Critics have had little impact on the global audiences drawn in the last decade to Dirty Dancing, since the original show premiered in Sydney … but I’ll go on!
Usually, if anything, stage shows inspire films but here it started the other way around, with the famous 1987 teen movie with Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. Indeed, all who’ve seen the show will be struck by how exactly it copies the film, which may further delight ardent fans.
The American writer of both, Eleanor Bergstein, keeps the same turnover of patchy scenes and quick musical quotes snatched from some 45 cover tunes. With our romantic leads never singing at all, the place of song in Dirty Dancing is really a bit of a musical mystery. An exception is Mark Vincent’s beautiful (and thankfully complete!) rendition of In the Still of the Night.
The setting is the same 1963 country holiday retreat where young Baby Houseman arrives with her nice family, and then discovers a staff very cynical and exploitative of the guests. But, boy, they know how to dance, and woo the girls, and no one better than Johnny Castle, who may be gorgeous but comes from the wrong side of the tracks.
The show hovers unsatisfactorily between Leave it to Beaver goes to summer camp, and a raunchier world where dancing is nothing but an act of sex. There’s some idealistic talk about Martin Luther King and freedom rides but it’s a social reality far beyond this WASP world of golf games and charades, and remains another plot thread not much developed.
The show’s lurking theme – appreciated by its largely female audience – is a young girl’s right, even in 1963, to take to the dance floor and, if elevated to love, bed who she likes. So here the incentive, the alluring eye candy, is not Kirby Burgess, who is suitably innocent and earnest as Baby, but the lanky, bare-chested prowess of Kurt Phelan as Johnny. Phelan has all the moves and, with the hip thrusts, brings a moody unaffected charm to the role.
The most thrilling dancing is actually between him and his blonde bombshell friend, Penny, played in London and in this Sydney revival by the long legged Nadia Coote.
Baby, in fact, spends most of the show just learning to dance with Johnny (even if she beds him between lessons) so the real dancerly climax comes only at the end with Time of My Life. Romantically, choreographically, it’s a moment hard to beat and bursts open an ensemble energy and impact which the earlier show lacks.
For a musical about dancing, it’s strangely strangled in musical snippets and a choreography (by Australia’s Kate Champion) which, while busy with fun gymnastic coupling, never consolidates to drive the show.
The costumes of Australia’s Jennifer Irwin deliver a sassy flounce and period colour, while James Powell directs a strong cast who mostly rise above a script lacking much punctuation and wit.
Penny Martin and Adam Murphy are solid as Baby’s blandly, well-meaning parents and Teagan Wouters is a standout as her gauche sister. Gabriel Brown too is fine as a geeky Neil Kellerman.
Perhaps the real star – and ever reminding us that this theatre is a good souvenir of the film – are the filmed projections of country style life on the shuttered backdrops of Stephen Brimson Lewis’ set. The audience screamed with delight as our lovers practiced their steps and leaps amongst immersive country glens, windy fields and splashing in the sea.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Dirty Dancing
Lyric Theatre
Touring Sydney, Melbourne an dBrisbane from December 3
