Dirty Dancing Review

Let’s start at the end this time, shall we? This is objectively not a good musical. Transitions between scenes and numbers are awkward, songs often feel forced, and the dialogue is not improved by being spoken before a live audience rather than immortalised through film. In an attempt to beef up the movie’s 100 minute run-time, extra scenes have been added along with a political perspective the original - an 80’s product through and through despite the supposed 1963 timestamp - blissfully ignores. Though this awareness of the topics of the time is welcome, the new moments feel very much tacked on whilst being little more than vignettes, no real depth shown. Along with this, the choice to keep the first half quite close to the source material culminating with the characters' first night together, meant that the second half had very little plot left to work with, causing severe pacing issues.

The performers were all more than competent, two of the main singers (Samuel Bailey as Billy, and Mimi Rodrigues Alves as Elizabeth) and the dancers in particular standing out. But the cast had the ungrateful job of stepping into roles that have become iconic, forever inexorably linked with the film actors. Michael O'Reilly‘s Johnny came out with the right amount of swag, had the dance moves down pat (though Patrick Swayze he is not), and exuded sex appeal. But it seemed very much like the whole premise of stage-version-Johnny was to get female audiences reduced to screaming teenagers, his body on display in ways that would be more in keeping at a Magic Mike show than here [after writing my draft, I looked up the cast details, as usual, and was tickled pink to discover that O'Reilly  actually WAS a cast member of Magic Mike in the past!]. As for Baby, Kira Malou didn’t quite manage to convince us that she was as naive and two left-footed at the start as she’s meant to be; another advantage of telling a story through film.

The whole show comes across as being an idea to make money: take all the fans of the movie + pander to them with word-for-word dialogue, costume replicas, and exact staging = make a profit. There was no attempt to reinterpret the story or tell it in an original way; no, this was very much bringing the film to life as directly and with as little effort as possible. The upside was that, rather than try to cram new music into a well known narrative (looking at you, Pretty Woman - the Musical!), the movie’s excellent soundtrack was mostly kept, either as live numbers or through the recorded originals. Unfortunately, rather than find a way to make whole songs work within the action, they were kept to the snippets we hear in the film; a lost opportunity to increase the run time effortlessly.

But after all this, let’s be honest: the movie is pretty appalling as well, and I say this as an avid fan! While a low-effort show, the performance came across as a party, a thousand odd people all coming together to celebrate a beloved cult film. It counts on the audience knowing the source material so well that a simple dance lift elicits a roaring cheer. And that’s ok, not all shows need to be deep and intellectual and complex. Was it good? No. Did I have a blast? Oh yes!

Conclusion: Eh, take it or leave it [what's this?]

Dirty Dancing opened at the Dominion Theatre in 2022.