Greasy
Last Thursday I found myself sitting surrounded by young adolescent girls and ITV execs for the second night of the new production of Grease in the Piccadilly Theatre. It’s an unusual, perhaps slightly sinister, audience combination, but luckily the boss types were there because it was viewers of an ITV programme who had chosen the hero and heroine of the play.
I haven’t developed a sudden interest in musical theatre, but am loath to pass up a work freebie. So, thought I’d chance it. Besides, attack-of-the-killer-stilton or not, Grease has some great songs even if it is very, very cheesy. Another good thing about the play is that the theatre is a mere two minutes walk from the legendary, fifties-styled and shortly to close New Piccadilly Restaurant where Autumn and I could go and get a fish and chips first.
We knew when we were getting near the Greasy action when a gaggle of women in satin ‘pink ladies’ jackets was spotted on the Covent Garden end of Shaftesbury Avenue - this musical inspires real devotion. Inside the theatre audience was primed for some serious Danny, Sandy action; there was lots of clapping along to old favourites. Soon we were into Summer Nights, which lays the back story for this Michaelmas term tale and then there a couple more songs before Greased Lightning another highlight from the tale.
It didn’t take long before I realised that I didn’t know the musical as well as I’d thought. There are lots of mediocre tunes between the hits, songs I have no recollection of hearing on my sister’s battered old Grease tape when I was at school. It was also difficult to make out the story amidst the constant flow of musical numbers. Still narrative is hardly the point with musicals I suppose.
The set was fairly modest, no spectacular moving parts or feats of aerial ingenuity. The fifties was a conservative decade, and so there were no radical interpretations of that high school and diner-centric world. The mainstream was shown in pastel and neon, while the complacent majority was threatened by the red and black-clad . We did see the odd flare of imagination that lit things up - a flashing guitar and mosaic-mirrored car.
Grease could perhaps also be called Adolescent Hormones, the containment of these tricky chemicals looms over the protagonists like dirty bombs in the minds of today’s security services. Danny does his best as a boy with barbed-wire in his pants, grinding his Elvis-pelvis, but I’m not sure what he sees in Sandy. TV phone ins might not be the best way of finding a repressed sex bomb, a surprisingly subtle role to play. Luckily, boy and girl get each other and there’s much singing and dancing. It was in the raucous finale that the show at last found its mojo along with the lovers, but by then it was a bit late.