Theatre 367: A History of Musical Theatre in the U.S.
Mostly known for its 1978 film version starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, Grease was a musical written and composed by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey in 1971. Casey and Jacobs were actors who based Grease on Jacobs’ experiences at Taft High School on the Northwest Side of Chicago. It is set in the late 1950s, and it features music in the rock ‘n roll style of that era. It is also named after the greasers, a young working-class subculture of the time. The story surrounds the romance between the new girl in school Sandy Dumbrowski, and the cool greaser Danny Zuko. They meet the summer before their senior year of high school, and they say ‘goodbye’ thinking they will not see each other again. However, they get back to the same school, and their love is tested by the tricky social atmosphere in Rydell High School. Grease is about American teenagers and their self-discovery within the complex society they live in.
The way this story has been told, however, has been different over the past forty-five years. It was born from the memories of someone who lived through high school at the end of the 50’s, and who was a generation older than the baby-boomers that brought Hair at the end of the 60’s. In 1971 Grease was introduced during a time of experimenting, change, anti-musicals, and the voicing of the youth’s perception of society. Grease has become quite popular over the decades, and with such popularity has come the constant re-shaping of the musical in order to connect it to audiences. This poses the question of how to preserve a work of art that, unlike a painting, can be modified to fit the society it reaches. What is the limit when it comes to script alterations and character portrayals? When a musical does not reach audiences anymore in the way its creators intended, how much of it can we bring back? These are questions that arise from comparing different productions of Grease and the ways they have been introduced to audiences.
Grease was first performed in Chicago on February 5, 1971 in Kingston Mines Theatre Co., located in an old trolley barn, which is now the site of a hospital parking garage. Its original production was quite different from what the musical became a year after. In its original production in Chicago, Grease was a “tougher, raunchier and, some would argue, vastly better, than any version of the play since.” Polly Pen, who was cast as Patty in the original production, describes how she had to hide “the script from [her] parents during the entire rehearsal period,” and that she recently found her mother’s diary entry from when they opened the show saying, “’Still can’t get used to the foul language — but the reviews are good.” After playing in Chicago for eight months, Grease was moved to New York and opened off-Broadway.
It premiered on Broadway in February 14, 1972, and it was performed at Eden Theatre, Broadhurst Theatre, Royale Theatre, and Majestic Theatre. With a total of 3,388 performances, it became the longest-running Broadway show up to that point, before it was surpassed by A Chorus Line a few years later. It was directed by Tom Moore, and produced by Kenneth Waissman and Maxine Fox. According to Rick Kogan, they “rewrote the play, adding songs and removing dialogue, taking out all Chicago references and most of the four-letter words. It was sanitized and gussied up.” It is very difficult to now find the original 1971 version of the musical since the 1972 version is the standard version licensed through Samuel French, Inc., but there are websites in which one can find some of the comparisons between other scripts, especially between the first Broadway version and subsequent productions. One example is Sandy’s line change from “Yeah. I’m all choked up!” to “Yeah. A wop baba lu-bop!” A school version was also created, so that younger audiences could have access to a show that became so popular even children knew about it. This school edition got rid of any mention of alcohol or tobacco. It also prevented some parts of the story to come up at all, such as Rizzo’s pregnancy and her song “There Are Worse Things I Could Do.” Musical numbers are also shorter and have lyric changes.
Then, in 1978, the film happened. This movie, produced and written by Highland Park’s Allan Carr, and starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, cost “$6 million to make and has gathered nearly $400 million at the box office worldwide.” This production brought many changes with it. One of them being Sandy’s background, which was done to accommodate the role for the actress they casted, who had an Australian accent. They also added the song “Hopelessly Devoted to You” so she could have a solo, as well as “You’re the One That I Want,” both songs written by John Farrar. Interestingly enough, these are the songs that became hits for years to come, representing Grease and eventually being included in future theatre productions.
Grease went to the West End, had two Broadway revivals in 1994 and 2007, and has been produced nationally and internationally, in regional theatre, community theatre, high schools, and even middle schools. For the 2007 Broadway revival, NBC ran a reality TV show in called “Grease: You’re the One That I Want” in order to audition contestants and cast them based on viewers’ votes. According to Larry Stempel, “NBC apparently had no fear that turning the process of casting a Broadway show into an entertainment might ultimately prove more entertaining that the show itself.”
Over time, a romanticism of Grease seems to have led our society to change it as it seems best so that it fits our standards of what is right for our audiences. In 2016, Fox presented Grease Live! starring Julianne Hough as Sandy, and Aaron Tveit as Danny. It dealt with social topics in a way that reflected this era’s consciousness. Jacobs describes his feelings about the production:
About this live TV show? … I don’t even know these people and I am not at all involved. I haven’t gotten a phone call, a text … not a word. It’s an amazing thing, Hollywood. I wasn’t at all involved in the movie, either. Once something is sold, people can mess it up any way they want. But I’ll be there to watch.
