An fun cartoon unfortunately distorts expectations of stage revivals

Rating: 7/10 (1 June 2007)

The original 1972 stage production of GREASE was a delightful, mildly dirty salute to rock and roll and the leather jacket and poodle skirt crowd of the late 50's and VERY early 60's. It set long run records on Broadway with its low running cost. When the powers that be got around to doing the film version they blew it up out of all recognizable proportions into a bubble gum cartoon that (to everyone's surprise) captured the essential insouciance of the original. It was buoyed by the canny casting of a number of performers (not least John Travolta's Danny Zuko) who had prepared for their roles in various stage productions.
All well and good as far as that went, and the movie with its (dishonest to the period and piece) overlay of Bee Gees music and re-orchestration of the stage score became an enormous commercial hit as well.
Viewers discovering the piece today will undoubtedly have a ball with the broad thesping of Travolta (newly shorn of the baby fat so in evidence in his early Broadway run with the Andrews Sisters in a musical called OVER HERE and subsequent TV "Sweathog" role on WELCOME BACK KOTTER), the bizarrely cast but delightful Olivia Newton John ("Sandy's" supposed to be a transfer student but from Australia!?!) and Stockard Channing's Rizzo (not yet having played her career defining roles in SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION or THE BIG BUS), but those who love the original musical will always lament a bit that the solid success of the movie bodes ill to forever distort potential audience expectations and prevent a honest revival of the superior but small original stage piece.
GREASE has been back on Broadway once already at this writing (a long run revival top billing Rosie O'Donnell and later Brooke Shields, both as "Rizzo") and at this writing is scheduled for an ill cast (by a national "reality show" elimination contest) summer revival during 2007. BOTH revivals were designed to be pointedly closer to the unsubtle aesthetic of the movie than the original Broadway staging. Productions like this have to be about making money as much as about making art, but if the movie had been a bit more about making art (as the occasional superb SUCCESSFUL movie musicals since GREASE - think CHICAGO - have been), the stage revivals would have been far better and probably more successful.
Fun film, but one can't help thinking of the old (inaccurate) joke about Chinese food - an hour later you'll be hungry for some real intellectual stimulation.