Hungry fans

Johnny and Baby (Josef Brown and Georgina Rich, in the London production) relive their summer romance in Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story On Stage. (Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images)

Here’s the cynic’s take on why Dirty Dancing writer Eleanor Bergstein waited two decades to transfer her beloved film to the stage: All those teenage girls who first thrilled to her steamy summer-resort romance back in 1987 are now in their 30s, meaning they’re likely to have the incomes to plunk down big bucks for a live dose of nostalgia.

Suggest that mercenary motive to Bergstein and she’s quick to refute it. “If that had been my thinking, I never would have done it,” she says emphatically as she settles down for an interview at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre, where the phenomenally popular Dirty Dancing stage show is having its North American premiere. Now in her late 60s with a cascade of silver hair to rival Jennifer Grey’s puffy perm in the original film, the vivacious native New Yorker admits my theory touches a nerve.

“That is what made me resist [a theatrical production] for 20 years,” she says, “the idea that I would be taking advantage of an audience that was perfectly happy with having seen the movie or having the DVD, and were now being asked to fork over more money for another version of it.”

There’s no reason to doubt her. For Bergstein, Dirty Dancing and its hordes of devotees are precious and not to be crudely exploited. The story, after all, was inspired by her own adolescence, while the film was a low-budget labour of love that its studio and distributors had written off until it unexpectedly caught fire with audiences.

In the years since, it has swelled to legendary status thanks to TV and video, and the advance sales for the Toronto stage show — as in London, Hamburg and Sydney before it — are breaking box-office records. The Canadian production sold more than $1.8 million in single tickets on the first day they became available and, due to demand, performances have been extended to Aug. 31, 2008.

Monica West (Baby) and Jake Simons (Johnny) star in the North American premiere of Dirty Dancing at Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theatre. (Steve Stober Photography/Mirvish Productions)

Clearly, there’s some kind of magic at work here that makes Dirty Dancing more than just another sweet-rich-girl-meets-
poor-bad-boy scenario. Maybe it’s the fact that the film’s daddy’s-girl heroine, Frances (Baby) Houseman, played by Grey, is also a smart, spunky kid with a social conscience; or that her wrong-side-of-the-
cabins lover, the resort’s studly dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze), is really just a decent working-class guy struggling to make a living. Or maybe it’s their compelling courtship, played out in a series of dance lessons that are by turns comical, sensuous and quivering with erotic tension.

When I ask Colleen Rusholme, a Toronto radio host, why she’s a die-hard Dirty Dancing fan, she responds via e-mail: “Why do you like ice cream? Because you LOVE IT!”

Rusholme says she first saw the film at 14, at a sleepover with a bunch of giggly girlfriends. Since then, she’s viewed it beginning to end about 30 times. “That’s not counting dropping everything I’m doing to watch it on TV.”

Rusholme says the story spoke to her and her friends at a time when they were young and impressionable. It’s about “finding your own identity and at the same time breaking away from your parents to become your own person,” she explains. “Part of that was daydreaming about your first love. And trust me when I say that we all wanted it to be Johnny Castle. And some are still looking for him.”

Teenage girls aren’t the only ones to be affected by the film — or Johnny. Jake Simons was an aspiring dancer growing up in Kitchener, Ont., when he first saw Swayze’s hunky performance. “The movie was pivotal for me,” he recalls, “because it showed that you could be a male dancer and still be macho.”

Now, the ruggedly handsome Simons is playing Johnny in the Canadian production, co-starring with up-and-coming actor-dancers Monica West as Baby and Britta Lazenga as Johnny’s dance partner, Penny. West and Lazenga were DD fans long before signing on to the stage show. “I was six when the movie came out,” says Lazenga, a willowy alumna of Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet. “My friend had the soundtrack and we’d make up dances to it in the basement.”

The petite West, who comes to the show via the off-off-Broadway and indie film scenes, points out another appealing thing about the story: Baby’s transformation, under the tutelage of Johnny, from a shy kid with two left feet to a graceful and confident dancer. “It’s always amazing to watch someone who doesn’t think that they can do something and then learns that they can; and then they find out that they’re actually really good at it,” West says. “It’s a really positive part of the story.”

Dirty Dancing writer and creator Eleanor Bergstein. (Matthew Peyton/Getty Images)

Bergstein takes that idea further. “My guess is that everyone has a dancer inside of them that they believe will connect them to the physical world,” she says.

The reason people watch the movie over and over, Bergstein has concluded, is that they want to connect with its physical world. That’s why she finally decided to do a live version. “It allows you to be there when it’s happening, to step through the screen and be a more physical part of the story.”

The stage show was also an opportunity to make up for the film’s shortcomings. “It’s not the best movie ever made,” Bergstein is quick to admit. She was a novelist-turned-screenwriter with one previous picture under her belt (the forgotten 1980 romantic comedy It’s My Turn) when she set out to write Dirty Dancing, shaping the script out of her own youthful experiences.

Like Baby, she was the younger daughter of a Jewish New York doctor, who spent her summers dancing the mambo and cha-cha at resorts in the Catskill Mountains. Like Johnny, she excelled at “dirty dancing” — the full-body-contact bumping and grinding to R&B tunes that kids did when the parents weren’t around — and also taught ballroom dancing at the Arthur Murray studios.

The resultant film, directed by Emile Ardolino with a budget of $8 million US, had a fine cast — not just Grey and Swayze, but vets like Jerry Orbach as Baby’s dad and Jack Weston as the resort owner, Mr. Kellerman — and exhilarating choreography by Kenny Ortega. But it wasn’t all that Bergstein had imagined it could be.

“We made it in very little time for very little money,” she recalls. “I would have been happy to go back and make it better.” With the live version, she’s finally able to do that. “There’s 60 per cent additional material that I couldn’t use in the film,” she says. “There’s a lot more scenes, songs and dancing. It’s a much fuller story now.”

Dirty Dancing — The Classic Story On Stage had its world premiere in Australia in 2004, which led to a German production and a third in London’s West End. The London creative team, headed by Bergstein, director James Powell and choreographer Kate Champion, is also overseeing the Canadian staging, a co-production with Toronto’s Mirvish Productions.

Whether on stage or screen, Dirty Dancing will always be more than just a “classic story” to fans like Rusholme. “It’s something we take with us with everything we do. Whether it’s learning something new, or sticking up for the little guy, Dirty Dancing has had a huge impact on [my] generation,” she says. “And what will I be for Halloween? Just a girl carrying a watermelon.”

Dirty Dancing — The Classic Story On Stage begins performances Oct. 31 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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