Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: Theatre

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December 19, 2015

The Seekers Musical: 'Georgy Girl'

To understand the story of The Seekers climb to success you have to put the era into context.

In the 60s, people travelled to England by boat or had multi-stop flights taking days to reach the destination. Today it is quicker to get to the moon. There was no Internet. A short phone call from London to Melbourne cost a weeks salary and fans couldn’t just stream a new song. They would generally hear it on the radio, watch it on TV and then if they liked it, physically have to go to a store to buy it. There were no 24/7 stores then. You shopped from Monday to Friday between 9am to 5.30pm or Saturday between 9am and midday.

As an artist then, your chance of any success (let alone global success) was next to nil. The Seekers were the first Australian band to break that barrier. In a figurative sense, they truly walked on the moon. And THAT is why they deserve to have their story heard.

The Seekers were pioneers. ‘Georgy Girl The Seekers Musical’ tells the unlikely story of four people from Melbourne Australia who rose to global success when the Bee Gees were still living in Australia. They pre-dated Simon & Garfunkel. As the show mentions of a few occasions, Bruce Woodley was writing with an unknown Paul Simon before Simon & Garfunkel had their first hit. Their song ‘Red Rubber Ball’, a 1966 hit for The Cyrkle, is placed in the show for that reason.

‘Georgy Girl The Seekers Musical’ is essentially told through the eyes of singer Judith Durham, who in her teens was a wannabe jazz singer and a secretary in an advertising agency. The Seekers left for London after being offered work as performers on a cruise ship. What was meant to be 10 weeks away, became four years.

Now considering the pre-technology era portrayed, a teenage girl away from her family on the other side of the planet, a music industry that was as fair to artists then as it is today (The Seekers sold millions of records but their royalty rate was 2.5% divided by four) and what we have is a music story where everything changes but nothing changes.

‘Georgy Girl The Seekers Musical’ tells of some incredible highs for this Melbourne quartet including the Academy Award nomination for their song ‘Georgy Girl’, their number one hits in the UK for ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’ and ‘The Carnival Is Over’, their US top 10 breakthrough with ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’, ‘A World Of Our Own’ and ‘Georgy Girl’ and their incredible homecoming performance in Melbourne where over 200,000 fans turned up to see them at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl in March 1967. At the time that was around 10% of the entire population of Melbourne. It set a record listed in the Guinness Book of Records that is still to be broken.

‘Georgy Girl The Seekers Musical’ is based on a book by Patrick Edgeworth, Judith’s brother-in-law. The script was overseen by Graham Simpson who was the author of Judith’s biography ‘ Colours Of My Life’. While the musical uses poetic licence to condense the 50 year story into two hours, the story of the journey, the legacy of the music and the trophy of success is the message to take away from this show.

With ‘Georgy Girl The Seekers Musical’ producers Richard East (Mamma Mia) and Dennis Smith (Dusty, The Go! Show) tell a story of an iconic Australian group that opened international doors for Australian music for others like The Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John and later Little River Band, Men At Work and INXS to follow.

Pippa Grandison as Judith Durham, Phillip Lowe as Keith Potger, Mike McLeish as Bruce Woodley and Glaston Toft as Athol Guy as believable and authentic as The Seekers every night.

The Seekers deserve their place in Australian Music History and every Australian should hear this story.

‘Georgy Girl The Seekers Musical’ is on now at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne and heads to Sydney in April. Get tickets here

By Paul Cashmere

With many thanks to Noise 11
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Julie Andrews To Direct My Fair Lady production At Sydney Opera House

November 17, 2015

Julie Andrews To Direct My Fair Lady Production At Sydney Opera House

The original Eliza Doolittle, Dame Julie Andrews, will direct a 60th anniversary production of My Fair Lady at the Sydney Opera House.

The actress and musical theatre legend starred as Eliza Doolittle in the original Broadway production of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's retelling of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion in 1956.

Andrews will be in Sydney later this year to start casting for the production.
"I am thrilled to have been asked to direct My Fair Lady at the Sydney Opera House in August 2016," she said in a statement.

"I look forward to coming to Sydney this November to cast the production and begin the process of bringing this great musical to life once again."

The Eliza Doolittle role in 1956 was Andrews' second part on Broadway, and her performance of Wouldn't It Be Loverly? and I Could Have Danced All Night launched her career.

