Dirty Dancing Up a Storm

The two hot new talents who are currently dancing up a storm in the leads of the new production of Dirty Dancing have a lot in common. Both are recent understudies, who were raised in small country towns where they cut their teeth at dance schools, community theatre and watching Dirty Dancing on video. Neil Litchfield spoke to Kurt Phelan, playing charismatic dance teacher Johnny Castle, and Kirby Burgess the new “Baby” Houseman.

Kirby Burgess grew up in the small country town of Batemans Bay on the NSW South Coast.

“We moved to Bateman’s Bay when I was three and we joined the theatre because we didn’t know anyone. My mum took us to the Bay Theatre Players and told my father, ‘If you want to see us you’ll have to join too, because we’re going to spend all our time there. So my debut role was a mouse in Cinderella. I fell asleep on stage.”

“My parents put me into dance classes when I was three, but I spent the whole time staring at myself in the mirror, so my mum took me out of dance class, put me back in when I was five, and I’ve been dancing ever since.”

Kurt Phelan hails from North Queensland, where he had danced and sung all his life.

“Straight up I told my mum, probably when I was about four, that I wanted to be Gene Kelly, because of Singin’ in the Rain.”

“I’m from Ayr, an hour south of Townsville. I moved to Townsville when I was 12. I always danced and sang. I performed with the Townsville Choral Society and North Queensland Opera and Music Theatre Company. I’ve actually gone back and done shows with them as a professional.”

Kirby also caught the stage bug in community theatre.

“Twenty years ago we did Annie; I played Molly, my sister played Annie, my father played Daddy Warbucks and my mum directed it. I’m so thankful for having grown up in amateur theatre. It’s a beautiful world to be part of when you’re a kid. It taught me how to be social; my sister and I were the first youth members so I was constantly around adults or teenagers that were a lot older than me, and having to associate and have a conversation with them. It’s the same old story too, that the kids might start, then the mum might join in, then by the end the dad, the mum, the grandparents, the dogs -they’re all part of it - it sucks them in.”

At 17 Kurt left for the big smoke, Sydney, where it all started happening with his first musical, appropriately Singin’ in the Rain.

“I went overseas, worked for Disney for two years, and lived in New York, then came home and did Saturday Night Fever and lots of old-fashioned tours. Then I found myself part of the original cast of Priscilla Queen of the Desert. It was fantastic, but I was an understudy again, and we worked very hard, and in heels, and carrying very heavy costumes.

“I felt like something was missing. I applied for Architecture, Psychology and NIDA, and I ended up at NIDA, which is the best crossroad I could have ever taken.”

Straight out of high school, Kirby left home for Sydney too, where she did a one-year Performing Arts course at Urban Dance Centre.

“During that I got my first show. It started as soon as I finished. I got a scholarship to study in New York, which was bizarre and crazy, because my musical theatre knowledge was not great. I was lucky enough to be invited back to perform on Broadway in a concert called ‘Rising Stars of Broadway’. I was 18, and I was singing with all the top graduates of performing arts universities like Juilliard. It was crazy and daunting, and I wonder what I would do now if I had that opportunity.”

Kirby returned to Australia and went straight into her first show, High School Musical, subsequently working consistently in musical theatre, including the acclaimed production of Sweet Charity at the Hayes Theatre earlier in 2014.

“I understudied Charity, and because there was such a small cast and so much hype around the Hayes Theatre and being its first production, I was somehow noticed. Probably the fact that I wasn’t wearing many clothes helped a little bit, but it’s funny how many people saw me, and it opened up a lot of doors.”

During rehearsals for Sweet Charity Kirby learned that she would be taking over the role of Rizzo for the Perth season of Grease. Both she and Kurt, who was in a production for the Melbourne Theatre Company, flew from in from interstate several times on their weekly day off for the Dirty Dancing auditions, meeting for the first time at their final audition.

“At the last audition they said, ‘We’ve seen you act enough, we don’t need to see it again,’ and then they changed their minds, so I had 10 minutes to prepare,” Kurt explained. “I looked around. I scanned the room saying, ‘Who is auditioning for Baby?’ and I saw Kirby. I just said, ‘Hi, I’m Kurt, are you auditioning for Baby?’ (Kirby, ‘Yes.’) Can we just run these lines? We did it maybe twice, and then they called out Kurt, and I did the audition.”

“Straight away after that they called people into a dance call and they partnered us up,” Kirby added. “In this industry you hear about everyone, but I’d never actually met Kurt, and so it was funny, because you’re doing this dance, and you do have to find instant chemistry with someone you’ve never met before.”

“And I’d just had lunch and I was scared that I didn’t have gum or mints,” Kurt said. “I don’t know if my breath smells …”

“You were fine - for the record,” Kirby assured us. “Kurt’s breath did not smell - feel free to put that in the article. It was just bizarre that you asked me to do that scene, and then they partnered us up in the dance call.”

Now they have both been given their biggest breaks, cast as the leads in the musical adaptation of the iconic film Dirty Dancing.

