Dirty Dancing Musical a Stage Hit
Toronto`s Royal Alexandra Theatre the Latest Home for Baby & Johnny
Dirty Dancing writer Eleanor Bergstein explains the phenom that Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey brought to life onscreen - and how it found a natural home on the stage.
"Everyone`s got a dancer inside," says Dirty Dancing writer Eleanor Bergstein. And she should know.
Bergstein not only wrote the hit film starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. She`s successfully adapted it to the stage. In 2007, the wildly successful musical sashayed its way to Toronto's Royal Alexadra Theatre and the buzz shows no sign of quieting.
Bergstein – in a phone interview from Amsterdam, where she was holding rehearsals for "Dutch" Dirty Dancing – says she figures our inner-Fred Astaires and Ginger Rogers are the secret to the endless fascination with the story. It's Pygmalian in dancing shoes, really: Jane Baby Houseman – the girl with two-left feet – falls in love with a professional dancer from the wrong side of the tracks.
Dirty Dancing Smashes Box Office Records
Since opening in Australia in 2004, the stage play has wowed audiences and smashed box office records in London and Europe, much the same way the low-budget film did 20 years ago.
Back then, producers figured the flick, starring little-known Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, would fizzle onscreen and quickly foxtrot over to video. Instead, it is among the highest grossing independent films of all-time, earning US $300 million, and a Grammy and Oscar for the soundtrack.
The Canadian production, lead by Toronto actor Jake Simons as Johnny (TV`s Metropia, Stratford, Aladdin), opened in 2007 with an early box office bang too, with the Royal Alex seeing its highest daily sales ever. For Simons, Dirty Dancing the movie was pivotal in sealing his future as an entertainer.
Patrick Swayze as Johnny Made it Cool to Dance
"I was 14 when the movie came out and I had been dancing for three years. As a boy dancer, it was pretty important for me, because it showed that you could be a male dancer and be masculine."
Bergstein's heard it before.
"It seems it gave permission to a generation of young men to know they could be dancers," says Bergstein. "And now, I`m asking those same young men to be my Johnnys on stage."
For years, Bergstein refused to adapt the play, not wanting to cash in on people`s fascination with the story. Finally, she realized, the stage was Dirty Dancing's natural home. "On stage, you have real bodies making real leaps. Every night, a very real Baby turns from a non-dancer into a dancer. In real time. Audiences don't watch it so much as respond personally to it," she says.
"I thought the film was terrific," continues Bergstein. "But in my heart, I now see that this is really what it was meant to be all along."
Dirty Dancing is currently running at Toronto`s Royal Alexandra Theatre.