"To think that Broadway's original Eliza Doolittle, Julie Andrews, will direct our new production at the Sydney Opera House 60 years later will, I'm sure, excite both Australian and international audiences," theatre producer John Frost said.

Frost and Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini will present the new production together at the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Opera House next year.

"I am delighted and it is indeed a privilege to work with Dame Julie Andrews as she creates a new My Fair Lady that will capture the magic of the world's greatest musical for a new generation of classic musical lovers," Mr Terracini said.

The production is expected to bring more than 19,000 overnight visitors to Sydney and bring about $7 million into the NSW economy, according to the NSW Minister for Trade, Tourism and Major Events, Stuart Ayres.

With many thanks to The ABC

When a movie was made of this show Audrey Hepburn took the role of "Eliza Doolittle".
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The Seekers Musical: 'Georgy Girl'

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January 03, 2015

Indina Menzel, Star of Frozen, Learns To Let It Go For Musical If/Then

BROADWAY stars are not typically known for their modesty: it takes a certain amount of self-belief to stand on stage, eight times a week, and hold an audience. And Idina Menzel has been doing that for two decades, since she got her break in the original New York production of Rent, through her award-winning, career-making role in Wicked, and now in If/Then, a year-long run of a show that was written for her.

As big a star as musical theatre has seen, she has become during the past year a bona-fide star of the screen as well — after a fashion. Menzel is the voice of Elsa, the magical, ice-powered princess in Frozen, the most successful animated film of all time. Which means she is the voice of Let It Go, the girl-power anthem that roared, topping charts globally, inspiring YouTube tributes galore and winning an Oscar for best song. And all of this means she is suddenly the worldwide heroine nonpareil of little girls everywhere — even if they initially may be confused that a girlish, blonde, Scandinavian royal is actually a 43-year-old, raven-haired, Jewish Long Islander.

“It depends on their age,” she says, asked whether many young Frozen fans understand who she is. “But more than you’d ever think. I remember some of those classic Disney songs from movies, and you knew the character but you didn’t know the person behind the song. But this is different, this is weird. All the little girls love Elsa but they also want to meet me. I think that’s because of social media, and their parents say, ‘Watch this, this is the girl at the Oscars.’ I’ve been trying to understand why it’s helping me so much, personally.

“But then I think, ‘Oh, I should give myself some credit — maybe it’s the interpretation of the song that I gave.’ ”

You don’t need to spend much time with Menzel to see she has some confidence issues. It’s also apparent that, unlike many stage divas, she is not in the least bit grand. Far from it: she is warm, forthright and self-analytical to a fault. It’s late on a Friday afternoon, a few hours before she is due on stage in If/Then, and she is barefoot and curled up on a sofa in a New York hotel suite, tucking into a chicken club sandwich, batting away my concerns about whether she is talking too much on a show day.

“I do have a discipline and a routine, but I used to be more precious. Once I’d had a baby,” she says, referring to Walker, her five-year-old son with actor Taye Diggs, “I started to relinquish some of that control because I just couldn’t get as much sleep, or things would come up and I’d have to go on stage tired. So I sort of lowered my expectation of myself, and actually ended up singing better most of the time because I was more relaxed.”

Lately, however, Menzel is doing anything but lowering her expectations. During the past few months she has been pulling double shifts, capitalising on her heightened profile by recording a new album, Christmas Wishes. And while her career is on the up, life has been far from easy because all of this success has come in the wake of her divorce from Diggs: a couple since they met on Rent, they announced their separation at the end of last year. Menzel is still adjusting and confesses to feeling a need to overcompensate with Walker.

“Exactly. Yeah, I’ve totally f. ked him up now — he’s going to have divorced parents,” she says wryly, with a shade of sadness. “But I had a parent-teacher conference yesterday and it was very positive. They said what a wonderful child he was. So that has helped me a bit: ‘OK, let me take that in, you’re doing OK.’

“It’s hard. It was even when I wasn’t single. Just being a working mum is so complicated because we want our children to grow up seeing the best version of their mother. And the best version of their mother is going to be a woman that’s fulfilled and doing what she loves and teaching her children that they have to go after their own passions and dreams. And yet I want to be home. I want to read (to him).

“I missed putting Walker to bed last night. All that kind of stuff. It’s constant. And I always feel guilty. I’m trying to let myself off the hook lately.”

Today Menzel says she and Diggs are focused on co-parenting their son, and after If/Then finishes in February Menzel plans to move to Los Angeles for a couple of months, where Diggs is filming a television series.

