Dirty Dancing Closes 9 Jul, Prior to National TourDate: 15 February 2011
Producers of hit screen-to-stage musical Dirty Dancing have announced that, after a run of five years and nearly two million audience members, the current West End run will finish at the Aldwych Theatre on 9 July 2011, prior to a two year national tour.
In a joint statement, the producers said: “We have enjoyed a truly wonderful five years in London and we are very excited to be taking Dirty Dancing out on the road across the UK later this year.
“It has been an absolute pleasure to bring this much-loved and iconic story to life on stage night after night, and we want to thank our tremendous cast and company for making Dirty Dancing such a huge success in London.”
Dirty Dancing broke box office records when it opened at the Aldwych in 2006, with advanced ticket sales of over £15 million. It was previously thought that the London run, which was booking to 29 October, would continue concurrently with the tour, which kicks off at Bristol Hippodrome on 1 September 2011.
Set at an upmarket American holiday camp called Kellerman’s in the 1960s, the 1987 film of Dirty Dancing starred Jennifer Grey as the teenaged Baby Houseman who falls in love with the camp's working class dance instructor Johnny Castle, played by Patrick Swayze, whose climactic line, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner”, has since become a classic.
Dirty Dancing has been adapted for the stage by the film’s screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein, who based the story’s setting on her own childhood experiences of family holidays in America’s Catskill Mountains. The musical had its world premiere in Sydney in 2004.
- by Theo Bosanquet
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