Dirty Dancing – West End Musical
The movie Dirty Dancing, which starred Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, was released in 1987 and was a big hit. All the hit songs from the film’s soundtrack, including Do You Love Me, She’s Like The Wind and Time of My Life, are featured in the stage show, with some new numbers.
The show is now at the Aldwych Theatre and booking until 23 October 2010. The director of the stage production is James Powell and the producer is Jacobsen Entertainment, in association with Lionsgate and Magic Hour Productions.
Re-written for the stage, the story still includes all of the movies most memorable moments and some added scenes as well. The Houseman’s take their vacation at a popular holiday camp where their youngest daughter ‘Baby’ meets ‘Johnny,’ the dance teacher from the wrong side of the tracks. Baby and Johnny fall in love and through their love we see that love can conquer all barriers and we learn that ‘nobody puts Baby in the corner.’

The stage production lasts 2 hours and 30 minutes. The musical supervisor is Conrad Helfrich.

The show does feature a limited amount of mild swearing and themes of a sexual nature.

A familiar American TV face as detective Sam Tyler in the US version of Life on Mars, Irishman Jason O’Mara, will return to the London stage to star in Simon Curtis’ revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1970 play Serenading Louie, which runs at the Donmar Warehouse from February 16th to March 27th 2010.
In Wilson’s portrait of two suburban American couples, friends since college, Carl and Alex, are struggling to deal with the harsh realities of adulthood as they enter their thirties. Disillusioned by work and fighting to keep their marriages alive, they’re desperately trying to make sense of it all.
O’Mara plays Carl opposite American Jason Butler Harner, making his UK stage debut as Alex. O’Mara’s previous stage credits include Popcorn, The Jew of Malta and School for Scandal. On US television, he’s also been seen in Grey’s Anatomy, The Agency, In Justice, Men in Trees, Criminal Minds, and Band of Brothers. Butler Harner’s New York stage credits include The Coast of Utopia, The Invention of Love, Hedda Gabbler, The Paris Letter and The Glass Menagerie.
The men are joined by Britons Charlotte Emmerson (On the Rocks, Therese Raquin, The Coast of Utopia, Baby Doll) and Geraldine Somerville (Power, Remember This, I Am Yours, A Doll’s House).

The 1964 musical Anyone Can Whistle, by Stephen Sondheim, is being revived at the Jermyn Street Theatre in March to mark the composer’s 80th birthday.
The production will run from March 10th to April 17th 2010 and will be directed by Tom Littler, who headed up Sondheim’s Saturday Night at this venue in 2008. The cast includes Issy van Randwyck, David Ricardo-Pearce and Rosalie Craig.
Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick opened Anyone Can Whistle on Broadway in April of 1964. It only ran for nine performances in a premiere production plagued by fist fights, failing machinery and two fatalities.
Regardless of this initial failure, the musical went on to achieve cult success, with numerous cast and concert recordings of some of Sondheim’s most memorable songs, including “There Won’t Be Trumpets”, “Everybody Says Don’t”, “There’s A Parade in Town” and the title song.
The play is a surrealistic satire about madness and nonconformity. Anyone Can Whistle tells the story of a corrupt and bankrupt town that invents a miracle to attract tourists.
It only received its first fully staged production in London in 2003, in a version that featured a new script by book writer Arthur Laurents. The production ran at the Bridewell Theatre, where the world premiere of Saturday Night was performed.

A strike threat, by theatre technicians nationwide may have been narrowly avoided. Buctu has agreed it will ballot its members with details of the new pay deal offered by the Theatrical Management Association. Should the offer be accepted by Buctu’s members, it will mean a 2 percent increase in pay for regional theatre staff.

A one percent pay rise is offered from October, a figure substantially lower than the five percent increase that the theatre union had asked for. None the less, the increase is a marked improvement on the pay freeze that had been initially proposed by the management.

Buctu official Willy Donaghy previously wrote to Buctu’s members asking if they were:

�willing to engage in a campaign of industrial action, up to and including strike action, to achieve an acceptable pay increase�.

This was in response to the talks breaking down, and prior to the new pay offer.

The Theatre Management Association (TMA) will now have the 2% deal backdated to April, and it is believed that the association has also included changes to working conditions, not least around overtime pay and minimum working hours.

Buctu should have the results of the ballot is expected around the 10th of July 2009.