Rather than tipping her over the edge, the new album was, she insists, just what she needed. By fluke, If/Then touches on themes obliquely analogous to her own life: she plays a late-30-something returning to New York after a divorce, navigating singledom while rebooting her career.

Christmas Wishes, by contrast, is pure escapism. It features perennials such as When You Wish Upon a Star and Silent Night; River, the Joni Mitchell classic included as a tribute to one of her childhood heroines; and Baby It’s Cold Outside, a playful duet with Michael Buble. It was recorded in a series of short sessions at a studio near the theatre.

“I just was in heaven,” she says. “It was a way to break up the monotony of doing the show every day at the theatre. I had fun and I didn’t over-listen to myself or second-guess myself.”

It’s her fourth studio album, and the hope is this is the one that achieves the mainstream pop success that (with the exception of Let It Go) has so far eluded her — a problem that often bedevils stage performers attempting to cross over. Can a talent with a belting voice adept at lifting the rafters in a 1400-seat theatre night after night be, in Menzel’s words, “stripped of my sound” to make a pop album?

The former requires power and theatricality; the latter usually requires something cooler, hipper and, often, more restrained. “Sure, I’d like it to be successful,” she concedes, but insists that she no longer obsesses over finding the right project. “Once you stop worrying about being so results-oriented, it’s very liberating.”

That liberation, it seems, is powered in no small part by the continued, snowballing success of Frozen. A word-of-mouth sensation and a meaningful one too, it centres on two strong female characters, where the happy-ever-after isn’t predicated on the girl finding true love with a handsome prince.

“It’s women depending on each other; it’s a bond between them, not with a man,” says Menzel. “So often they pit us against each other, two powerful women. So it’s hard for people to believe that those two women would love and support each other. It’s easier to play the angle of them not liking each other.”

She has been overwhelmed by the response to the film, and particularly the video tributes it has inspired. “Recently someone sent me one of a girl with autism singing Let It Go. And I love the one with, I think it’s twins, and one of them’s yawning in it. And there’s one where the song’s been put in famous music scenes in movies: The Shawshank Redemption, where all the prisoners are looking up and listening to the opera. Or Rocky, when he’s running up the steps …”

Frozen has just been rereleased theatrically, and there’s a new six-minute short that will play in cinemas in the festive season. There are rumours of a sequel and a stage musical. What can Menzel tell us of those plans?

“That they’re all in the works, ha ha!”
Is she signed up for them all?

“Ah, yeah sure … Not the stage show — I don’t know what will happen with that — but the movie hopefully. We’ll see. I’m just going along for the ride,” she says.

Like Elsa, Menzel is belatedly learning to love her powers. As a child in Long Island (her father was a children’s pyjamas salesman, her mother a housewife who later trained as a psychotherapist), she found her vocation at the age of eight when a trip into New York to see Annie turned her head. From her mid-teens she performed at weddings and bar mitzvahs, singing show tunes, power ballads and Whitney Houston anthems. The weekly gigs paid her way through college and helped hone her performance skills.

But they also meant Menzel had to endure drunk, ignorant crowds, while battling fears that her dreams of escaping Long Island would never come to pass. All the while, she hid her talent from her friends. “I didn’t want to stand out. I didn’t want other girls to be envious of me — or not to like me. So, yes, I would hide that.”

That wasn’t the only thing that she hid. “I come from a Long Island Jewish family. We curse and we talk and we argue. We fight big and we make up big.

When I left my (family) house in my 20s, and started to juxtapose myself with other ‘normal’ people in the world, I realised that not everybody communicates in that way.

“So I actually started to get really anxious, and embarrassed, or ashamed, of my anger, my temper, my …”

She stops and frowns. “I was afraid of being too big and too loud. So I went inward. If you ask people that know me, even now, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, she’s so shy when you meet her.’ But I’ve come back around in my early 40s to not being ashamed of being bawdy and maybe a little bit rough around the edges, and not caring about what people think as much of everything that I said. And understanding that my voice and my big presence are OK. That’s who I am.”

Menzel’s parents separated when she was 15, and “I’m a little ashamed because I always said I wouldn’t get divorced. I wouldn’t let that happen because it was so upsetting to me. But,” she inhales, on the point of tears, “it is what it is. And he’s got two great parents, who are committed to co-parenting.”

