Grease: Children's Theatre For 40-Year-Old Straight People

Grease is by no means the best musical ever to play on Broadway, but director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall's revival suggests that it might be the most indestructible one.  Plagued with humorless staging, rudimentary dance routines, a set that looks ready to pack up and take on the road at a moment's notice and two stars that seem more "happy to be on Broadway" than "ready to be on Broadway", this production has no business being as entertaining as it somehow manages to be.  Certainly such qualities would doom any professional mounting of My Fair Lady or Guys And Dolls but for the first act and a quarter I found myself rather enjoying my evening at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.

Perhaps it's because this revival opened in the middle of the New York International Fringe Festival and I was still in the mindset of determining if a show was worth the fest's $15 ticket price.  But more likely it's because the first and only Broadway musical written by the team of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, with its pleasant period music and lightly satirical lyrics (this time the score is juiced up with four songs from the movie, only one of which, "Sandy," has the same sense of parody) glued together by a sluggish book that only lightly touches its Boy Meets Girl/Boy Ignores Girl/Girl Dresses Slutty And Gets Boy plot for most of the first act, is the kind of show that can coast on the fumes of reasonably talented people giving the kind of broad, enthusiastic cartoon performances usually reserved for those playing barnyard animals and magic forest creatures in summer stock children's theatre.  To paraphrase Douglas Carter Beane in the far more satisfying Xanadu, this revival of Grease is like children's theatre for 40-year-old straight people. 

It wasn't always such.  Grease has a history that might remind you of that classic Oscar Levant quip, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."  When the show hit Broadway in 1972 it was full of raunchy humor ("Those aren't yellow leaves.  They're used rubbers") and hormonally charged Patricia Birch choreography.  There was also a prologue that introduced the characters as attending their 10^th high school reunion, making the show a nostalgia trip for Broadway's thirty-something audiences.  No doubt the tremendous popularity of TV's squeaky-clean Happy Days among younger viewers helped make Grease popular family-fare, especially after the edgeless and earnest smash hit 1978 film.  When Grease became available for high school and amateur productions, the authors eventually saw fit to provide a sanitized version of the script.  The current revival, though not quite Pat Boone material, is perfectly apple-cheeked and inoffensive for all but the most conservative 2007 American audiences.  The grit and vulgarity is gone and Derek McLane's colorful cartoon set makes the show look like it leaped off the pages of Archie Comics.

And this revival is perfectly amusing and harmless when Ryan Patrick Binder (Doody) cheerfully sings "Magic Changes," shaking hands with people in the front row, Daniel Everidge (Roger) and Lindsay Mendez (Jan) start falling in love through "Mooning" or when the T-Birds and Pink Ladies gleefully celebrate their friendship in "We Go Together."  Robyn Hurder spices up "Freddy, My Love" with a Marty who seems a Jayne Mansfield in the making and other fun performances are supplied by Jeb Brown as a sleazy Vince Fontaine, Allison Fischer as a perky Patty Simcox and Susan Blommaert as a dry Miss Lynch.

The standout performance of the evening – the one that proves Grease possesses more than just a talent to amuse – comes from Matthew Saldivar, whose low-key cool Kenickie is a believable portrayal of a gang leader who, while capable of kicking major ass, is also emotionally unprepared for the realities of being sexually active.    His eye-catching flesh and blood realism makes "Greased Lightin'," the best performed song of the night, more than just a lively number but an effective spoof of adult men who require "toys" as confirmations of their manhood.  Jenny Powers is admirably on the same track, but her Rizzo lands as too adult, rather than as a mature teenager.  Her "There Are Worse Things I Can Do" is polished and emotional, but a little too Judy At The Palace.

When it comes to the actors starring as Danny and Sandy, once you're sitting in the theatre and the lights are going down, does it really matter if the leads won their roles as prizes on a television game show or if they were cast the old fashioned way  (sleeping with a producer)?  What really counts is their stage charisma and their ability to sing, dance and act, right?  Unfortunately, these are all, in varying degrees, problems for Max Crumm and Laura Osnes.  Both can sing decently enough, but neither shows an ability to interpret lyrics.  Her "Hopelessly Devoted To You" is an exercise in bland while his "Sandy," is poorly acted and sung without falsetto.  (These two numbers sandwich a misconceived and dreadfully unfunny "Beauty School Dropout.")  Osnes holds her own with the book scenes while Crumm tends to fade into the ensemble, but he does nicely during the dance numbers.  They give the song about being the one that each other wants (nobody's gonna misquote me there) a game effort but the number ends abruptly without any chance to build.  Fortunately, Danny and Sandy are rather small roles as musical theatre leads go.  Once their story is introduced with "Summer Nights," the other characters pretty much take over until the last three-quarters of the second act, which is when the air starts leaking out of the pretty pink balloon.

Nevertheless, the power of television pretty much guarantees that Grease is in for a healthy run with people from all over the country planning their New York vacations around seeing the team of Crumm and Osnes.  There are those who say that any hit show that brings in people who would normally not attend theatre is good for Broadway.  If that's the case, I suppose it won't be long before NBC casts another Broadway hit with a game show called, That's Our Hamlet!

Photos by Joan Marcus:  (top) Jenny Powers and Matthew Saldivar; (center) Lindsay Mendez, Jenny Powers, Robin Hurder, and Kirsten Wyatt; (bottom) Laura Osnes, Max Crumm and company