“It’s a kind of Catch 22,” Kirby explained, “because there is so much pressure, but it’s also exciting that people want to see this story being told in a new light. Then there’s the pressure of doing that eight times a week, and giving the audience Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, but we will be us.”

“There’s no doubt it’s going to be very physically demanding, especially for me,” Kurt added. “In the first 20 minutes of the show there’s three dance numbers – Bang! Bang! Bang! - mambo, lifting, throwing, and then it gets sexy …”

“… and then you just don’t have a shirt on for pretty much the rest of the show,” Kirby quipped.

“Which is good, because you get to press a bit, and lift someone, so you’d be pumped up,” Kurt continued. “But then there’s quite a big break in our dancing until the end, and that last six or seven minute routine, culminating in a big lift, so keeping physically there during all that time when our relationship is blossoming, then with that big dance routine at the end, will be a challenge physically, but that’s part of what makes it fantastic to watch.

“The whole Jennifer / Patrick thing is daunting, because you don’t want to do a disservice to the original, but you don’t want to be those people either, because the reason why we were cast is because we have attributes which are correct for the characters, and when we’re being true to ourselves, that’s when these attributes shine the most. So if you try to be someone else, you’re squashing who you are …”

“… and it will never be right,” Kirby added.

What personal attributes will Kurt and Kirby bring to their roles?

“Well I’m very cheeky,” Kurt admits. “He’s the quintessential bad guy from the wrong side of the tracks, and I’m the good boy from the right side of the tracks who really pretends that he was bad. I’ve always been getting in a lot of trouble, as a kid and an adult, for being quite cheeky. I’m looking forward to bringing a little bit of that to the role.

“In film and TV I’m always cast as the bad guy. Once I was a killer in an independent horror film, and I don’t really think I look like a killer. The bad boy side is something I really love doing as an actor, so that’s really going to take care of itself. And in the end Johnny is really not the bad boy; it’s just that he’s been dealt a few bad hands along the way. So it’s bringing that little touch of Kurt to Johnny and just a little bit of Patrick’s hips, and I think that’s the perfect balance.”

“Baby is such a brilliant character because she’s both what you expect and what you don’t expect,” Kirby said. “I think what I have in common with her is my eagerness to learn from any experience. At the start of the show she wants to feed the hungry, and world peace, and all that kind of stuff, and obviously finds this relationship. She’s always been around people who are so aware of the world around them, and Johnny is probably more focussing on his life, and his survival. It is so daunting to her that he doesn’t know about these things, so she wants to teach him that, but she also wants to learn.”

Returning to Kurt’s love of Gene Kelly, I suggested that the dancing in Dirty Dancing is very much along the lines of Kelly and Astaire’s classic seductions through dance.

“Absolutely,” Kurt agreed. “There’s interviews with Patrick Swayze, about what drives him to be the dancer he is, and he cites lots of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and Cyd Charisse, and it’s seduction through dance. Long before there was twirling and crimping, there was actual dancing. That’s what the film is about - people back then thought it was dirty and taboo, but actually it’s all just about seduction, and two bodies in space having to move together, expressing themselves.”

When did Kurt and Kirby first see the film of Dirty Dancing, and did they ever envisage themselves in the roles of Johnny and Baby?

“My sister was eight years older than me, and the dancer in the family,” Kurt said, “so she was mad keen, and watched the film a lot, while I pretended I wasn’t interested, because I was pretending I was a cool young kid who … I like to dance, but I’m not into those girly movies.

“Then I would watch it and go, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool, quite excellent.’ Then for a while I would pretend I’d never seen it, but actually I’d watched it about 18,000 times.”

“The video was in our video drawer for years and years, and because it was called Dirty Dancing, I thought it was a naughty movie that I wasn’t supposed to watch.” Kirby confessed, “when my parents were at work one day, I watched it without them knowing, and just fell in love with it.

“I was about seven at the time, so I was in dance classes every afternoon, and what I loved about the film, and Baby in particular, is that she’s discovering dance, and in the first scene she’s going into this restricted area where only staff are allowed, and that’s the first time you see all that dirty dancing happening.

“It’s the first time she sees Johnny, and he ends up finding her and teaching her how to do this style of dance, which blows her mind. She has never, never been in that world, never seen people move or interact like that, and all of a sudden she’s like, ‘OK, I’ll give it a go,’ and just how awkward she is. You can tell that she doesn’t know whether she’s falling in love instantly with this person, or whether she’s just so out to her depth.

“It’s so bizarre to be playing this character, from a film that I’ve been obsessed with. Also I never play the nice girl, I always play the bad girl. Baby gets both sides - she gets her little naughty moment, I guess, but essentially she’s such a sweet girl, and so this is such a different world for me, to be playing that.”

Dirty Dancing opened at the Sydney Lyric Theatre on December 3, 2014. The production tours to Melbourne’s Princess Theatre from 4 March 2015, the Lyric Theatre, QPAC from 27 May and Perth’s Crown Theatre from 2 August.

Originally published in the November / December 2014 edition of Stage Whispers.

Photographer: Jeff Busby

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