Next summer Menzel — who for now is single — will be embarking on a solo tour performing the songs that made her and the songs that she made, from Wicked’s Defying Gravity and If/Then’s climactic power ballad Always Starting Over, to numbers popularised by another of her all-time icons, Barbra Streisand. She is heartened by the size of the concert venues she has been able to book.

“This is such a mercurial, unsteady, fragile industry where you never know what’s going to happen,” she acknowledges. “It feels really good to be in control of your own career; to know I can show up at a theatre and people will buy tickets. As a woman who wants to be independent, no matter what man she ends up being with, it felt good to know I can make a living doing what I love to do — singing — no matter what.”

Before I leave, she gives me tickets to see If/Then that evening. She lifts the rafters: she is sensational, front and centre in the exuberant, talky show for two hours and 20 minutes.
And at the end it is the audience who lifts the rafters.

By Craig McLean

With thanks to The Australian

Frozen Breaks iTunes Record

Disney musical Frozen has become the biggest selling film on iTunes of all time.
The movie’s soundtrack was also revealed by Apple to have sold more than any other album in the US this year, although the company gave no figures.

HBO’s Game of Thrones was named as the year’s best-selling TV show of the year on iTunes, while the list of the other top programmes included The Walking Dead, Downton Abbey, Breaking Bad and Scandal.

Frozen pipped The Wolf of Wall Street into second place in the 2014 movie chart and The Lego Movie was also in the top three. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy was into tenth place despite its recent release.

Taylor Swift’s 1989 was named 2014’s second biggest selling album on iTunes globally despite only being released a few weeks ago and her hit song Shake It Off was 12th on the singles list.

Frozen also featured highly on the list of the best-selling songs of the year with Let It Go in ninth spot on the iTunes global list.

Apple has also revealed the biggest selling apps of the year for its iOS platform, with Minecraft top of the list for iPad users, although it fell back to second place in the iPhone list.

The Fault in Our Stars and Gone Girl were named as 2014’s best sellers in fiction in the ebooks chart revealed by Apple.

By Joni Oneil

With thanks to Billionaires Australia

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December 10, 2014

Mikhail Baryshnikov: First Ballet, Now Photography

I HAVE loved Mikhail Baryshnikov for years. Not in any real sense, of course, but as someone privileged to have witnessed many of his extraordinary performances on stage, I have had the chance to fall in love with his charisma, his charm and his stunningly precise and absolute way of moving. He may be 66 now but time has done nothing to still those qualities. I know, because I’m about to be bewitched by Baryshnikov again.

We are in London, in a West End gallery where the ballet superstar, modern dance icon, film star, stage actor and television leading man is showing me his photographs. Not holiday snaps or family portraits but electrifying, large-scale digital images that seek to capture the act of dancing. He is in London to launch Dancing Away, the first UK exhibition of his photography, which opened at Contini Art UK last month.

Baryshnikov’s CV is testament to one of the most remarkable careers of the 20th century. He was the Kirov dancer who defected to the west in 1974, who conquered the international dance world, who performed with the top companies and worked with more famous choreographers than anyone else. His career as a dancer spanned more than 30 years and brought him fame on screen and a near hysterical presence in the gossip pages, thanks to his liaisons with a succession of actresses and ballerinas. Dressed for our meeting in a natty suit, he looks as if he could have stepped straight out of TV’s Sex and the City, in which he played Carrie’s Russian artist boyfriend. Everywhere he goes in the world, people still remember him as that elusive rogue, Aleksandr Petrovsky. He doesn’t mind — “at least they are remembering me for something”.

Yet he’s more interested now in what’s coming out of his trusty digital camera, which has captured thousands of images of dance and dancers. Rigorously edited and then blown up and printed on French watercolour paper, the chosen few present a vibrant array of the body in motion — ethereal pictures that have the look of painterly impressionism. His work doesn’t come cheap: a single print can set you back a staggering £32,000 ($60,000) and you will need a lot of wall on which to display it properly.

Transition is more important to Baryshnikov’s lens than posturing, he wants people to see the moment just before and just after a particular movement. With his use of long exposures, some of the images are so blurred, the metaphorical brushstrokes so fluid, that the specifics of choreography and individuality are almost undetectable. “I’m inspired by some of the people who pioneered this kind of photography, notably the Russian Alexey Brodovitch, and later on the American Irving Penn,” Baryshnikov says. “They were photographers who tried to depict movement. There is nothing wrong with crisp focused pictures, and there are lots of lovely ballet books all done in a very slick style. The image of a woman a la seconde or in arabesque can be very beautiful, but it’s not what I am trying to do.

