ARTICLES

THE SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE

THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES

Almost 20 years after the movie, Dirty Dancing is set to storm the West End – and then the world. Why do we still love Baby and Johnny, asks Patricia Nicol.

“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 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 1980’s. 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 e 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 1980’s.

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 hair. “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 this recent work has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company. His only foray in to 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. Not is its temporal setting.