Dirty Dancing - The Musical

Dirty Dancing puts a sheltered seventeen-year-old at a summer resort in 1963 and hands her a secret to keep: the dance staff have a world of their own after hours, and one of them needs help she cannot ask for openly. Baby Houseman learns to dance, and a good deal besides.

She is spending the summer with her family at a holiday camp where the guests are respectable and the entertainers are not expected to mix with them. When the resort's dance instructor loses his partner at short notice, Baby volunteers, badly. What follows is a summer of lessons, lifts and lies, a first love conducted across a class line, and a crisis that forces her father to see her differently.

Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote the 1987 film, adapted her own story for the stage, and the production first opened in 2004 before travelling widely. The stage version keeps the period songs and the choreography the story is built on, with the big vocals delivered by singers working alongside the acting company.

Expect the dancing to carry the evening: mambo, merengue and the lift everyone is waiting for, played live against a set that moves between ballroom, staff quarters and lake. Underneath the nostalgia the story keeps its teeth — about money, about who gets protected, and about a young woman working out what she actually believes.

It suits audiences who know the story and want it in the room rather than on a screen. It works best live, where a full house holding its breath before the final lift is the reason to be there.