Review: GREASE THE IMMERSIVE MOVIE MUSICAL, Evolution London

Grease is the word yet again as immersive theatre giant Secret Cinema rolls back into London with a repeat of last year's summer spectacular. Given how the last twelve months have gone for them (and the industry in general), Rocky may have been a more apt choice.

The show arrives at Battersea at something of a critical juncture for its makers, both creative and commercial. Grease was the film Secret Cinema staged in Birmingham in 2023, and when it resurfaced as last summer's flagship — somewhat reimagined for London, admittedly — some of their cult following wondered whether the company that once trafficked in genuine mystery was running low on ideas. 

In fairness, there is evidence of ambition: a ten-year lease on a purpose-built Greenwich Peninsula home, opening late this year, where next February they will launch a Disney-licensed Pirates Of The Caribbean adventure. Even that, though, is a franchise they have considered before: a Pirates prequel, Spirit Of The Sea, was reportedly in development with Disney until Covid sank it in 2020. New ideas, one senses, do not come along here as often as revivals.

Not helping matters was the very public non-arrival of Barbie In Barbieland, a planned collaboration between Secret Cinema, TodayTix, Mattel and Warner Bros promising a BarbieLand Carnival, dancefloors and (of course) themed food and drink. Officially announced last November for an eight-week run in summer 2026, nothing was then heard until the news that we were all going back to Rydell High instead. 

Meanwhile, in the boardroom, TodayTix (owners of Secret Cinema since 2022) were themselves bought last October by MARI, Ari Emanuel's new events conglomerate, adding a layer of Hollywood-agent uncertainty to the future of the ticket reseller and its subsidiaries. 

The wider industry offers still less comfort. Layered Reality — the outfit behind the seventeen-year-old War Of The Worlds and the much-maligned Elvis Evolution — collapsed without warning in April when its parent company ceased trading, closing both shows within a week. Punchdrunk, meanwhile, is still in hock to Arts Council England to the tune of £3.6m; the company that invented British immersive theatre now runs on borrowed money and borrowed time. Against that backdrop, resurrecting a proven crowd-pleaser looks less like complacency and more like a company in survival mode.

The marquee change this year is the lead singer of 2000s indie upstarts Kaiser Chiefs ("one of Britain’s most treasured bands" according to the website). Ricky Wilson descends as Teen Angel across July and August, with David Fearn taking the halo for September. Almost everything else is as it was. Director Matt Costain keeps last year's bipartite staging: an hour outside in a carnival of rides, games and burgers before the doors to the school hall open and the film begins, stopping and starting to let the live cast take over. In blazing sunshine, this works fine. How it will fare under a good old British thunderstorm is another matter. 

The harder question is what the thing actually wants to be. For cineastes, it offers the novelty of the staging, then asks them to watch Grease in a well-lit hall that stops every few minutes for on-stage business. For musical-theatre lovers, it swaps jazz hands for the chance to jive on the central platform but denies them the comfort of bopping away in darkness. For immersive obsessives, it lavishes detail on every corner of the hall but still feels like a one-and-done tribute to Rydell High rather than being genuinely enrolled. 

The design is where the money and the ideas have gone. Costain and designer Tom Rogers ring the central platform with locations from the film: on the long sides, the blue-and-cream booths of the Frosty Palace face onto the auto shop, where Kenickie's car turns from beaten white jalopy to red-and-black road warrior in one genuinely riveting transformation; at the far end, the dimly lit Drive-In seats you in booths built as cars, each with its own headlights; and best of all, the fourth side houses the live band as the National Bandstand. 

The problem is geography. The hall is so vast that anyone slurping a shake in the Frosty Palace watches the auto-shop drama unfold from a distance, and the disconnect between proximity and impact means we often navigate scenes from memory rather than sight. The fairground has the same flaw in reverse: authentic enough, but sealed off from the school, with no walkabout actors and no story threads tethering the carnival experience to whatever follows. A missed opportunity, twice over.

The performances get lost in the acreage. Neither the singing nor the acting will be troubling any awards juries, and valiant individual turns arrive diluted by the sheer square footage. Giórgios Michaelídes makes a decent fist of Danny — a man visibly working his way up the T-Bird org chart, having been Sonny in the 2023 West End Grease and Kenickie on the 2024 tour before finally claiming the leather jacket here. Stephanie Costi's Sandy and Lucy Penrose's Rizzo fare better on paper than in the room; Penrose has played the role in all three of Secret Cinema's Grease outings and lands a heart-rending "There Are Worse Things I Could Do" that deserves a smaller space to breathe in. 

As for the marquee stardust: Wilson's Teen Angel is barely worth the wait. Anyone predicting a riot will leave disappointed by how flatly he sings "Beauty School Dropout", a number Frankie Valli once delivered with real tenderness. Applause to choreographer Jennifer Weber, whose numbers supply the vigour and imagination the rest of the staging keeps promising and mislaying.

Having the film playing overhead while the cast performs the same scene beneath it produces its own hard choices. During "Summer Nights", do you watch John Travolta and on-screen Olivia Newton-John sizzle away in celluloid, or keep an eye on their 3D counterparts a few metres below? The screen usually wins out, which rather defeats the point of the show. In the end, Grease is not too dissimilar to Danny Zuko: a supremely confident and handsome summertime diversion that knows exactly how to move and not at all what it wants to be.

Grease The Immersive Movie Musical continues until 13 September.

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