A Funny Thing Happened In The Theatre

The early 60’s set Dirty Dancing settled into its run at the Bristol Hippodrome with a pink carpet premier to celebrate the start of it's UK touring production. It is a coup for the theatre and they pulled out all the stops to ensure it was a night to remember; it’s certainly a night I'll not forget for quite some time. I can honestly say I've never experienced anything quite like it - nothing to do with what was happening on the stage, it was what was happening in the audience.

Imagine the X-Factor studio audience, hyped beyond reason by a warm up team - if you don't whoop you'll be Tasered. Now imagine that audience in a theatre, whipped up to the same level but not by a warm-up man but by some strange common bond, a fanaticism that transcends mere love and dedication to a movie; a movie they know inside out and backwards. In some cases they know it so well the anticipation, as they sense moments coming, can be felt like a strange physical presence in the auditorium. I swear the woman sitting next to me had a two hour orgasm. Such was the anticipation that the tiniest, the flimsiest of moments was met with something approaching hysteria. I’ve never experienced anything like it in years of theatre going – it was more akin to the reaction you get at megastar pop concerts.

Clearly this was an audience out to enjoy themselves and boy did they. But it was a bit like a Mexican wave travelling around a sports stadium when there's a lull in the action on the pitch. You can come away from certain events thinking you’ve had a great day out but how much of it was to do with what you were watching?

Dirty Dancing attempts to transpose the film to the stage without the ruthless editing necessary for something made in one medium to work in another. Dirty Dancing started life as a film with music, as apposed to a Musical. 60’s records are used in the stage production like they would be on screen, there are some sung numbers, more would have been better – the show comes to life when someone on stage actually sings something. But here's the thing, by trying to include so many recognisable moments from the movie the show lumbers itself with things that may be satisfying for the Uberfans but don’t make much sense in terms of the story, or go anywhere, or add anything to the production. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those moments get trimmed along the way. If they keep them in they're crazy.

What all we writer are told over and over again is Kill Your Darlings. No matter how much you love them, the scenes that don't work have to go.

The performances from the young and mostly unknown cast are okay - but lets not get carried away like that audience - they're okay, nothing to write home about. Nobody woke up the following morning with a star on their door. Some of the dance sequences were energetic but the show I saw a few weeks back 'Midnight Tango' - an out and out dance show -  knocked spots off it.
It's not a disaster by any means but it's not the 'Best Live Theatre Event Ever!" as the poster proclaim. Jeeze, they didn't even put that on the posters for Cats. It looks great; the production design is contemporary whilst harking back cleverly to resort hotels in the Catskill Mountains that provided summer holiday experiences for so many urban families in the early 1960’s - and is the backdrop to the story, which I'm not going to detail because we've all seen the film. But I'm sitting there, listening as the audience react to every tiny moment it can, thinking this needs somebody to stand back and look at it with a cold eye. There was a bit where Baby and Johnny have just been having some afternoon delight and the audience went bananas when he puts his trouser BACK ON.

So what was going on? Obviously the film has built an enormous fan base over the years but I would have thought you'd need a few higher wattage stars to merit that kind of audience reaction. Apparently not. And it shows a show doesn't have to dazzle.

What that audience wanted was for the show to be THE SAME. To this crowd the young actors merely inhabited the bodies of Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey - and that's who they saw up there.  I've seen dozens of much better shows that didn't get anything like the reaction. 

I tell you, it was weird.

One last thing - two last things - the iconic moments from the film are the line ‘Nobody puts Baby in the corner’ and Baby completing a lift that she’d ducked out of earlier.

The former got a huge reception, even though she patently wasn't IN A CORNER - Duh. But when the leading man lifted Baby above his head, his biceps were trembling like a palm tree in a hurricane. If I was the actress playing Baby I'd make sure he was in the gym, lifting weights every day of the tour.

Forget about putting her in the corner, nobody is going to forgive him for putting Baby on the floor.