As someone who has never seen the beloved late 80s smash hit Dirty Dancing, I didn’t know how well its stage adaptation, touring now with Magic Hour Productions, would land with me. Would it come off as cheesy and dated over three decades later? To my surprise, right from the opening moments, this dreamy, deeply romantic musical had me by the heart.

The plot itself is a nostalgic trip even further back, into the 60s, set during summer at Kellerman’s Holiday Camp, an upscale Catskills resort where 16-year-old Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman (Kira Malou) is vacationing with her affluent family.

Part of why the magic has remained strong here is because the story is less nostalgic for the era it’s set in, and more for a particular era of adolescence, where one is shucking off their childhood dependency but not yet overwhelmed by adult responsibilities. For Baby, Kellerman’s ends up being transformational, not only awakening her own desires but also opening her eyes to the inequalities of the world around her. Malou’s performance is hugely compelling, impressively teenage, with an awkward, jittery edge. She plays several of the character’s lines for laughs - effectively, though as my friend pointed out, this divergence from the deeply sincere tone of the film may annoy die-hard fans.

The story follows Baby’s slow-burn romance with one of the camp’s dance instructors, Johnny Castle (Michael O’Reilly), as Baby fills in for Johnny’s dance partner, Penny (Georgina Aspinall), so the latter can get a clandestine abortion (having become pregnant by Robbie, a womanizing waiter who then sets his sights on Baby’s ditsy sister Lisa). With her physician father, Baby comes from a comfortable, affluent background, whereas both Johnny and Penny are working class and disillusioned with their dead-end lives. The ‘Dirty Dancing’ of the title refers to the after-hours dance parties the staff throw to let loose.

The biggest thrill of the show remains the dancing. The stunts the characters pull off are awe-inspiring, with particular credit going to Aspinall’s Penny, who radiates charisma and makes the most tangling of movements look sharp and fluid. Michael O’Reilly’s Johnny shines on the dance floor as well, in an otherwise understated performance.

Credit to Malou as well, for convincingly underselling her dancing ability in the beginning to show Baby’s skills go from non-existent to impressive - no easy feat.

The live music is also sublime, with powerhouse vocals from Colin Charles as Bandleader Tito Saurez and Lydia Sterling’s Elizabeth, a new character created to tie the scenes together via song.

While the sexual politics and morals explored here are very much those of the sixties, the underlying messages are not. There’s the non-judgemental framing of abortion, and crucially an autonomy granted to Baby’s character in both her life and love story that still feels right: she’s not simply a cheerful ingenue waiting to be discovered by Johnny. Like all great love stories, both parties have something to give and to gain from one another, and by the end of the show, I understood why these two and their love story captured a generation of teens. Sweet, thrilling and thoughtful - quite simply, you’ll have the time of your life.