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Grease Live: EW Review
The best 'Grease' ever. That's right. Better than 'Grease 2'
When did you realize Grease: Live was killing it? Was it the start of âFreddy My Love,â when the camera swooned eye-to-eye with Keke Palmer at the precise moment she became a star? Was it âBorn to Hand Jive,â when you watched a whole high school of swirling dancers and realized you actually cared about all these people, even Patty, even freaking Doody ? Was it Vanessa Hudgens singing âThere Are Worse Things I Could Do,â the usually kinetic camera slowly moving into an intimate close-up while the light shifted to a noirish red around her? Was it when Carly Rae Jepsenâs hair changed color for the third or fourth time, or any frozen moment from Haneefah Woodâs performance as Blanche, a GIF-for-all-occasions sustained exercise in brilliant pantomime? Or was it that part of the opening number, when Wendell Pierce played a few toots on his trombone in what has to be as the worldâs best (and first) homage to Treme ?
Live events are the thing now, they say. But thereâs a big gap between âsomething happening right nowâ and âsomething thatâs happening .â For me, Grease: Live started happening right away, when the oddly Lubezkian camera followed Jessie J behind the scenes and into the dressing rooms. There were the Pink Ladies: Vanessa Hudgens, Palmer, Jepsen, Youâre the Worst âs Kether Donohue. Hudgens held up a smartphone â and they posed for a selfie. The camera moved on, restless, out into the rain. El Niño couldnât stop this beat. The dancers carried umbrellas; hey, it worked for Gene Kelly.
Iâm a human being, so I have fond memories of the 1978 big-screen Grease , starring peak Travolta and a movie-stealing Stockard Channing and a songbook thatâs practically Great American for a world that only remembers the â70s version of the â50s. I knew that Grease: Live would incorporate elements of the movie and the original stage production. But director Thomas Kail transformed this small-screen Grease into a new kind of livestreaming celebration, at once smarter and grander than the film version and more intimate, raw, desperate. Cheese and trash and camp and nostalgia-baked vanilla pop: Grease is all that, with a story that one might reasonably declare â Vanderpump Rules -esque.â (Everyoneâs always overreacting; barely anything happens.)
But Kail and his thrill-drunk collaborators energized the material at every turn. It helps, I think, that Grease: Live clearly understands that this platonic saga of basically good badasses and basically nice mean girls is an ensemble piece. Danny Zuko and Sandy Young are sweet bores. As Danny, Aaron Tveit couldnât touch Travoltaâs goofy-sexy grace. As Sandy, Julianne Hough was the opposite of expressive â an inheritor of Olivia Newton-Johnâs energetic blandness. But no one questions Houghâs abilities as a dancer, and her numbers with Tveit radiated fun and true physical charisma.
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More urgently, they provided a nice foundation from which the supporting cast could rocket off. Former Nick kid Carlos PenaVega and current Disney kid Jordan Fisher had standout moments as T-Birds. But enough of the guys: Tell me more about the Pink Ladies! Donohue, Jepsen, Hudgens, and, most of all, Palmer all seemed to be starring in their own character-centric version of Grease: screaming farce, candy-colored soap, preening melodrama, and arena-rock stadium tour, respectively. Together, they were like a superteam: The Avengers, with better clothes.
And thatâs not to mention Ana Gasteyer as the beleaguered Principal. Or Didi Conn â the film versionâs Frenchy! â as a rueful-giddy waitress. Or Elle McLemore, energetically playing maybe the showâs most impossible character: Patty, the cheerleader nerd class-president virgin. ( Grease âs vision of high school is so abstract, it makes High School Musical look like social anthropology.) Under Kailâs democratic vision, everyone got a star moment. Some worked better than others. They added in a new Frenchy number just to give Jepsen something to do, but âAll I Need Is an Angelâ was a well-intentioned snooze.
A better idea wouldâve been just letting Jepsen sing any track off her latest album . Why not? Although Grease: Live paid lovely homage to all its source materials, it was also playfully self-aware. How else to explain casting Mario Lopez as a very Lopez-esque TV host â and then also letting the actor play a kind of meta-Lopez, an offscreen alter ego who leers overs teenagers and preens about his makeup? (At one point, a potential conquest declares Lopezâs character âso old,â and the look on the former Slaterâs face was positively poignant.) When Boyz II Men showed up as a tripartite Teen Angel, the moment worked doubly well: As nostalgia spectacle, and as genuine whoa-they-can-still-sing thrill .
The sound dropped out, and the car chase looked goofy, and the ending will always be a mess of mishmashed social intentions. (Itâs up for debate whether the point of Grease is âbe yourselfâ or âdonât be yourself.â) Whatever. Grease: Live reconfirms all the possibilities of the live musical event as a genuine transcendent pop experience: Clever, funny, rapturously huge in a way showbiz used to only want to be.
There was a scene set at a drive-in theater. The movie playing onscreen was The Monster of Piedras Blancas , a budget ripoff of Creature From the Black Lagoon . It was an impeccable detail â Monster came out in spring 1959, during the time period of Grease â and it felt like a wink from the producers. Yes, weâre not the first to do this stuff; yes, weâre working with enough constraints that âDriving a Golf Cartâ counts as as a major stunt effect.
But Grease: Live defied modesty, transcended nostalgia, served up cheese as a ten-course gourmet meal. Coming so soon after the triumph of The Wiz Live! , it banished once and for all any easy notions of hatewatching and trainwreckitude. It was an old-fashioned show and a newfangled playful meta-show: Marvel at how the cafeteria was the gym and the carnival, how the âNational Bandstandâ sequence was both a loving homage to long-ago talent shows and a this-is-how-itâs-done improvement on our modern reality competitions. In this moment overrun with must-see TV events, Grease wasnât just live. It was alive.
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193K views 7 years ago. Broadway.com editor Paul Wontorek gets a peek at the GREASE: LIVE set on a tour with T-Birds Aaron Tveit, Andrew Call and Jordan Fisher. ...more.
967. 146K views 1 year ago #WestEnd #Theatre #London. Grittier and more electrifying than ever before, the world’s best-loved musical, Grease, makes a triumphant return to London’s Dominion ...
2007 West End revival. 2007 Broadway revival. 2008 US tour. 2017 UK tour. 2022 West End revival. 2023 West End revival. Grease is a musical with music, lyrics, and a book by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. Named after the 1950s United States working-class youth subculture known as greasers and set in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High School in ...
Grease. Casa Manana. Fort Worth, TX. Find Tickets. Jun 5. Wed • 7:30pm. đ° Deals Available.
Just like the Playbill programs that theatre fans know and love from attending live theatrical experiences on Broadway and around the country, our exclusive and official Grease: Live Playbill...
10.2K subscribers. Subscribed. 3.3K. 594K views 8 years ago. Danny and Sandy recount their summertime. FOX enrolls at Rydell High with GREASE: LIVE, a LIVE one-night musical production of the...
Grease: Live reconfirms all the possibilities of the live musical event as a genuine transcendent pop experience: Clever, funny, rapturously huge in a way showbiz used to only want to be.
Grease Live! is an American television special that was originally broadcast by Fox on January 31, 2016. It was a live, televised remake of the 1978 film Grease, executive produced by Marc Platt, directed by Thomas Kail, and starring Aaron Tveit, Julianne Hough, Carlos PenaVega, Vanessa Hudgens and Jordan Fisher .