I spend the first ten minutes of one of the biggest shows in the history of the musical scoffing at the ticket price, snarling at the scissor-legged dancers and wondering where the first half of that cracking soundtrack has got to.

By the time Johnny Castle bounds through the stalls to rescue Baby from her corner, there's so much adrenaline coursing through my veins I feel as though I could perform the famous lift myself.

I'm not sure of the exact point at which my body decides to buy so thoroughly into this celebration of Sixties kitsch and Eighties softfocus romance. But it has nothing to do with six-packed Australian ballet star Josef Brown and everything to do with Georgina Rich, the spitting image of Jennifer Grey in her pumps, sailor-dresses and multi-pack bras, whose Baby moves from earnest but awkward teen to brave and graceful woman with the help of a renegade dance instructor.

I guess it helps that I'm a big fan of the 1987 film, a still unbeaten exercise in the manipulation of female sexuality whose magic resides somewhere between the ugly duckling narrative and Patrick Swayze's arms. And this adaptation by original screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein succeeds by sticking faithfully to the choreography and the script. Do we really need to learn, in one additional "character-expanding"

scene, why Johnny doesn't vote?

But I think my favorite moment comes during a scene change, with the introduction of the giant mechanical log on which Baby and Johnny practice their cha-cha-cha.

Like some ludicrous visual metaphor for the pair's dawning physical relationship, it's the most phallic thing you've ever seen on a West End stage - and, I like to think, a stroke of genius from a subversive set designer.

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