“My work has a touch of surrealism. For me, a picture is a memory of something; I am looking for that one moment to remind me why I still love to see dance.”

He has been taking photos for years, of his family, of his extensive travels, but it was the arrival of digital technology that convinced him to start photographing his own art form. “I started to experiment and develop my own style. Digital technology makes it easier to capture movement; what’s difficult for me is that the light is changing all the time. People like Penn photographed their subjects in a studio, that’s never the set-up for me. I only photograph in available light because I try to be a fly on the wall.”

He takes me through some of the images on his laptop — “here you see traces of their previous movement; they are on a journey”. There are photographs of dancers from New York City Ballet, from the Mark Morris, Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham troupes; tango and samba dancers in South America — “half of my images are done on the streets”. He is attracted to explosions of colour, from deep violets to vibrant reds, and stylistically his photographs are clearly indebted to a range of artists, from Matisse to the Russian constructivists.

Is this a vanity project? “No, it’s not. I take this very seriously. This is not a hobby. I always travel with a camera in my hands and make room in my schedule to take pictures. It keeps me busy, it keeps my eye sharp and it’s as hard work as anything I do.”

Baryshnikov may spend hours behind a camera but he’s still happy to put himself out there in the theatrical spotlight. His career as an actor began in 1977 when he appeared in The Turning Point, Hollywood’s classic backstage bitchfest dance movie, playing a lothario ballet dancer with a heavy Russian accent (a part many believed was based on Baryshnikov’s colourful reputation with the opposite sex). He earned his dramatic stripes with a 1989 Broadway production of Steven Berkoff’s take on Kafka’s Metamorphosis and followed that up with plays by Samuel Beckett.

Last year he starred in Robert Wilson’s production of The Old Woman at the Manchester International Festival and he’s working on another project with the irreverent American theatre director. This time it’s a one-man show about the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, the great Ballets Russes dancer who by the age of 30 had deteriorated into the debilitating mental illness that plagued the rest of his life. Nijinsky’s diary, written in 1919, records his descent into madness. “It’s the diary of a very disturbed and very wonderful person,” Baryshnikov says, “and the manifestation of an artist.” The resulting show will be seen in Milan next summer. “I like to try everything. And I have always loved the theatre, it has been my passion for the past 15 years. Dancers or actors, we are all stage animals. Yes, it makes you very nervous of failure, but in my case the more scared I get, the greater the desire to perform. I like to put myself in discomfort because somehow that excites me.”

Baryshnikov continues to dance, working recently with Mark Morris, with whom he founded the innovative White Oak Dance Project in 1990. It toured for a dozen years, presenting a fascinating repertoire of new modern dance works and historic revivals. His main job, though, is running the Baryshnikov Arts Centre, a creative laboratory and theatre complex on West 37th Street in New York (he lives just outside the city), which he opened in 2005. “I started a little foundation to help people in very modest ways, to support artists at any stage of their career. Not just dancers, but theatre, music and visual art people too. In the beginning it was very small scale, and somehow we raised the money and we built it. But I never knew it would get so big.” He uses the proceeds from his photographic sales to help fund his flourishing centre.

At 66, how does he handle the ageing process? “Actually, I’m having a better time now. I am more in control of my emotional life, I know how to concentrate better. I still go up and down and get frustrated with myself and with people around me, but I know how to work better than even 10 years ago. Life is full of possibilities as an artist.

“I have stayed healthy too. I did damage my body when I was younger, and I had 12 or 13 operations — shoulder, knee and this and that — but I was smart enough to take enough time to recover fully afterwards and I had extraordinary doctors; I was always lucky. I have no problem with my body now.”

The man who was once the most famous ballet dancer in the world and who ran American Ballet Theatre in the 1980s no longer follows the classical scene. “I rarely attend classical ballet, it’s not where my heart is; my interest is in more experimental work. Do I have any desire to influence ballet? No, not at all. I am approached every second year to take over a company here and there — you must be kidding. I didn’t leave one company to take over another one.”

