Y’all, I am just back from the best show I’ve seen in yeeeeeears!!!! Dirty Dancing On Stage was just phenomenal.
Before I get to the story of the story, I want to start with a few stories. Ha! First, about my “some-timers” as Honey is calling it… I was driving down the highway about a week ago and I saw a billboard for the show. I thought to myself, “DARN!!! I would love to see that show. How did I not know it was coming?? This was practically made for me.” A couple of days after that I was scrolling through my calendar for the week and see 11/27 1PM Dirty Dancing. I think “I wanted to see that darned show so bad that I wrote it on my calendar.” Delete and move on. A day after that bestie S is texting me about The Little Mermaid (she’s my show girl) and mentioned that she’d love to see Christmas Story but it’s right after Dirty Dancing. I sit there for a minute perplexed and then I figure I’ve known her long enough to just ask… “Are we, by chance, going to Dirty Dancing?” She answers that we sure are and best of all I paid her for my ticket in August. HA!!! I was SOOOO excited!!!
My second little story is just about how much I have loved this movie. Since 1987. I have always loved every kind of dance. It’s my passion and probably my love language. Y’all know I was a dancer myself, and while ballet is my first love, I have always envied and felt deeply moved by other “looser” forms of dance. So, when the movie came out I was eleven… the same age as my newly minted eleven year old boy. Yikes! Mother would NOT let me see it and that was pretty devastating. I didn’t want to see it for the story as much as the dancing. So, I did what any crafty eleven year old does. I saw it with a friend and just forgot to mention that fact. For like 19 years. HAHA! (And see Marm… it totally didn’t ruin me!) Anyhoo, it was the first naughty thing I ever did (and one of few to be honest) so I’ll never really forget it. I was completely enthralled with the movie and immediately bought my very own copy on VHS the minute I left home for college. It was one of the first DVDs I bought when those came in vogue and now we have it on our “media server” set up by Honey. I think I have under 5 titles on there (including Gone With the Wind, a season of Pretty Little Liars and Legally Blonde.) And I have approx 2 movie star crushes in my lifetime, with Patrick Swayze and Matthew McConaughey rounding out that list. So, seeing it live was a pretty amazing event for me. (So eventful I forgot I was going… but seriously!)
Johnny and Baby were absolutely PERFECTION!!! They were played by Christopher Tierney (remember the Broadway Spidey that fell 30 feet into the orchestra pit and might never take the stage again 6 years back? Same guy! And his back is just fine. Trust me.) and Bronwyn Reed. Let’s just go ahead and address the elephant in the room… Johnny was smoking, his dancing was fantastic and he was everything you could want in a real live stage version of Patrick Swayze. *clutches her pearls* The entire cast was fantastic, there were two singers with voices you wouldn’t believe, and the orchestra was the icing on the cake. It was hard to imagine how they would bring the movie to life, but the unique stage set up was ingenious. It got corny a few times, but they totally embraced that.
We had first row balcony seats and were just speechless through the first act. As soon as the lights came up we both started squealing and talking 90 miles an hour. It was just SO good. We walked out of there on cloud 9. I must insist that all Dirty Dancing lovers (that surely includes every female of my generation, right?!) check the tour schedule to see if it is coming close to you. If I had seen this Friday or Saturday nights I am 99% sure I would have done what I could to see it again!
So today, one might say, I’ve had the time of my life…. :-)
DIXIE DELIGHTS DELIVERED
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