Checklist show a crowd pleaser

Dirty Dancing, Palace, Manchester, to January 7
IT has the moves, it has the almost-lookalikes, it has the famous scenes and yes, it has that famous “baby in the corner” line and big dance finale — complete with crowd-surging extra volume, key change and spotlight at the crucial lift.

The crowds go wild and the predominantly female audience, by and large, has the time of its life.

If you love the movie you will almost certainly enjoy the log-balancing scene, the dance practice in the long grass scene, the lift-practice in the lake scene and all the other big moments of the film, reproduced here courtesy of large-scale video projections of lake, fields, mountains and some sexy dancing that add life to what is, to be honest, a mostly empty stage.

The odd thing is that Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote this stage adaptation of the iconic film; who earlier wrote the film script, and who even earlier than that was the main female character, Baby, whom she based on her own teens — has managed to make “Dirty Dancing” a bit sterile.

Over the past three decades the film has become so iconic to a generation or two of women that every big scene has had to be squeezed into the show — at the expense of linking scenes, dialogue and much of the characterisation.

The result is pretty perfunctory: rather than luxuriate in the dance practice montage scenes we rush through them hurriedly; key episodes are dashed off like the director was running through a check list. Similarly, linking scenes often involve members of the ensemble running across the stage for little good reason, and much of the back-story, about the changing society of America in the Sixties, is mere filler.

But who goes for all that? Doing everything else with greater attention to detail might make an entertaining show a great show, but as long as most of the audience has a good partnership for Baby and Johnny (here Emily Holt and Paul-Michael Jones, who decidedly are; she even looks like Jennifer Grey from a distance, and he is a strong dancer) most will go home happy.