It has been 40 years since he escaped from his KGB minders while on tour with a group of Soviet dancers in Toronto. He has never once gone back to Russia. “I have been to Latvia, where I was born, but not Russia where I lived for 10 years. There is a reason for that which I don’t want to discuss because it’s personal. But it’s very sad what’s happening in Russia today. I thought the country was going in the right direction with certain reforms, but what’s happening now is a regression. I would rather not talk about it — it’s too upsetting.”

Family is important to Baryshnikov, who lost his mother when he was 11 (she committed suicide). He has four children (one with his former partner, the actress Jessica Lange, and three with his wife, the former dancer Lisa Rinehart) and two grandchildren.

“None of my kids studied ballet, and we rarely speak about dance at home.”

I ask him if he feels Russian, or indeed Latvian, and am surprised by his answer. “I lived in Latvia until I was 16, then spent the next 10 years in Russia and then I left. In Latvia I was an outsider because my father was in the Russian military and we were an occupying force in Latvia so that wasn’t too comfortable for us. But I was not comfortable in Russia, where I was perceived as a provincial Latvian looking west all the time.

“I would say that as a state of mind I am an American. I would never speak English as my mother tongue, of course, and I will always have my accent. But even with all the horrific things happening in the United States — the poverty and the racial problems — I admire the tenacity of the country and I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

By Debra Craine

With thanks to The Australian
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November 21, 2014

"Dirty Dancing" The Stage Musical Brings Back The Patrick Swayze-Jennifer Grey Lift - Updated

When this movie was screened in 1987 it wasn't a case of "have you seen it?" It was more a case of "how many times have you seen it?" It was, and still is, an inspiring and uplifting story with a great cast and a terrific soundtrack.

"Dirty Dancing" and "The Bridges of Madison County" have always been my favourite 'chick flicks'.

‘THE room for error is quite great,” dancer Kurt Phelan says, with a nervous smile. “If you’re a centimetre over or under you’re screwed.” His co-star Kirby Burgess nods. “It is an incredibly demanding moment. It is not just getting up there; it is holding it.”

It’s Wednesday, 10.30am, and we are holed up in the bowels of Sydney’s Capitol Theatre with the cast of Dirty Dancing under the promise of learning the alchemy behind one of the most enduring pop-cultural moments of the 20th century: we are here to learn the lift. That memorable moment when Jennifer Grey leaps into the arms of Patrick Swayze at the dramatic denouement to Emile Ardolino’s 1987 film; the moment that would see Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’s (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life win an Academy Award and secure its future as a karaoke classic; the moment that inspired a generation of would-be Johnnys and girls who just wanted to be his Baby. The time of my life has arrived. Or has it?

The film may famously tell us nobody puts Baby in a corner, but it turns out some are willing to put her on the floor. A penchant for peanut butter and a fitness regimen that barely extends beyond vacuuming means I lack the core strength needed to keep myself in the plank position supported by my male companion. As for Phelan, it’s early days in rehearsals and he’s still struggling to hold aloft a professional dancer. He isn’t going to risk carrying a journalist. Undeterred, we resolve to practise the lift on terra firma.

Phelan lies on his back and creates a perch with his hands, anchoring his palms into my waist. I blush as I think about how excited I’ve been about this moment and hope no one realises I’m wearing a leotard beneath my clothes.

DIRTY Dancing opens in Sydney next week, a decade after the adaptation of the classic film premiered on stage in the same city. It has since toured globally. The production — the Sydney show is directed by James Powell, with choreography by Michele Lynch — was adapted for stage by Eleanor Bergstein, who also wrote the screenplay. Bergstein had a close relationship with the film’s star, Swayze, and while she acknowledges the actor’s death from pancreatic cancer five years ago gives the show’s return to the stage extra resonance, she is reticent to speak about him, concerned his memory will be exploited to sell the live show.

“The most important thing about Patrick was that he was a very good person. He wanted to be a good person and he was certainly a loving and loyal friend to me,” Bergstein says of the actor who was a relative unknown until he was cast in Dirty Dancing, a role for which he received a Golden Globe nomination.

Although the film was released in 1987, the story unfolds over the summer of 1963. Before Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles overtook America. “It was the last summer of liberalism” Bergstein says. “It was a time when you did feel that anything was possible and that you could reach out your hand and if your heart was pure you could change the world.”
We all know the story. A shy and ungainly good girl falls for a handsome bad boy. It’s hardly a revolutionary tale, so what made the dance movie a cult classic and earned it a cool $US214 million at the box office?

