Dirty Dancing at the Peace Center

The stage musical version of DIrty Dancing can be enjoyed without having seen the 1987 movie on which it’s based, but that’s not the primary audience for the show. On opening night this week at the Peace Center, in Greenville, South Carolina, just as the climactic musical number was about to get under way, one member of the audience shouted out, “Here we go!” and much of the rest of the crowd laughed in appreciation. This was what they had come for: the Oscar-winning song “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” and the corresponding dance number left fans glowing with pleasure and warm memories, and the final ovation was sustained and enthusiastic.

As for the rest of the show — well, your results may vary. It’s a jukebox musical, meaning that all the songs are drawn from pop music past, rather than original to the show. Some are performed by the cast — the opening number is “This Magic Moment,” sung by Frances “Baby” Houseman (Annalese Starzec) as she’s packing to leave with her parents and older sister for three weeks at Kellerman’s, a vacation camp in the Catskills — and some songs waft in from radios. At times, DIrty Dancing onstage comes across as a parody of jukebox musicals, as cast members deliver tunes such as “Besame Mucho” and “The Hula Song” for laughs.

Not all the songs from the movie made the transition to the stage, a list that thankfully includes “She’s Like the Wind,” a notorious awful tune performed for the film by Patrick Swayze, who played the male lead, Kellerman’s red-hot star dance instructor, Johnny Castle. In this stage production, Johnny is played by Blake Zelesnikar, who’s an amazing dancer and a less-than-amazing actor. Starzec works hard as Baby and gains the audience’s sympathy, as does Olivia Cece, playing Penny, Johnny’s dance partner. Penny’s unplanned pregnancy is the catalyst for the play’s plot, as Baby decides to try to help both Penny and Johnny (who is not the father).

The rest of the cast is fine but too numerous to assess one by one — save for kudos owed to the vocal talents of Ethan Peterson and Carmella Taitt, who deliver many of the best songs in the show. Fans of the movie can expect live renditions of that finale number, of course, as well as the Eric Carmen hit from the film, “Hungry Eyes.” Otherwise, the musical overlap with the movie is minimal — the songs selected for the show are from the same era, the early 1960s, but most of the film’s needle drops are missing from this production.

That may seem a petty point to make, since one would expect a stage musical, even one based on a popular movie, to go its own way. But DIrty Dancing onstage comes across less as a separate creation than as fan service, something best enjoyed by those who already know the story and setting. The film — a loosely autobiographical tale written by Eleanor Bergstein, who also wrote the musical — does such a fine job evoking its era that the stage show seems to rely on audience memory rather than working at receating the period convincingly in its own way. Sure, there are plenty of songs from the time period, but scenes that touch on the Civil Rights movement, for example, are more gestural than touching.

There is lots of dancing, and it’s all good. Whether it seems “dirty” to you or not will depend on the context you bring to the Peace Center. For me, the energetic hoofers could have been kicking up their heels in nearly any show in the past 50 years, since the choreography adheres more to Broadway stage expectations than to any inspiration from the 1960s.

Baby’s story remains a satisfying arc, and the ‘60s setting is convincing enough that a final speech by Mr. Kellerman (Loren Lester) about how his camp is passing into history is genuinely moving. In the end, DIrty Dancing onstage relies on audience nostalgia for the 1980s (whether they remember those years or not), when stars Swayze and Jennifer Grey wove for moviegoers an enduring story that in turn relied on nostalgia for the early ‘60s. That may be something of a stretch for the mid 2020s, but a cheering audience is evidence enough that it still works.

Dirty Dancing plays through Sunday, November 18, at the Peace Center. For tickets and more information, visit peacecenter.org.

(Photo courtesy of the Peace Center.)