Sarah Manton: Baby talk
With her lead performance in the stage version of Dirty Dancing, Sarah Manton is bringing the house down, discovers Anwar Brett
Above: Streatham's Sarah Manton plays Baby in the West End
The challenge any writer faces in profiling actress Sarah Manton is a tricky one. Currently to be seen as ‘Baby’ Houseman in Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story On Stage at the Aldwych Theatre, the are many obvious, hugely tempting clichés the show inspires that ought to be avoided.
Having played the role since the beginning of October she’s doubtless heard them all, but the cheery 27-year-old Streatham resident has also seen with her own eyes, night after night, how much this stage adaptation of a hit film means to audiences.
"It’s different things to different people," she explains. "I’ve had some men tell me that it’s one of the first films they took their girlfriends to see, so it’s not just a girly thing at all."
The benefits for the performers in playing to audiences who know the songs – and some of the lines – as well as they do is the kind of energy that exists between them, which helps to keep the show from ever becoming repetitive and boring.
"Obviously there’s that line – ‘nobody puts Baby in the corner’ – the reaction to that can be deafening," Manton notes. "It’s really sweet because they’ll all ‘shush’ each other before it’s about to happen. But the audience reaction does really vary and that helps to keep it very fresh."
Sarah Manton was six and growing up with her family in Leicester when the iconic film came out in 1987. But even she and sister Emma – who is herself treading the boards in London now – were infected by the romantic mood and toe tapping vibrancy of writer Eleanor Bergstein’s 60s-set coming-of-age story.
Memories of Patrick Swayze lifting co-star Jennifer Grey above his head as she poses as if flying, in an attempt to become his dance partner, quickly seeped into the popular consciousness.
"Me and Emma used to practice the lift in swimming pools on holiday," Manton giggles, "I was always Baby because I was the smallest. We could never do it though, however hard we tried. We used to listen to the soundtrack, we had a tape of it, and I remember we made up dances in her bedroom so it must have sunk in.
"But doing it now it’s really difficult to think of how I thought of it before. Now it’s always going to mean being on stage, for me. Whenever I hear a song from it on the radio I’ve just felt like I’ve been transported back onto the stage. I think for the rest of my life it’s going to be like that, but they’re always nice feelings. I’m loving it."
Happily ensconced in Streatham with boyfriend Richard Hollis, who is also an actor, Manton is enjoying that rarest of luxuries for a jobbing theatre actor – the security of a long run. Prior to Dirty Dancing she had done a variety of work on the stage, notably the contrasting gloom and grit of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger.
Small wonder she auditioned for her current role with a smile on her face and a spirit of unbridled freedom. But when she suffers inevitable periods of joblessness – resting, as actors euphemistically call it – she is not one to mope around waiting for the phone to ring.
"I’m extremely pro-active," she adds, "I always write letters and find out what’s going on. I’m not one of these actors who can sit at home and be on the dole and wait for the next job. I can’t do that.
There is a real get-up-and-go to Manton, a rather – dare one say – American sort of can-do attitude. So it is with this in mind that she acknowledges that every experience is good for an actor, and every new skill acquired has the potential to help her in her work.
"I started going to acrobatic tumbling classes at The Circus Space in Hoxton. Quite a lot of actors go there," she explains. "It keeps you ticking over when you’re not working. I always need to have something on the go and feel like I’m actually achieving something.
"And I had a bit of an out of work period last year, and I did my Grade 8 violin with a teacher, because I’d played it when I was younger. I got myself into a couple of orchestras, the Streatham Orchestra and the Lambeth Orchestra, and it was really fun to do concerts with them."
She also made her television debut last year in an episode of Casualty. Television and film remain ambitions for the future though, such is her current commitment to daily performing Baby Houseman’s rite-of-passage in that staid Catskills community recreated so faithfully at the Aldwych.
What free time she has is spent going to the theatre or cinema with Richard, whom she met when they worked together at the National Theatre five years ago. An intriguing, perhaps mischievous thought occurs, that if they married they could celebrate in the same joyous manner as the couple whose recreation of "I’ve Had The Time of My Life" at their reception has become a YouTube classic.
"I was jokingly talking to him about that the other day," she laughs. "We first worked together at the National on The Coast of Utopia, which was a big epic Tom Stoppard trilogy set in the 19th century and it had lots of big ballroom dance sequences. I was dance captain, so I ended up dancing with him quite a lot and teaching him all the waltzes. So we did start out dancing together, but I don’t know. I think it might be a bit of a cliché for us to recreate that dance, it’s been done now hasn’t it?"
Cliché or not, Sarah Manton knows more than most how difficult those opening bars are to resist.
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