Dirty Dancing at the Aldwych Theatre

Honestly now, all girls love Dirty Dancing. If you know one who claims not to, she's clearly lying. What's not to love? Kooky, curly 'Baby' on a family holiday, tiring of her family and sneaking off to be taught how to shake her money-maker by big, bad, buff male pin-up Johnny Castle. The movie has it all. Scandal, back-street abortion, one-night stands, teenage kicks, rebellion, glory, standing up for your rights and of course, plenty of wind and grind.

I'm not alone in never getting bored of Dirty Dancing – the stage show is sold out every weekend months in advance and it's been re-produced for enraptured audiences the world over. I've watched this film a shameful number of times since it's release in 1987 and it just gets better. The feeling you get when the first song kicks in ('Big Girls Don't Cry') and Baby begins her monologue ('That was the summer of 1963 when everybody called me Baby and it didn't occur to me to mind…') is actually unparalleled. It's a combination of your first kiss, recalling your first real, big-time crush and re-discovering a book you loved age five. Gratuitous, nostalgic, slightly cringey and utterly brilliant.

So I, along with most girls aged between 18 and 40, know every word, every smouldering glance and shake of the hips. The problem with this is that when the stage-Baby delivers her first line it's NOT HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE SAID! Every single member of this audience (besides the token boyfriends and husbands who've been dragged along and are pretending to love it) know how the film-Baby tells Johnny that she 'carried a watermelon'. But the actors just don't deliver the lines how you remember them.

Maybe it's the dodgy American accents (the acting is terrible). More likely is the way the lines have been burnt permanently into our childhood memories – and seeing the script we know so well in the mouth of an unfamiliar doesn't sit quite right.

But it doesn't matter in the end. Baby learns to dance – and is a dead ringer for Jennifer Grey, and pretty nifty on her feet – and although stage-Johnny is not a patch on Patrick Swayze, he's still hot and commanding and a blisteringly good dancer. The set is outstanding – the water scene is actually convincing and the dancers do an excellent job of replicating the steps perfectly.

And when the first bars of the 'Time of My Life' twinkle into existence and Johnny tells us that 'nobody puts Baby in the corner' and the crowd go beserk and jump to their feet, the feeling is exactly the same. Laughing and crying and bubbling with the vital memories of our youth.