Everybody thinks they know Grease but what they are invariably thinking of is the glibly sanitised film version (the highest-grossing screen musical of all time) which transplanted the action from the rough streets of Chicago to the golden beaches of California. Nikolai Foster’s production is the first major revival to go back to the original source; and though no one might be expecting John Travolta’s toothy shtick, you could be forgiven for wondering where all the sunshine and palm trees have gone.
The show was originally the brainchild of an advertising copywriter, Jim Jacobs, and a high school art teacher, Warren Casey, who met at an amateur theatre group in Chicago and cooked up the idea of a musical inspired by the greasy fast food, fast cars and oily hairdos of their teenage years. Ultimately their modest show about gangs of disaffected kids in the industrial midwest became the most successful attempt to put delinquency on the Broadway stage since West Side Story.
In terms of sophistication, the music barely touches the hem of Bernstein’s masterful score; but that is beside the point. Casey and Jacobs wanted to pay homage to the doo-wop hits of the 1950s, and a key leitmotif throughout the show is that Nathanael Landskroner’s gamine, guitar-toting Doody struggles to master the hackneyed C-A minor-F-G chord progression that spawned a million rock’n’roll ballads; before he eventually spins them into a genuinely inspired melody entitled Those Magic Changes.
The most magical of the changes wrought by Foster is the restoration of some original tunes rarely heard since the first Broadway production. The pick of these is a musical monologue for Dex Lee’s supercool Danny entitled How Big I’m Gonna Be, which indicates how the big shot behind the Burger Palace Boys (the T-Birds in the film) is anxious that he will amount to little more than a small-time hoodlum. Less essential is the wistful In My Day, a solo in which the high school principal gets to reminisce fondly about her own teenage years. Shobna Gulati does this very affectingly, though it is clearly only there to buy time for Jessica Paul’s Sandy to be sewn into the pair of spandex trousers required for the finale.
Even prior to her spectacular makeover, Paul is far from a prim Pollyanna; and the spirited resistance she puts up towards Djalenga Scott’s sizzling Rizzo makes you wonder if the show’s attempt to celebrate teen rebellion really proves the opposite – that youth culture exerts an even greater pressure to conform. Here Sandy’s adoption of high heels and a smoking habit feels more like a capitulation than cause for celebration. But even so, Foster’s unsentimental version deserves credit for putting the grit back in Grease.
• At Curve, Leicester, until 21 January. Box office: 0116-242 3595.
