Dirty Dancing (Chicago)

A screenplay that kept on selling tickets

Eleanor Bergstein wrote Dirty Dancing as a screenplay set in the summer of 1963, drawing on her own adolescence in the Catskills. The 1987 film took more than $200 million worldwide and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Bergstein has controlled the stage rights and written every stage version since, which is why the theatre adaptation has never drifted far from the film's dialogue.

The stage version first appeared in Australia in 2004. London followed: previews began at the Aldwych Theatre on 29 September 2006, the production opened on 24 October 2006 under director James Powell and producer Karl Sydow, and it ran until 9 July 2011. Some form of the show has surfaced in London on and off in the two decades since, including a Dominion Theatre season in 2022.

The Chicago attempt that never reached Broadway

Chicago got the show early and did not care for it. A pre-Broadway tryout opened at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in autumn 2008 and played through 17 January 2009, with Josef Brown as Johnny Castle and Amanda Leigh Cobb as Baby, and with Boston, Los Angeles and then Broadway announced to follow.

Newcity Stage's October 2008 review called it one of the most anticipated pre-Broadway openings in recent memory and then took it apart: no chemistry between the leads, a director with little understanding of how music and drama fit together, and a stage full of turntables, platforms and projections that existed to be shown off rather than to tell the story. The verdict was that the production had, in effect, thrown the film onstage.

Broadway never happened. The show kept touring instead, returning to Chicago again in 2015. The engagement that has just closed was at least its third visit to the city, and the first with an entirely different creative team behind it.

A rebuild, not a revival

The new production was announced on 4 February 2026 under the title Dirty Dancing: The Musical, with Bergstein's book retained and almost everything else replaced. Lonny Price directs — he played Neil Kellerman in the 1987 film — with choreography by Darrell Grand Moultrie, set design by Brett J. Banakis, costumes by Linda Cho, lighting by Japhy Weideman, sound by Kai Harada, video by David Bengali, hair and wigs by Charles G. LaPointe and music supervision by Joseph Joubert. Alchemy Production Group is general manager; casting is by The TRC Company.

Price has been blunt about what he inherited. Speaking to Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune ahead of the Chicago opening, he said earlier versions felt more like a video-driven homage for superfans of the film than a screen-to-stage musical, described the new version as a whole new treatment, and said he had been able to work on it with a Rolls Royce team.

The most substantial change is musical. Rather than leaning on the film's pop soundtrack as backing, the production builds new orchestrations around the American standards that would actually have been played in a Catskills resort ballroom in 1963 — the music the earlier staging treated as background. The film's songs remain, but they are placed rather than piped in.

Saint Paul to Randolph Street

The tour opened at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in Saint Paul on 12 August 2026 and played there until 6 September, carrying an age guidance of 12 and over. It moved straight to Chicago, where performances at the James M. Nederlander Theatre on West Randolph Street began on 9 September and opening night was Friday 11 September. The run closed on 20 September.

Annalese Starzec plays Frances 'Baby' Houseman and Blake Zelesnikar plays Johnny Castle, with Olivia Cece as Penny Johnson, Ethan Peterson as Billy, Ashley LaLonde as Elizabeth, Bryan Fenkart and Gina Lamparella as Baby's parents, Lily Kren as Lisa Houseman and Loren Lester as Max Kellerman. Musical direction is by Patrick Tice-Carroll, and the Chicago performances used an orchestra of Chicago Federation of Musicians Local 10-208 players.

One structural decision carries through the whole evening: the leads do not sing. The vocals on the film's songs are handed to supporting players, principally Peterson and LaLonde, which leaves Starzec and Zelesnikar free to dance and act through the numbers instead of stopping to deliver them.

What the reviewers made of it

Dennis Polkow, who had reviewed the 2008 tryout for Newcity Stage, returned on 17 September 2026 and marked the new tour as recommended, writing that much of what was wrong then is now right. He credited the production with restoring a sense of journey that gives the dancing context, noted that the dancing is largely shown from a behind-the-scenes angle with two big set pieces near the end of each act, and said the cast takes the melodrama seriously rather than playing it as soap opera.

Colin Douglas at Chicago Theatre Review was warm but measured: not a great theatrical production, he wrote, but nicely improved and updated and lots of fun. He singled out the chemistry between Starzec and Zelesnikar as honest, praised Banakis's Kellerman's resort and Bengali's video work — including water projections during the lake rehearsal of the lift — and said the pair dazzle in the final number.

Angela Lin's BroadwayWorld review of 12 September called the choreography impressive and enthralling and the closing lift the pinnacle of grace. She also drew attention to how much of the period the book keeps in view: abortion before Roe v. Wade, the civil rights movement, the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam all sit under the romance rather than being sanded away.

Where it stands now

The Chicago engagement has ended and no further Chicago dates are on sale. The tour moved on to the Altria Theater in Richmond, Virginia for 22–27 September 2026, then the National Theatre in Washington, DC for 29 September to 4 October, the Fisher Theatre in Detroit for 13–18 October, the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas for 21–25 October and the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach for 28 October to 1 November.

Autumn continues at the Belk Theater in Charlotte, 3–8 November, the Peace Center in Greenville, South Carolina, 10–15 November, and the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston, 18–22 November, before the longest booking of the run: the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto, 24 November 2026 to 3 January 2027, presented by Mirvish. Further cities have been flagged as still to be announced.

Separately, an older incarnation of the show opened in London at the Capital Theatre in Westfield Shepherd's Bush on 16 September 2026, priced between £25 and £125 and running two hours and twenty minutes. Time Out noted that at the time of writing none of the dates appeared bookable, so the two productions are best treated as unrelated ventures sharing a title.