Dirty Dancing

Synopsis

Beloved coming of age film, Dirty Dancing comes to the stage to take you back to 1963... ....when everybody called me Baby and it didn’t occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy got shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn’t wait to join the Peace Corps and I thought I’d never find a guy as great as my dad. That was the summer we went to Kellerman’s’ Experience the excitement and romance of the blockbuster film - live on stage. Featuring the hit songs from the best selling movie soundtrack of all time including; Time Of My Life, Hungry Eyes, Hey Baby and Do You Love Me? First dance. First love. The 1987 film starred Jennifer Grey as the teenaged Baby who falls in love with the camp's working class dance instructor, played by Patrick Swayze.

Our Review:

6 May 2012

THE 1987 movie Dirty Dancing essentially had three things going for it. Well, four, if you count Patrick Swayze. There was an iconic theme tune, (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life. There was an iconic movie moment – that lift, when Swayze hoists Jennifer Grey above his head in the lake. And there was an iconic line: “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

But there’s a reason why films are films and theatre is theatre. Successful adaptations from one medium to another recognise this and fundamentally rebuild their story in a way that transforms it into something new and creative.

What screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein has done is pickle her film script in aspic and recreate it, virtually frame by frame, on stage. She and director Sarah Tipple even reinforce this notion by projecting images and footage onto the vast white set, so the lake ‘lift’, for example, is performed through a screen on which is displayed a gently rippling body of water. It’s clunky, unconvincing and, ultimately,...

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