Anyone wanting to discover how a musical oozes sex appeal without doing anything too near the knuckle ought to make for the Aldwych.

Dirty Dancing, adapted by Eleanor Bergstein from her fairytale script for the madly popular American movie, proves a virtual replica of the original, even if it offers little of the film's pelvic-thrust dancing.

Yet this stage version offers something distinct and more intimate than the celluloid experience. Artfully designed to titillate hearts and minds of teenage girls, not to mention mature ladies pining for their lost youth, a role here amply filled by muscle-flaunting Josef Brown, the musical's game of mutual seduction comes into close, breathless focus.

Dancing lessons for Georgina Rich's adventurous, virginal "Baby" Houseman, a doctor's daughter holidaying with her family in 1963 at a ghastly, upmarket holiday camp near the Catskill Mountains, lead little by little to bed with Brown's dance instructor, Johnny Castle.

Bliss and trouble follow until the ecstatic dance finale - I've Had The Time Of My Life - incites the audience to escapist euphoria-The scripts Bergstein wrote for film and stage surprisingly rise above sex - a bit.

Dirty Dancing discovers America in the socio- political upheavals of 1963: black civil rights protests have turned violent and Kennedy's Peace Corps are giving young Americans chances to help the poor abroad. Bergstein is unconcerned with civil rights but conflict over class, American materialism and the Sixties youth culture serve as driving forces in her plot.

Baby hates the pleasures of fox-trotting and waltzing, wants to join the Peace Corps and dislikes the hotel owner's conventional grandson. She finds her way to the staff quarters where the music beats sexily, bodies pressed close.

Rashly volunteering to stand in for Johnny's dance partner Penny (Nadia Coote), laid low by an abortion, Baby faces a crashcourse from Johnny in the new dancing and Sixties sexuality.

Stephen Brimson Lewis's set looks tacky but the use of video film helps in the athletically daring, dance rehearsal scenes out on the water: Johnny holds the thrilled Baby above his head as if she were a trophy.

At such moments you realise why the musical has broken all box office records, with £11 million already taken. Dirty Dancing in the flesh, as opposed to the screen, will offer a warm dip in fantasyland for a fresh generation of teenage girls.

Rich is a delight and a discovery, worlds away from the traditional, simpering musical heroine. Serious, wreathed in shyness and reserved, she dances elegantly to Brown's imperious tune and is gradually transformed from virginal awkwardness until she relaxes into happiness and Johnny's arms.

Brown, his spectacular agility expressed in leaps and spins, puts an enviably muscled torso to work, but his acting is not as finely developed as his body or his dancing. He needs to be more sexually fired by Baby and angrier about his life as a dancing stallion, servicing female holiday makers.

James Powell's pulsating, dynamically choreographed productionmeanders in the second half until Johnny's triumphant return to the hotel after being sacked. Josef comes up trumps, assertively dancing Baby back into his life. The light-hearted, frivolous young will have a ball with Dirty Dancing.