Real-life ‘Baby’ having time of her life with ‘Dirty Dancing’ musical

At a breakfast meeting with Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote the screenplay for the hit 1987 movie Dirty Dancing and adapted it for the stage, she beamed about her van ride from a downtown hotel to the Deep Ellum diner.

When the driver found out that Bergstein was behind the musical Dirty Dancing, he said that he and his wife had seen it the night before at the Music Hall at Fair Park. Not only did he love it, but it was the talk in the men’s bathroom at intermission. Apparently he wasn’t the only dude who was dragged to the musical by his wife — but ended up having a great time.

“I’m happy for 14-year-old girls who love it ...,” Bergstein says, “but male audiences are so moving to me. In the theater I pick out some males and watch them. The moments they get connected and they begin to weep. I love that. …[The driver’s] story is one I hear all the time.”

Bergstein, a native New Yorker, was in Dallas to work with replacement casting and make some small changes to the production, which has been touring the world since 2004 and is finally making its North Texas debut. It opens Tuesday at Bass Hall for a six-day run.

With “The Classic Story on Stage” as part of the Dirty Dancing musical title, Bergstein says that love of the movie is a big reason for the musical’s success. The film famously starred Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey as a macho dancer and a sheltered doctor’s daughter who fall in love at a 1963 summer retreat in upstate New York, as the country changes around them.

Although it has not been to Broadway, the musical has had successful sit-down productions in Australia and across Europe, including five years in London’s West End. Now on a national tour of the U.S., the name recognition isn’t hurting, where it has been packing in a crowd even weekday nights at the 3,000-plus seat Music Hall at Fair Park, presented by Dallas Summer Musicals.

“For years, I refused offers to make it into a musical,” says Bergstein, who grew up in Brooklyn. “I loved musical theater. I went with my parents to the theater all the time. But I watched how people were watching the movie over and over again, owning it on VHS and LaserDisc and DVD. Then TV stations started playing it on a loop, and people would tell me they watched it every time. So it was natural for live theater.”

If anyone would understand that, it’s Bergstein. Not only is it the project that solidified her reputation, it’s a story that’s close to her because it is, in part, based on her life.

Born into a comfortable life with a doctor father, in a family that would take summer vacations in upstate New York, Bergstein felt the need to break out as a teenager and get into a little trouble. As a child she took ballet, but it was in grungy spaces in a rough Brooklyn neighborhood where she fell in love with dance.

In the 1950s and ’60s, there were “dirty dancing” contests — it was actually called that, a hybrid of moves from Latin dances such as tango, mambo and cha-cha — and she found dance partners.

“I was a teenage mambo queen,” she says. “We went out on the dance floor and rubbed our bodies together, and my foot was wrapped around the neck of my partner. We would win contests; I was good.”

She also loved to write, and that skill is what fostered her career. A novelist and screenwriter, her first screenplay to be picked up was the 1980 movie It’s My Turn, starring Michael Douglas and Jill Clayburgh. In that film, there was a dirty dancing scene between the two stars — but it was cut in the editing process.

Bergstein wanted to take it further. She shopped around her idea for Dirty Dancing for years, receiving numerous rejections, before it was finally picked up. No one expected it to be such a big hit, even though Swayze had become a bona fide star and Grey was the progeny of Broadway and musical royalty (her father being Joel Grey, who originated the role of the Master of Ceremonies in the musical Cabaret on Broadway and reprised it in the film version, winning a Tony and an Oscar for each).

With the film Dirty Dancing, Bergstein was adamant that the setting be the summer of 1963, as it still felt like a time of innocence in America, she says. It was several months before John F. Kennedy’s assassination, less than a year before the Beatles would take over America, and just before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

In the movie, Grey’s character, Frances “Baby” Houseman, wants to change the world. Civil rights is discussed several times, and the hot-button plotline concerns a dancer who has an abortion — a decade before Roe vs. Wade. Baby and Swayze’s character, Johnny Castle, are from two different classes, but in the end, love wins.

“If it had been set the following year, this story wouldn’t take place,” she says. “Young men would be in Vietnam, and the Beatles would happen and they wouldn’t be listening to this music.”

The music is a big reason the movie was so beloved. It combined a lot of classic doo-wop, folk and Motown, such as Do You Love Me, In the Still of the Night and You Don’t Own Me, with newer tunes like Eric Carmen’s Hungry Eyes, Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley’s Oscar-winning (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life and She’s Like the Wind, sung by Swayze.

In the stage version, those and more songs are included. Some of them are sung by singers in the cast, while others are played in the original forms in the background or in a major scene. Carmen’s Hungry Eyes, for instance, is played loudly as Baby and Johnny (Gillian Abbott and former Joffrey Ballet dancer Samuel Pergande) rehearse for their big dance number.

The final scene — and the most iconic from the film, set to (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life — features that song performed by singers Jennlee Shallow and Doug Carpenter, and the focus is all about the dance. When the famous “lift” happens, the audience goes nuts.

“It’s been criticized for not being like a traditional musical,” Bergstein says. “I understand musical theater. And I picked the best music of 1963 for the film and the musical. Would you do Guys and Dolls with a new score? It’s the power of music.

“I wanted to make this into an ecstatic experience that is about music and sexual electricity and integrity and love, so I knew I had to make a new musical form that’s about music,” she says. “The music is the story; you can’t separate the story from what you hear, what you feel, what you remember.

“This is music from your heart and memory and specific to the story.”

This story was originally published July 2, 2015 at 2:22 PM with the headline "Real-life ‘Baby’ having time of her life with ‘Dirty Dancing’ musical."