REVIEW: Grease the Musical at The Lyceum, Sheffield
Before Grease the movie – the 1978 classic that made icons of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John – there was Grease the Musical, a stage-show premiered in Chicago in 1971.
Like Grease, but grittier, it’s this edgy original, updated in 2019, which ends a racy seven-month-long UK and Ireland revival tour in Sheffield on Saturday.
Gone is the candy-floss California sunshine of the bubblegum movie.
Grease the Musical is raunchier, more raw, and set back where it began, in its grimy working-class southside Chicago roots.
When Kenickie, last of the old romantics, suggests a date, it’s with the tender proposition: “Let’s talk over by the drainage canal” – a location littered with ‘used rubbers’.
When the T-Birds, now tattooed low-level gangsters the Burger Palace Boys, go to fight they take baseball bats – and guns.
The show was reimagined five years ago by director Nikolai Foster, acclaimed artistic director of the Curve theatre in Leicester.
Choreographed by Arlene Phillips, it toured the UK until 2021, has had two stints in the West End, and has been back out nationwide, burning up the quarter mile, since April.
It’s slick, it’s high energy, and the tight 20-strong cast who make up the Rydell High Class of 1959 are an ensemble of some of the brightest young talent in theatre today.
The harmonies are sublime, the acting is razor-sharp, and the power the whole-company dance routines are supplying – why, it’s electrifying.
Marley Fenton, with a fantastic falsetto, and Margot Robbie-lookalike Hope Dawe, making a stellar professional debut, play ripped-at-the-seams summer lovers Danny and Sandy, both with a distinct shift in personality from the characters made famous by Travolta and Newton-John.
Danny is less bumbling and goofy, Sandy less saccharine-sweet and naive. She joins Rydell High with an assured confidence and takes no nonsense, either from Zuko or ascerbic anti-heroine Rizzo, leader of the Pink Ladies.
If Danny is not the hapless nice guy John Travolta led us to believe in, then his sidekick Kenickie, played with menace by Ben Nicholas, is downright unpleasant.
When he squeezes Rizzo’s arm it’s in a way that suggests he’s not a stranger to smacking her around – and Rizzo, in turn, is far more brittle than even her Stockard Channing incarnation.
In the hands of actress Rebecca Stenhouse she’s not just sarcastic but cruel, and when she sings the world-weary standout song There Are Worse Things I Could Do – not as a ballad but as an attack on Sandy and her preppy perfection – it has heartbreaking new meaning. “To cry in front of you?” she sneers at Sandra Dee. “That’s the worst thing I could do.”
There are other differences, too, from the much-loved famous film. There’s no climactic car race (though a clever circular TV screen which doubles as a DJ booth for radio star Vince Fontaine could have allowed it) and the high school dance-off becomes a Halloween Hop, giving Arlene Phillips chance to incorporate some genius Thriller moves in with the jitterbugs and hand-jives.
There are additional songs – new (old) numbers which were cut for the 1978 movie but appeared in the original show – and the order in which songs appear in the storyline is reshuffled.
Act II is closer to the big screen version the audience knows best – there have been drinks in the interval, after all, and everyone has their sights set on the Megamix medley at the end.
And that’s where the musical struggles to stay true to its different, darker interpretation.
The weight of fan expectation means crowd pleasers like Hopelessly Devoted To You, and You’re The One That I Want – songs which never featured in 1971 but were added for the film – have to be included, even when they don’t fully gel with the plot.
Sandy has shown no signs of being hopelessly devoted to Danny before she’s forced to burst wistfully into song – in fact, she’s been doing just fine on her own.
That deadbeat Danny should be the one that she wants is almost a source of disappointment rather than a cause for celebration – though the joyous rendition of the song performed live by such a fantastically talented cast does make up for it.
There’s definitely grit in this Grease – but it’s all the slicker for it. It may not be exactly the one that you know, but it’s got groove, it’s got meaning, and it should definitely be the one that you want.