Dirty Dancing

Grand Canal Theatre, Dublin

It's 25 years since Baby carried that watermelon, but the film Dirty Dancingstill has a devoted following. The 1987 tale of Frances "Baby" Houseman, a nice Jewish girl who falls for tough dancer Johnny Castle at a Catskill resort in 1963, was a huge box-office smash and, for those of us who were about to start secondary school at the time, a slumber-party standard.

Now Baby and Johnny’s summer loving has been turned into a stage show, with mixed results. The original film is a lot edgier than most people remember – the plot turns on Baby stepping into the dancing shoes of Penny, one of the resort’s dancers, who has a botched backstreet abortion. The story remains the same in the on-stage version, but this is even camper. And even though it’s longer than the original film, it feels more rushed, with most scenes consisting of dancing with just a couple of lines of generally clunky dialogue thrown in.

As a musical, it’s a bit of a mess. The music consists of early 1960s hits and a couple of songs from the original film, which remind us that we’re getting the 1960s by way of the 1980s. But the sets are imaginative and fun, the dancing is great (especially Charlotte Gooch as Penny) and the cast performs with enthusiasm – Emily Holt smartly depicts Baby’s journey from dancing novice to skilled mover, and Paul-Michael Jones, as Johnny, channels Swayze’s tough-ballet-dancer charm.

But basically, this is a panto for middle-aged ladies – the audience whooped and whistled throughout. And yet this is why it’s hard to resist – when Johnny tells Doctor and Mrs Houseman that “nobody puts Baby in a corner”, performs the famous off-stage jump and lifts Baby into the air for the grand finale, I was cheering along too. Blame my age.