Thud!

As hard as it may be to believe, that is the exact sound delivered by the stage musical version of "Dirty Dancing" that opened Tuesday night at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts.

If there was ever a stage adaptation of a movie that ought to just fly off the stage, this one instead landed like a hopeless drunk trying to tap dance on a giant exercise ball.

Thud!

The 1987 movie "Dirty Dancing" is regarded by many as a classic. It featured wonderful music like "Be My Baby," "Love is Strange," "Stay" and the gorgeous "I've Had the Time of My Life," by Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley.

The story of the young Jewish girl who goes to a resort in the Catskills and falls in love with the dance captain Johnny, who spends his days teaching older women to dance, is a story full of romance and sexual joy. The dancing – from the title – is exciting and delivers a punch that sent thousands of people to dance studios to learn how to "dance like that."

But somewhere along the way, the producers who decided to move this film to the stage forgot all about the things that made the original so wonderful.

Let me start with everything that was wrong with this production. Sit down because this may take a while.

The acting was kind of like watching a junior high school tryout for "Hamlet." There was absolutely no chemistry between any of the actors, much less between Christopher Tierney, who played Johnny, and Gillian Abbott, who played Baby. If these two don’t create sparks, we may all have just stayed at home.

Wooden doesn’t even come close to describing the acting in this thing. Each line was uttered as if it existed all on its own and didn’t have any place in what was supposed to be a whole story, moving along and taking us with it. The concept of good actors listening to other actors was a foreign concept to these professionals.

They could mug with the best of them, and there were hams in the bunch, but not a single character seemed like a real person. Shame on them all.

The next significant problem was the constantly changing set design that featured one video backdrop after another. Jon Driscoll was the video and production designer, and director James Powell obviously didn’t have the courage to tell Driscoll when enough was enough.

These video backdrops became everything from a golf driving range to fields of wheat and water where Baby and Johnny practiced the famous lift from the movie. The audience at the Marcus Center event laughed at some of these settings, and I don’t think laughter was what the production was going for.

The over the top design proves the classic advice that just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.

Let us move, if we dare, to the music.

The movie had 12 songs. Start to finish. This production had 44. That’s right, 44 different songs. Some almost complete, but most of them just snippets. Some were recordings. Some were originals sung by an occasional stray member of the cast. The live music came from an eight-piece ensemble, notable only for the occasional saxophone work of Brian Krock.

Even when they tried to do something memorable, this whole thing fell apart.

The song "In the Still of the Night" by the Five Satins is a classic slow dance song. It is performed quietly, with reverence appropriate for its title. For some reason, the producers put this into the show with Doug Carpenter singing it. Missing were the "shoodoopa doobydoos" that are critical to the song. And Carpenter finished the song, not with the silence of the night but like he was the steroid addicted child of Ethel Merman and Luciano Pavarotti. He was the loudest thing all evening.

And finally, let us take a look at the raison d’etre for the entire thing: the dancing.

The movie had dancing that was a fever. This production had dancing that put you to sleep.

What you’d expect here is some dirty dancing. Well, who’s kidding who here? I heard more than one person say that every dance looked the same. And it’s true. The choreography was absolutely unimaginative and trite. When you think "dirty dancing," you want to see people wipe the sweat from their eyes. Doing gymnastic tricks is not dirty dancing.

And it’s a shame because it’s obvious that there are accomplished dancers in this cast. They have danced with some of the best ballet companies in the country. But they haven’t been given anything that’s even close to thrilling to work with.

Near the end of the show, before the summer ending talent show at the resort, the son of the owner steps forward and calls for his cast to assemble.

"Singers! Dancers! Actors!," he shouted through a megaphone.

Nobody answered the call.

"Dirty Dancing" runs through Oct. 11 and information on tickets and showtimes is available here.