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‘Dirty,’ sexy Aussie

Josef Brown — the hunky star of “Dirty Dancing — The Classic Story on Stage” — stood before me and swiveled his hips. After an hourlong interview, I had mustered enough courage to ask for an impromptu mambo lesson.

“Seriously?” said Brown, flashing a grin and jumping up from the couch. He lifted his gray wool sweater at the waist and, revealing a perfectly chiseled torso, demonstrated the finer points of the hip movement.

“It’s just getting this roll, so it feels really organic,” he said, stepping lightly in stocking feet and rolling his hips rhythmically.

At 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds, with dark eyes, tousled brown hair and rugged good looks, Brown has sent mostly female audiences in London and Australia into fits of rapturous screams and enthusiastic whistling. At one show in Brisbane, Australia, a woman leapt onto the stage and lustily tackled Brown before she was dragged away by security.

“She literally koala-beared me!” said Brown. “She jumped up and put her legs around my waist. I had to put her down six feet of stage. How she got up [there], I have no idea. Must have pole vaulted. Very impressive.”

Such is the power of “Dirty Dancing,” an undeniably cheesy movie that somehow continues to captivate 21 years after its release.

After wildly successful runs in Australia, England and Canada, the stage version made its U.S. debut in Chicago at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in September. Since then, Chicago audiences have whooped their way through the 2 1/2-hour production, which runs through January.

Even Brown, who in person is much slighter and more finely featured than he appears onstage, seems amazed at the story’s undying appeal. “In London, you’d get the first boom-boom-boom [of the music] and people would screeaaam,” he said. Even before the curtain rises, “they’re already going ‘Aaaagggghhhhh!'”

Why do we love “Dirty Dancing”? Let us count the ways: It has super-sexy dancing, with just enough eroticism to tantalize. It has a fun, feel-good soundtrack and a story line worthy — OK, almost worthy — of Romeo and Juliet. There are dark subplots involving illegal abortion and the class divide. Throw in Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, perfectly cast in the film version. Add a few over-the-top lines — “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” — and presto, you’ve got a cult classic.

“When something works, when it really works, it’s magic,” said Brown, who at 39 could pass for someone in his late 20s. One afternoon, before an evening performance, the native Australian chatted amicably — his shoes off, his legs crossed — in a meeting room of the Chicago apartment building where he has lived for the past three months with his wife and two young children. (Yes, ladies, he’s married. No, we’re not printing his address.)

Intelligent, passionate and disarmingly friendly, Brown talked about the appeal of “Dirty Dancing.” “It’s sexy. It’s got a great love story: Girl meets boy from the wrong side of the tracks,” said Brown. “One of the things that I love is the courage of these characters,” he added, citing the moment Frances “Baby” Houseman decides to sneak into a party at the staff quarters and the final climactic scene in which Johnny Castle returns to dance with Baby. “Its not courage like Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace.’ It’s everyday courage.”

Raised in a working-class suburb of Sydney, the son of a divorced couple (a secretary and an information technology manager), Brown was a sports-crazed teenager who didn’t take a dance lesson until he was 15 years old — late for a professional dancer.

Yet his unconventional entree into dance gave him an edge. Lean and strong, Brown landed a spot at a Sydney performing arts high school, eventually moved on to the Australian Ballet School and, by the time he was 24, had become a soloist with the Australian Ballet. “Because of my background, which was sports, it just gave me a different energy,” said Brown. “The guys who had been brought up dancing were more effeminate and graceful. I was more of a guy onstage, and people responded to that.”

Just consider what Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote the original “Dirty Dancing” screenplay, had to say about Brown: “Josef is enormously charismatic. He has great aloofness and also great tenderness. He’s the stuff that fantasy is made of.”

Bergstein had already decided to open the musical in Australia when she heard about Brown, who was with the Sydney Dance Company. “I looked and looked, but I still couldn’t find a Johnny. I said to [a choreographer], ‘Who is the best dancer in Australia?’ She said, ‘Josef Brown.'”

When first approached in 2004, Brown wasn’t sure about taking the role. But he agreed to have breakfast with Bergstein. “We talked politics. We talked dance. It was very easy. We talked about new challenges and where it might go. I got really excited,” Brown said.

Brown, of course, landed the part. “I had no idea of how big it was going to be. I hadn’t realized that the role was held in such high esteem by so many women.”

To prepare, Brown watched the movie as many as 30 times, studying Swayze’s performance. He took lessons in the mambo and the cha-cha and went through intensive acting training because he had little experience. He continues to work with a voice coach to master the American accent, though his Australian accent still slips through in performances. The accent wasn’t such an issue in London and Australia. But now, “I’m doing an American accent in front of American audiences,” he said. “This is the toughest house in the world.”

If Brown gets an ego boost from his role as a sex symbol, he doesn’t show it. An amateur documentary filmmaker — he made a film about a Palestinian dance troupe in Ramallah and planned to go to Africa for another project before his gig with “Dirty Dancing” got in the way — he laughs off the antics of female fans, saying: “They love this character. It’s such an iconic American character.”

The hordes of adoring women are “not reacting to me. They’re reacting to Johnny Castle,” he added with a shrug.

So maybe I was just reacting to a disembodied fantasy when, at the end of the interview, I asked Brown for that dance lesson. He laughed, then cheerfully walked me through the steps. He coached me on how to shift my weight, push off with my toes and twist my hips.

But when Brown grasped my hand, I couldn’t help but grin goofily. My knees knocked, my hands shook.

As I muttered an apology, Brown smiled. I got the feeling that he had seen other women turn to Jell-O in his arms. “The dances are much harder to do than they look; it’s quite amazing,” he said, with his movie star grin.

I felt as if I had just re-created the scene in which Baby stumbles through her first dance steps in the arms of dreamboat dance-instructor Johnny. All I needed was a pair of white Keds and slim-fitting pedal pushers.

Pathetic, I know.

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cmastony@tribune.com