IT was an autumn Monday night, and the queues were winding along Clifford Street and snaking up Cumberland Street: a sign of just how popular Dirty Dancing remains, 29 years since the Patrick Swayze film.

What's more, the minor inconvenience of a late start to enable technical glitches to be ironed out only heightened the excited air of anticipation among the predominantly female audience.

Tickets are flying out of the Grand Opera House door for every performance of Dirty Dancing, The Classic Story On Stage, a 2016/2017 tour that amounts to a new Italian job, on account of the director being Federico Bellone, formerly artistic director of Teatro Nazionalde in Milan.

Already staged over there, and now biting a thumb at Brexit in an Italian-British partnership with producers Paul Elliott and Karl Sydow, Dirty Dancing squeezes on to the York stage in Eleanor Bergstein's musical adaptation of her film script with all the much-loved characters and new choreography by Gillian Bruce.

The Grand Opera House has a comparatively small stage, by comparison with Leeds Grand Theatre and the Bradford Alhambra, and so Roberto Comotti's scenery tends to cramp the ensemble dancing. "No-one puts Baby in the corner," says Lewis Griffiths' Johnny Castle, in the show's most famous line, and in this case that's partly because the scenery is already there.

York Press:

Lewis Griffiths, as Johnny Castle, and Carlie Milner, as Penny Johnson, with the Dirty Dancing ensemble. Picture: Alastair Muir

The Musicians' Union was protesting outdoors with leaflets bemoaning the reduction in the number of musicians in the touring production, but, as it turned out, having only five on stage was probably a blessing in disguise, although the music failed to match the impact of the 2012 production at the Leeds Grand.

Set at a Catskills resort in a clean-cut 1963 USA before JFK was shot, before The Beatles arrived, when a young woman could still be called Baby, this version of Dirty Dancing has become more a play with songs than an out-and-out musical.

This is emphasised in the Grand Opera House staging, where the love story of Griffiths' dance teacher Johnny and Katie Hartland's Baby comes even more to the fore. Griffiths, handsome, hunky, cool and groovy, is fabulous; Hartland grows delightfully from cygnet to swan.

Carlie Milner's Penny Johnson is the outstanding dancer, but the script feels somewhat starchy, and it will take more than Johnny and Baby's famous lift for this show to hit the heights.

Dirty Dancing, The Classic Story On Stage, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday; 7.30pm,Wednesday and Thursday; 5.30pm, 8.30pm, Friday; 2.30pm, 7.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.com/york