Dirty Dancing
Festival Theatre, Edinburg JJJJ
PATRICK SWAYZE’S death in 2009, at 57, may have robbed Hollywood of one of its bestloved stars but, a decade on, his screen legacy is still helping to shape this spring’s touring programme at the Festival Theatre, with last week’s version of his 1990 film Ghost followed immediately by Dirty Dancing, the recordbreaking stage musical based on the smashhit 1987 film that made Swayze’s name. In it, he played handsome working-class dance instructor Johnny Castle, drawn into a serious holiday romance with “Baby” Houseman, the 1960s middle-class girl with radical principles.
Of the two stories, it’s Dirty Dancing – writer Eleanor Bergstein’s 1980s take on a 1960s love story – that stands up more strongly to the test of time. The social milieu of the show – a family mountain resort full of rich white folks so liberal that they gather round the campfire to hear Martin Luther King on the radio – is hard to imagine now, yet it nonetheless provides the backdrop for themes of class, sexual and racial politics – from employment conditions to abortion rights – that continue to haunt us today.
Its outstanding feature, in this touring production by Federico Bellone, is the sheer, heartfelt commitment of its young leading actors, led by Kira Malou as a wonderful, humorous and increasingly radiant Baby, and Michael O’reilly as a hero in the true Swayze tradition, dancing brilliantly, and showing off muscles that have the audience swooning in the aisles.
And when Baby finally breaks free into that iconic final lift of sexual and personal liberation, there is still, even in 2019, hardly a dry eye in the house.