theartsdesk MOT: Dirty Dancing, Aldwych Theatre

I suspect that more than half the audience that goes to see Dirty Dancing on stage has seen the 1987 movie, and that quite a few of them have seen the stage version more than once. There’s a strange feeling of being at a party where everyone knows everyone, and the party’s held nightly at the same house. It surely is not the misleading title that accounts for the wildly enthusiastic flow of fans - there’s nothing dirty about this squeaky-clean story, and there’s not that much dancing either. No, it must be that eternal celluloid magic, the girlish fantasy of entering a favourite movie and touching Patrick Swayze’s ghost.

The show was written in 2004 by the film’s original writer, Eleanor Bergstein, but she makes clear in the programme note she didn’t intend a step-by-step transfer from screen to stage, more of a dance-musical, studded with period classic songs to plump an already popular soundtrack. In fact, despite the solemn attempt that’s made to emphasise the 1963 American crises that underlie the plot, what you get at the Aldwych in this London incarnation, four years after it opened, is something likeably gawky, less slick, rather more like a British amateur dramatics production in nice dresses.

The American accents are all over the place - the Canadian Johnny Wright (in the Swayze part) at one relatively authentic end, Ray Quinn, the quiffed ex-X-Factor elf, in a cameo at the other, getting to sing the big song “The Time of My Life” - and there is equally a rather dismaying range of acting ability to be found, often the case in a show where dancing is needed as well.

But what is well done is the swift storytelling, as virtually the entire film is delivered on stage via a set that is little more than a balcony and stairs surrounding a small central space with a revolve, using the back surfaces to project a brilliant array of photographic and video scene-setting, from a plashing riverbank to a staff canteen lit in flames like Dante’s Inferno. Credit above all, I guess, to video and projection designer Jon Driscoll.

The story is a Romeo-and-Juliet of social classes, set in JFK America in an upper-crust summer-camp marriage mart, a resort hotel where sheltered daughters get dance tuition (pictured above left) under their parents’ chaperonage, and Ivy League boys get pretend-waiter jobs in order to meet said daughters. The jokers in the pack are the dance tutors, who are a distinctly lower-drawer set. They’re headed by Johnny and Penny, a pair of groin locksmiths hired to show the uptight young ladies how to move out of the Fifties into the Sixties via a musical journey from Cole Porter to Tina Turner. But alarm bells soon start ringing.

Johnny and Penny once had a thing going, but they each now trade from downstairs to upstairs - she to get knocked up by the most obnoxious of the Ivy League boys, he to hook up with the mousy little “Baby” who, for unlikely reasons, becomes his substitute dance partner, for lack of anyone better. Romance, of course, ensues, ugly ducklings become swans, and reprobates are remade as good husband material. Dirty, this ain’t.

Ah, but meanwhile everyone occasionally remembers to worry about the Cuban Missile Crisis and discuss the desirability or not of votes for blacks, so as to remind us that cross-class wandering and smooching in the Sixties was actually pretty dirty. All that subtext is so unconvincingly staged and directed as to be redundant.

This recent cast change keeps the Baby, Hannah Vassallo, but replaces the Johnny - the programme shows the swarthy former Royal Ballet principal Martin Harvey, and the new Johnny, Johnny Wright, is also ex-ballet, with a nice wry Kevin Bacon smile. Ten years ago he was dancing Balanchine with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. But despite his attractive gravelly voice, he is evidently an inexperienced actor and radiates as yet no kind of sexual connection with Vassallo.

She too moves nicely (she’s ex Matthew Bourne), but she’s a naturally cheery little mouse, not a screwed-tight, buttoned-up mouse like Jennifer Grey in the film, and you can’t readily believe she’d either put up with being called Baby rather than Frances, or have quite such a needy relationship to her father, the good Doctor Houseman (great name). The romance never kindles between the leads, the dancing certainly never gets dirty.

Also for this habitual dance-goer the moves simply aren’t interesting enough - nothing compared to slick Fosse or inventive Bourne, and the flying lift that appears on every poster is really the only lift. In a ballet like Don Quixote (with which the Bolshoi recently brought the house down), this launch would only be the merest preparation for at least a dozen far more difficult feats.

However I did enjoy an eyecatching and hugely spirited performance from Baby’s sister, the Barbie-haired Caroline Haines, doing a perfect Nicole Kidman in To Die For - her Hula number in the end-of-holiday show got the loudest roars of the night. Less impressive (though exceptionally pretty) is the tall Nadia Coote as Penny, who suffers romantic betrayal, illegal abortion and career disaster like it’s all in a day’s work. She also is most at disadvantage in the choreography by Kate Champion and others, which majors boringly on high kicks and deep back bends in a small space, and offers very little else to show her off as a star dancer. In movie musicals they rarely make that mistake - the heroine may be the lead, but it’s usually the second girl's moves you've got to watch.

Still, sometimes it's also the audience you've got to watch - and I suspect every night the same thing happens. The sequence shown in the movie clip below is what the audience has been waiting for all night, and they miss nothing - they even gasp, squeal and applaud in the same places, as if the experience were a ritual to be re-enacted. It's very strange, when mostly in great dance you beg that the familiar will emerge with the wonder of a unique new creature being born. Somehow I think it would be gravely disappointing for this show's audience if even a scintilla of familiarity were to be replaced.

• Dirty Dancing is booking at the Aldwych Theatre, London until April 2011

Watch the final dance in the movie Dirty Dancing (from YouTube):