Georgina Rich & Josef Brown
in Dirty Dancing
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The West End has never seen anything quite like it. Ticket sales for
Dirty Dancing had already gone into summer 2007 before previews had even started. The box office at the Aldwych Theatre, now shiny and pink in exterior, was—and is—having the time of its life.
So is Eleanor Bergstein. She wrote her coming-of-age tale about a young girl who meets a bad boy dance teacher during a family summer holiday over 20 years ago. Now not only is it one of the most successful films of all times, it’s also a piece of theatre. “No one is more surprised than I am,” the author admits. “Finally it’s found its natural home. I’ve discovered that the story suits being in a theatre more than a movie. It allows the audience to be part of it, to be physically in that world. The theatre is the natural form for the story.”
Audiences are going crazy every single night. The mostly female crowd, who grew up watching Jennifer Grey awkwardly, sweetly seducing Patrick Swayze—once he’s taught her how to dance and feel like a woman—go positively wild at seeing those iconic lines, and steps, delivered right in front of them. The cry of excitement that’s released when Australian actor Josef Brown walks onto the stage, clad in shades and black biker jacket, is deafening. “I don’t take it personally,” Brown admits. “They’re not wild at seeing me, it’s Johnny Castle they’re screaming at.”
Josef Brown & Nadia Coote
in Dirty Dancing
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Suitably modest, Brown took on Swayze’s part when it was first conceived for the stage, two years ago in Sydney. At the time he was in the Sydney Contemporary Dance Company, having previously been a lead dancer with the Sydney Ballet. He cites the 1987 movie as instrumental in helping him through the difficulty of being a man and being a dancer.
“I’d probably only been dancing for a year or two when that film came out. Johnny was this strong male role model; he was very masculine and yet he was also a dancer. It said to me that it was OK to be a dancer,” Brown says. “I think any guy when they start off dancing has a hard time with how they’re seen by their peers, by the girls around them, their parents—you only have to look at another great stage play that’s going on here, Billy Elliot. I think it’s getting easier and it’s more acceptable now to be a guy and be a dancer, but there are still clichés and stereotypes about it. Dirty Dancing helped change that.”
Brown has never had an acting role before Dirty Dancing. For his co-star Georgina Rich, it was the other way round. The audition call was for an actor who could dance. A graduate from RADA—which she only left two years—Rich has only appeared once before in the West End, alongside Diana Rigg and Natascha McElhone in the play Honour. Who knew she’d be doing the rhumba eight times a week? “It’s very exciting,” Rich admits. “I still can’t quite believe it. I only went to the audition for a laugh. I thought it would make a good story for my friends who were obsessed with the movie. Going to an audition to play Baby.”
Georgina Rich in Dirty Dancing
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Now she’s playing Baby every night. But not Jennifer Grey’s Baby; it’s a fine line to tread says Rich. “You don’t want to get in people’s way. People are coming to see the live show because of the film. So you can’t really do a whole different take on this character because she’s on the page, she’s written for you. She is 17, she is studious and she is physically and sexually awkward and then grows. But on the other hand you can’t just copy,” Rich notes. “Jennifer Grey did that part how she did it because that’s who she is. If I tried to do a Jennifer Grey impression then it wouldn’t work, and it certainly wouldn’t work doing it eight shows a week for a very long time. It would just look dead.”
It’s a hard part to play. Because the role requires that Rich unlearn all of her newly acquired dance training—complete with lifts, the mambo, cha-cha and the dirty stuff—at the beginning of every show. “I have to begin being awkward, uncomfortable in my body,” Rich explains, “and then gradually grow comfortable with the steps and the moves.” She does this by recalling, every night, her own difficulty at the start of the Dirty Dancing rehearsals. “How awkward and clumsy I felt, and frustrated, especially in a room full of professional dancers who are amazing—being in a room with 15 amazing, beautiful bodies doing all this stuff—I have to remember how I felt then because that’s how Baby feels a lot of the time.”