original piece, in which she used music as she does day-to-day: as a soundtrack to life.
Shortly after 9/11, she attended a Bruce Springsteen concert that prompted her to think again of the visceral shared experience of live theatre. Springsteen did a surprise encore and the audience sat down as one, in the rain, and wept. Days afterwards, she met the Australian producer Kevin Jacobsen (Amber’s uncle) at a New York workshop. He told her that if she gave him the rights to do Dirty Dancing in Australia, he would let her do what she wanted with it.
At first, Kate Champion, the show’s Australian choreographer, refused to meet them. A former dancer with the art-house regulars DV8 and Australian Dance Theatre, she had just set up her own company. Choreographing a musical was the last thing on her mind. They told her it was a play with music, not a musical. She agreed to meet Bergstein out of politeness. “I told them I worked from an improvisational base, that I didn’t do dancing in unison and that I didn’t like dancers who didn’t look like real people. I thought that would put them off — Eleanor grew more and more keen.”
Dirty Dancing has a 60-strong cast and crew. The hope is that the multi-million-pound show coming to the Aldwych will be the template for all future productions. Brimson Lewis will not reveal how big his budget is, just that it has allowed him to think on a whole different scale. Sets, which will include lifts and revolves, are being constructed in Germany and America. Technology new to the theatre, such as LED walls and state-of-the-art projectors, will be used. An on-site camera crew will relay specific sections of each evening’s performance live to hitherto hidden screens. And all of this arsenal must be squeezed into the confined space of the Aldwych. “This really is a unique show,” he says. “Most stage versions of films or books are adapted to fit the so-called restraints of the theatrical language. But Eleanor said, ‘Okay, let’s not do that. How can we have the same expansive vision as a film and put that on stage?’ That means about 78 scene changes that might take them from driving down a road in a car, to practising dance lifts in a lake, to walking up a hillside...” In other words, Brimson Lewis has been charged with fulfilling a devoted film audience’s expectations. Amazingly it sounds as though he has exceeded them.
Today, Bergstein feels that live theatre, not film, was actually always the right forum for Dirty Dancing. Audiences loved the film because they wanted to be part of it; now they can be. Speak to anyone involved and their voice catches with emotion when they describe the show’s audiences. “People are just so happy to be there,” says Champion. “It’s extraordinary. It’s as if you’ve given them something that they’ve waited half their life for.”
And so we come back to walls. In 1989, friends sent Bergstein pictures of kids climbing over the Berlin wall wearing Dirty Dancing T-shirts. “They wanted the freedom that is shown in the film,” she says excitedly. Is this really what we envisaged when Gorbachev spoke of perestroika? Well, now they have it. For the price of a ticket, it will be coming to a theatre near them soon.
Dirty Dancing previews at the Aldwych Theatre, WC2, from Sept 29
