Eleanor Bergstein's Decision to Develop the Stage Musical

Excerpts from an article written by Michael Posner and published by The Globe and Mail website in 2007.

.... A few weeks ago, with the tacit blessing of her husband, Shakespeare scholar Michael Goldman, [Eleanor] Bergstein and I went dancing at a Toronto nightclub. ... A week or so later, I met Bergstein again, to hear the story of her incredible journey with the [Dirty Dancing stage show] show.

Bruce Springsteen's legion of fans will be surprised, I expect, to learn this, but it turns out the Boss is the guy who inspired Bergstein to adapt the movie for the stage. Producers had wooed her for years for just such a project, but she had always declined.

But one year after the attacks of 9/11 [i.e. in 2002], she attended a Springsteen concert at Shea Stadium in New York. It was a cold rainy night and, Bergstein recalls, "we were all feeling pretty awful. He was very tiny -- we were sitting far away from the stage -- but his energy just filled the place with an ecstatic presentness. It was very moving and emotional. And at the end, when the musicians were packing up, he came back on stage to play more and many of us were just weeping, like a community. And I knew at the moment exactly what I wanted to do -- to create a live theatre experience as intimate as a movie, to make it a community experience with all the lines of ecstasy and sorrow."

Bergstein has been in Toronto for the past month [October-November 2007], overseeing the fourth installation of a show that has shattered box office records in all its previous incarnations: Sydney, Hamburg and London. The Toronto advance sale is now more than $17-million ...

A few weeks ago, as it happened, Bruce Springsteen was playing Toronto's Air Canada Centre and Bergstein arranged tickets for about 12 members of the cast. "And I saw again everything that had made me want to do this."

Michael Posner is the author of several plays and five books.