Dirty Dancing

It’s thrilled millions of teenage girls, saved people from bombing in Bosnia, and – so the creator of Dirty Dancing claims – helped bring down the Berlin Wall. How did a low-budget chick flick become one of the most adored films of all time, and now a West End stage phenomenon before it’s even opened?

In the upstairs lobby of Hamburg’s vast, modern and terribly neat Theatre Neue Flora, on a mild evening in early July, an eclectic crowd of Germans gathers. Some are older and suited, others younger and self-consciously glam. Some are middle-aged and draped with flamboyant scarves in keeping with the standardised dress style of the theatrically bohemian. They are male and female, gay and straight, and they are excitable and giddy, albeit in an understated Germanic fashion. There’s a palpable edge to proceedings, something that elevates the atmosphere way beyond that of your standard pre-performance buzz.

That’s because these people have come, in their varying degrees of finery, to watch the musical version of Dirty Dancing and Dirty Dancing traditionally inspires heightened levels of excitement and nervy expectation. For the 17 or so of you who aren’t familiar with the phenomenon, Dirty Dancing is a low-budget, unapologetically girlie coming-of-age film, first released in 1987. Set in 1963, it concerns a swotty, plain-Jane, 17-year-old duckling of a girl called Frances “Baby” Houseman, who, in the course of a family holiday at Kellermans (a sort of middle-class Butlins located in upstate New York’s Catskill Mountain), falls in love with Johnny Castle, an alpha-male, ultra-muscled dance instructor employed to keep the guests entertained.

Johnny teaches Baby how to dance and have sex; Baby teaches Johnny how that love and passion and a sense of justice are no respecters of the social divide. Baby falls out with and is then reconciled with her adored father, and the film finishes with what is to many minds the greatest, most goosebump-inducing dance finale of our times.

Contrary to all expectations, the film pretty much set the world on fire. It scored massive box-office success (having cost a paltry $5m, it made more than $170m worldwide), became the first film ever to sell a million copies on video and won several Golden Globes. It made stars out of the leads, Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze.

Assorted lines of dialogue – among them: ‘I carried a watermelon’ (Baby on gaining entry to the hallowed sanctuary of the Cool Dancers’ below-stairs world); ‘Spaghetti arms’ (Johnny Castle teaches Baby to dance); and, most famously: ‘Nobody puts Baby in the corner’ (Johnny Castle finally stands up to Baby’s disapproving father) – were so regularly repeated and referenced that they became the ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ of the Eighties and shorthand for the modern teenage experience.

The Dirty Dancing soundtrack was released in album form and was an instant No 1. It featured Bill Medley and Jennifer Warner’s duet ‘(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life’, which won an Academy Award for best original song in1987 and became a karaoke classic.

Dirty Dancing endured through the next two decades, accumulating fans, cementing its position as am iconic piece of popular culture. Subsequent generations of teenage girls across the world discovered it and loved it. And now the phenomenon is receiving another lease of life in the highly successful sell-out runs in Australia and Germany, previews start at Aldwych theatre in London’s West End in a couple of weeks.

I wouldn’t have thought that Dirty Dancing would ply too well in Hamburg. Of all the countries in the world, Germany does not strike me as the spiritual home of this defining work of whimsical, hante-trash chick-flickery. But I’m wrong. The German production had record-breaking pre-sales. In April, Karja Hoffman, Variety magazine’s German correspondent, wrote: ‘Anyone who ever stereotyped the Germans as buttoned-up should observe the unique spectacle of a couple of thousand Teutons rhythmically clapping along to “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life”. Indeed. Here we are, on a Tuesday night, with the full house cheering and stamping its way through proceedings – sobbing, laughing, swaying along in time. Despite the fact that I speak no German, I follow every second of the show. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched the film since its release (in time for my 16th birthday), but it transpires that I’ve seen it at least enough to be able to translate not only the ‘big’ lines (‘Spaghetti armen’), but also the lesser ones, such as subsidiary character Billy saying: ‘He had a folding table and a dirty knife!’ and Daddy Houseman announcing: ‘Baby, you looked wonderful up there’. As for the London show, Dirty Dancing is, with £6m advance ticket sales, the most successfully pre-sold show in the history of London theatre. Across the world – in Dubai, Mexico, Russia, Slovakia and Poland – production companies are clamouring for the rights to produce it. Dirty Dancing is shaping up to be the biggest live theatre sensation of all time.

What exactly is it about Dirty Dancing that inspires such as an astonishing response? Opinions vary. It’s not as if it’s flawlessly accomplished. ‘As a movie, the cliché-ridden script is so bad that it almost becomes unintentionally funny’, writes a reviewer on one of the myriad online fan sites – and he’s right. It is, at moments, breathtakingly cheesy. But then no one has ever consumed Dirty Dancing on a purely sincere level. Its campness is art of its joy and adds to, rather than diminishes, its soul. The internet reviewer goes on to say: ‘The film’s saving grace is that fully a third of it has the actors dancing rather than talking’. I’ve always argued that it was to do with its pace – breathless and tight - and the fact that it addresses the kind of teen aspirations that never really leave us, regardless of how old was we get. It serves as a user’s guide to getting in with the cool crowd, getting off with the alpha male, getting a makeover (in this case, spiritual rather than sartorial) and learning how to dance brilliantly. And it’s a film with a social conscience, via a plot that hinges on a back-street abortion.

Others have different ideas. My friend Julie Goose insists it’s all about Patrick Swayze. ‘Baby Jen’, a regular contributor on another fan site, is highly enamoured by the aesthetic of the film – the early Sixties fashion statements, the sub-Rockette dance costumes. A 1987 broadsheet review suggested its appeal stems from a contemporary fearfulness, a desire to return to ‘a more secure, less problematic time – less cancer, no Aids or herpes, no computers, [when] relationships were more important’.

And Joseph Brown, the dancer who will play Johnny Castle in the London version of the show (having starred in the Australian production), thinks it’s because Dirty Dancing I ‘a celebration of change and difference, and also a story about the transformative power of love’. The film was also the reason Brown started to dance in the first place. ‘It said to me: it’s OK to dance and be masculine, like Patrick [Swayze]’.

If anyone should have the definitive line on the appeal of Dirty Dancing, then it’s Eleanor Bergstein, writer, creator and protector of the film. I meet her at an early rehearsal for the British production. Around us, cast members bounce and high-kick and swing each other over a complicated system of revolving stages, to the strains of ‘(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life’. Everything’s a little shambolic at this point, with the tracksuit-clad dancers still working through their steps with Kate Champion, the choreographer, Bergstein scrutinises every ankle flick, every early attempt at a steamy clinch, every nascent suggestive back-arch. ‘There movements are the movements of everyday life’, she says. She’s definitely hands-on. Bergstein is a cliché of a late-fifty-something, arty New Yorker: an intense, thoughtful, passionate piece in floary, thespy clothes and lairy jewellery. She has insisted in the past that Dirty Dancing is not autobiographical, and yet her hair-mid-length, wild and curly – recalls nothing if not a silver-grey version of Baby’s. She makes no apology for how completely her life is consumed, still, by her film.