Dirty Dancing

There are movie fans, and then there are ‘Dirty Dancing’ fans. The latter are responsible for turning an unassuming, nostalgic, somewhat clichéd story – of star-crossed lovers, dancing and the Catskills, circa 1963 – into an international phenomenon with a twice-released hit film, an Oscar-winning soundtrack, two DVD’s a ‘Collector’s Edition’ and an ‘Ultimate Edition’ and a treasure trove of T-shirt worthy catchphrases. Learning that television audiences would watch 12-hour movie marathons of the romance between Baby, an idealistic 17-year-old, and Johnny, a wrong-side-of –the-tracks dancer, Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote the script, came to a realization: ‘People were seeing it over and over and over again because thy wanted to be there while it was happening .’ And now, 18 years after the film’s release, they can. The musical version – or as some of the crew jokingly call it, the dancical – has opened. ‘The most natural form for it would be live theatre, because you would actually be present in the here and now’. Ms. Bergstein said, ‘and you would experience it in a way that you couldn’t in your living room’. But don’t start dialling Telecharge yet. ‘Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story Onstage’, is playing in Australia. And while it isn’t unusual for a show to open out of town – even way out of town – in order to fine-tune before coming to Broadway, this was going to financially succeed’ immediately, said Ms. Bergstein, a vivacious woman with a name of fluffy grey hair who based the movie loosely on her own life, and who helped produce the show. She began drafting the idea in 1996; in 2001, she staged a workshop in New York that drew attention from international producers. She considered opening in London or even Amsterdam, but not on Broadway. ‘In some cases, New York is necessary because otherwise you have no cachet’, she said. ‘In this particular case, I didn’t need New York for that’. Among her suitors was family-run Australian production company, Jacobsen Entertainment, which had produced arena rock shows as well as theatre. “When they came to me, I thought, The Australian have a great reputation for dance and great actors”, Ms. Bergstein said from her office overlooking Central Park. ‘And I love a free trip’. Five trips later, she was in.

The show, both a close sibling of the film and an unconventional staging that defies the rules of traditional musicals, opened in mid-November at the Theatre Royal in Sydney and has already sold over 100,000 tickets. After an Australian tour, the current plans are for the cast to go to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore and New Zealand. The Australian show will also serve as a template for near-simultaneous foreign-language production in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. New York and Las Vegas, Ms. Bergstein said, are possibly on a far horizon. ‘Something told me that Australia was the place, and it really was’, she added. ‘The people I worked with, their mandate was: ‘Eleanor, do what you want. We trust you”. That was particularly important because Ms. Bergstein is a hands-on producer on her last visit, she stayed for five months with an unusual vision. While there would be music the show is built around early-60’s hits by groups like the Contours, it was no ‘Footloose: The Musical’. Baby and Johnny don’t sing to each other. ‘I think people would just throw things at the stage if that happened’, Ms. Bergstein said. Instead, as in the film, the music is used more as a backdrop for the story. The show has a real-life backdrop, too: a series of scenes that display both still photographs and the stage action from different angles, thanks to a live camera feed. The set-up was inspired in part by a Bruce Springsteen concert Ms. Bergstein attended at Shea Stadium. ‘I wanted to be something between a rock concert, a very intense drama and a live interactive event’, she said.

In Australia, Ms. Bergstein, along with Mark Wing-Davey, the director, hired an avant-garde choreographer, Kate Champion. More Pina Bausch than Susan Strohman, Ms. Champion had never worked on a musical let alone a dancical. ‘I really went into the interview to explain why I was the right person for the job’, she wrote in a recent e-mail message. ‘But on meeting Eleanor and Mark and hearing the approach they wanted to take with the production, I began to think otherwise. The fact that it was vitally important to Eleanor that the cast look and dance like real ‘people appealed to me’. Ms. Bergstein’s slant also won over Josef Brown, who plays Johnny. ‘I thought, ‘This person really understands it and she doesn’t want to make some tacky remake’, Mr. Brown wrote in an e-mail message. ‘She wants people to feel this story anew’. And there was new material: more music, more love scenes, more background about Baby’s parents – ‘true love, 20 years later’, Ms. Bergstein said – and above all, more history, including a focus on freedom marching and on the social and political upheaval of the time. The Australian actors were even assigned research papers on the civil rights era. ‘There’s a whole bunch of stuff that was the subtext of the film that I’ve brought up into the text now’, Ms. Bergstein said. ‘It’s set in the ‘I Have a Dream’ summer. The year after that, you could never have told this story, because everything changed’. Not incidentally, these expanded storylines help decode the settings for international audiences. Still, how does such a culturally specific show about the Catskills play in Tokyo? ‘There’s a story told trough dance’, Ms. Bergstein said, ‘and it’s told through the possibilities of doing things you never thought you could do’. Ms. Bergstein, who is equally comfortable charting the six social strata in the film and admitting that she sold it by dirty dancing on tables for roomfuls of male film executives, thinks the class conflict, the romantic elements including the sexual awaking will resonate across cultures.