As a millennial, I cannot help but to watch the 1978 film through the eyes of the era I live in. First I noticed the lack of people of color. Then I noticed the characters’ behaviors, and I felt bad every time Eugene was made fun of or humiliated. I saw it as bullying. I felt bad for Patty for similar reasons. I did not feel comfortable with the moments I deemed misogynistic or homophobic. I found myself in a difficult position. This was a film I had seen too many times as a child as one of my favorite musicals. I felt like I was judging it too much.
When I saw Grease Live! the first thing I noticed was the diversity of the cast, in race, gender, and physicality. Lines such as “Only boy-girl couples,” that appeared as one of the rules for the dance contest in the movie, were changed to “Couples only. No Solos. No threesomes.” The spiking of drinks was also punished, and no one smoked. Eugene became someone whom his peers appreciated more. Women were treated with the degree of respect society treats them now, and adult figures were portrayed with more dignity. This production still did not scape female objectification when they added ‘sexy’ female dancers in the song “Grease Lightning,” but all the other changes attempted to prove that we are changing.
Scott Miller makes an interesting point about our perception of Grease in current times and our understanding—or lack of it—of the musical. He points out that many people feel uncomfortable with the ending because of Sandy’s change, but that they are actually missing the fact that she represents the “letting go of the tendency of too many Americans to stigmatize sexuality as dirty and shameful.” He says, “She gives up the desexualizing poodle skirt that hid away her female form and replaces it with clothing that reveals and celebrates – and takes ownership of – her body and its adult curves.” It is through his explanation of Sandra Dee, however, that he describes in more detail why this era cannot relate to the original Grease:
Today, it may be hard to understand what Sandra Dee represented, but she was the poster girl for the big studios’ attempts to make teen movies … But the studios’ teen flicks were inevitably artificial in the extreme, creating a freakish – and clueless – adult imitation of the teen world, a kind of cultural Frankenstein, that teens could see right through. To savvy teenagers, Sandra Dee was a teen sellout, and in a world where authenticity was the goal, there was nothing worse…Teen audiences didn’t want that; they wanted High School Hellcats and Teenage Doll. But adults loved Sandra Dee; she reassured them that their teen was a “good girl.”
Grease doesn’t moralize; it just reports…Grease is set in 1958 and 1959 for a good reason – it’s not just about the changing of decades but also the changing of eras. Sandy’s triumphant line late in the show, “Goodbye to Sandra Dee,” puts away not only Sandy’s false good-girl persona, but also the 1950s as a whole, a world in which the goody-goody Sandra Dee can be a role model, in which facades were cracking.
We are constantly looking at history through our eyes. As productions of Grease have expanded over the decades, the different lenses from which this musical has being looked at have allowed it to access masses that Jacobs and Casey did not envision when they wrote Grease. Their work was a success, but such blessing came with modifications of their own work that they could no longer control. Grease has gone through several changes and alterations in order to accommodate the demand of balance between keeping the history of a work of art, and adjusting it so that more audiences can accept it. How did a Chicago-based Kingston Mines Theatre musical from 1971, with rough language and messages, end up being watched by a four-year-old in Ecuador in 1997? Had it not been for the multiple adaptations it went through from its beginning, Grease would not be what it is today, and people my age would not recognize it the way we do. This makes me wonder if we would recognize Grease at all had it not been touched by the changes that followed it right after it reached Broadway. Miller says that “cleaned-up Grease is worse than no Grease at all,” and he might be right, since I could tell how Disney-like the 2016 live version felt. However, with its original script, it would be impossible to present the musical on Fox the way it was broadcasted, and the younger generations would not become familiar with it. ‘Cleaned-up’ Grease is most of what we have now, and I cannot imagine being happier with no Grease at all.
Bibliography
“Grease.” Broadway Musical Home -. 2015. Accessed March 12, 2016. http://broadwaymusicalhome.com/shows/grease.htm.
“Grease – Original Dialogue.” New Line Theatre. Accessed March 13, 2016. http://www.newlinetheatre.com/grease-dialogue.html.
Grease (1978). Directed by Randall Kleiser. Produced by Allan Carr and Robert Stigwood. Screenplay by Bronte Woodard. Performed by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 2002. DVD.
Grease Live! Screenplay by Robert Cary and Jonathan Tolins. Directed by Alex Rudzinski and Thomas Karl. Performed by Julianne Hough, Aaron Tveit, and Vanessa Hudgens. Paramount Television and Marc Platt Productions, 2016. DVD.
Kogan, Rick. “The Original ‘Grease’ Was Born in Chicago, Wild, Funny and New in 1971.” Chicagotribune.com. January 29, 2016. Accessed March 12, 2016. http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/ct-grease-live-original-stage-play-fox-ae-0131-20160128-column.html.
Miller, Scott. “Inside GREASE.” New Line Theatre. 2006. Accessed March 14, 2016. http://www.newlinetheatre.com/greasechapter.html.
Stempel, Larry. Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater. New York, NY: W.W. Norton &, 2010