Why transpose a successful movie from the screen to the stage? That’s the question we’ve recently been asking of Footloose, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and others, and Eleanor Bergstein’s ultra-faithful version of her original script of Dirty Dancing doesn’t wholly answer it. But tell that to the hen parties who are booking in in busloads. Tell that to the thousands likely to be nostalgic for the coming-of-age movie they saw when they were young and impressionable.

Dirty Dancing is a variation of the Ugly Duckling story that is set in 1963. Earnest, insecure Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman goes with her parents to an upscale holiday camp in the Catskills and becomes a bit of a sylph, siren, saint and swan. She quickly tires of bingo or hairdressing lessons and invades the servants’ quarters.

With them, there’s none of the sedate foxtrotting she’s seen clumsily perpetrated by guests in naff shorts. Instead, there’s energetic swirling and swivelling, pelvic thrusting, and girls bending back to form question marks then flying up like exclamation marks as their men lift them to the skies.

Then the romance begins. Nadia Coote’s Penny, who is the partner of the lead dancer, Josef Brown’s Johnny Castle, is in bad trouble. She begs for an abortion and, as often, it goes wrong. Georgina Rich’s Baby comes to her aid. She’ll partner Johnny in a vital gig at a local hotel. And, lo, he teaches her to become an embryonic Fonteyn in about six days. See what I mean by romantic? This makes Hans Christian Andersen look like a kitchen-sink realist.

But who cares when Brown is on the dance floor or (inevitably) in his bedroom, matching Patrick Swayze, who played Johnny in the film. When he and Rich’s Baby are at their sinuous best, you feel what that movie suggested. Dancing isn’t almost as good as sex. No, sex is almost as good as dancing — or, rather, both are indivisible.

Maybe that’s enough to justify a show which adds so little to the original. There are identical lines about, say, the “bungalow bunnies” who spend all summer at this posh Butlins while their husbands come up for weekends. We even get a reference, surely obscure to most British, to George Burns. What’s added, apart from some sentimental stuff about Baby’s parents, is extra emphasis on the period’s politics. There always was plenty about class distinctions — camp guests patronising camp workers — but now there’s more about Vietnam and racial turmoil in the South. We Shall Overcome features among the songs and Martin Luther King among the filmed images.

There are plenty more such projections. Town and countryside glide by as the Housemans drive to New England or Johnny drives Baby out to practise her dance by a lake. And, yes, both of them assay lifts actually in that lake after teetering on a log, as in the film. All this is brilliantly staged, but raises an obvious question. Why not get a DVD of the movie, where such things occur more seamlessly?

Yet I found myself warming to Bergstein’s modern fairy story and to the principals: Brown, elegant of mind and spirit as well as body, and Rich, growing in assurance, skill and beauty as she takes her life into her own hands — and, of course, her own feet.

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