Bergstein believes it was that feeling of expectancy, of being on the brink of something special, of discovering the “upstairs” (conservative American society) and the “downstairs” (debauchery, dirty dancing and botched backstreet abortions) of the era that pulled so many people into the cinema.

Set at a resort in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, the film script was inspired by snippets of Bergstein’s life. “There is actually much more of Johnny than Baby in me. I was called Baby since I was 21 and I went to the Catskills with my parents, but I’m a dirty dancer,” Bergstein says.

The film’s iconic dance choreography was all her work.

“I’ve got dancing trophies that’ll turn your hands green!” the 76 year old exclaims. “I was quite a little dirty dancer when I was a kid.

“We did a combination of things based on the old dirty dancing steps of my childhood, which basically came from both rhythm and blues.”

Incredibly, the film was a tough sell for Bergstein, who spent the early 1980s peddling it to countless filmmakers.

“I had written 62 pages of dance description into the script and no one could quite grasp what I was imagining,” she says.

Eventually, Bergstein realised there was only one way she was going to sell the script.
“I’d have to get up on a table — this was a time of very short skirts remember — and I guess you just do what you have to do,” she recalls, laughing.

Bergstein would perform a risque movement in which the female dancer pulls her leg up around the neck of her partner.
“That’s the Eleanor signature step and I did that for group of male executives after group of male executives.”

Eventually Bergstein’s vision came to life with the help of a new studio, Great American Films Limited Partnership, and became a box office hit. It was the first film to sell more than a million copies on home video and now sits at No 1, above Grease and Pretty Woman, on Sky Movies’ “Women’s Most Watched Films” list.

Bergstein had been approached for 25 years to adapt the film for stage but she resisted, unwilling to trade off her project’s loyal cult following.
“Then the TV stations started running it in a loop … and these statistics came out that instead of people dipping in and out they were stopping their lives and some were sitting for 18 hours to watch it over and over again,” she remembers.

“I realised people wanted to be there while the story was happening again and if that was the case then we needed to look at live theatre. But we knew it wasn’t something that could truthfully be a live musical — the artificiality of that form would be very off-putting to our particular audience.”

Intriguingly, it was a Bruce Springsteen concert and his inspired use of video on stage that changed Bergstein’s mind about the potential of a stage show.
“I wanted to put together a live show with very precise storytelling and the enormous kinetic excitement of a brilliant rock concert,” she says.

Australia has a place in the writer’s heart. She had wanted her “Johnny” in the stage production to be an Australian and says she was attracted to our “masculine” dancers. In the early noughties, she sought to find the best male dancer in the country and ended up begging to meet the lead dancer of the Sydney Dance Company, Josef Brown.

“He came to breakfast on his motorcycle and I knew it was him with his hooded eyes; he was a wild boy I could tell,” Bergstein remembers.
She knew she had only one shot to convince him to leave his prestigious position.
“Have you by any chance seen the film Dirty Dancing?” she asked him.
“And he said to me, ‘Yes that is the reason I became a dancer,’ and we had him. He became the toast of the West End,” she says.

Phelan, for his part, is also a big fan of the film. “Swayze was a huge influence on me as a young male dancer,” he says.

Australia has had its own love affair with the film — with an unlikely audience, Bergstein says. She recalls being in the country to do a live radio interview, during which she said hello on air to her taxi driver from that morning. The show was quickly inundated with calls from Australian truck drivers.

“This one (driver) said he was driving in his semi outside of Melbourne and he watched the movie on a mini-computer on the seat next to him as he drove. He knew the movie off by heart because he had watched it over a thousand times,” Bergstein recalls.
“The people on the computers taking the calls just stared at me because while I had been talking they had got calls from 65 other truck drivers who travelled with their Dirty Dancing DVDs.”

BACK in the studio, Phelan stretches out to take my body weight. Even at ground level it takes trust, but I don’t look into his eyes; I’m sizing up his muscles. Up we go. Like a toddler playing airplane, I stretch my arms out like wings for balance, suddenly conscious of the effort it is taking to keep my legs from swinging down. I make an awkward joke about how my middle name is Grace. Phelan grimaces but the move is done. There’s no music playing.

There’s no Swayze pushing his hand into the small of my back and pressing his forehead intimately to mine. There’s no crowd of resort-goers dancing gleefully around me.
This is one for the professionals. This Baby, at least, is happy to stay in the corner.

Dirty Dancing opens on November 28 at the Capitol Theatre, Sydney.