When advertising copyrighter, Jim Jacobs, and a high school art teacher, Warren Casey met through an amateur theater group in Chicago in the early 1960s, they had no idea they would ever be anything more than acquaintances. Jacobs was a cool kid in high school; Casey had been bookish and studious. But when hearing Led Zeppelin records playing at a late-night cast party, they both lamented the passing of the great doo-wop songs of the 1950s, which turned into an idea of writing a stage musical about a bunch of ne’er-do-well high-schoolers with rock music as the backbone of its score. They would call it, Grease.
An homage to the era’s greasy hair, greasy engines, and greasy food. The gritty, profanity-laced, raunchy story of teenage attitude—for which Jacobs and Casey collaborated on the book, the lyrics, and the music—opened on February 5, 1971, in a former trolley barn in Chicago. It was directed by Guy Barile, choreographed by Ronna Kaye and produced by the Kingston Mines Theater Company. The theater was in a basement where an audience of a hundred sat on the floor on newspaper. The set consisted of backdrops painted on brown paper. At that time the show had far less music, far less plot, and no central characters. But it did have infectious songs like “Greased Lightning,” “Beauty School Dropout,” “Those Magic Changes,” and “We Go Together.” It ran for eight months.
New York producers Ken Waissman and Maxine Fox saw the show on Lincoln Avenue and recognized its surprising honesty and the appeal of its rough edges and made a deal to produce it Off-Broadway. Once the producers decided to bring Grease to New York, they set about finding a production staff. One agent tried to sell them on hiring the bright young director-choreographer Michael Bennett, but they didn’t think he was right for Grease. (They were probably right.) They asked Gerald Freedman to direct, since he had helmed the original off Broadway production of Hair, but Freedman turned them down without even reading the script. They finally settled on director Tom Moore and choreographer Patricia Birch who had created such interesting, “real” staging and choreography for The Me Nobody Knows¸ a show about homeless kids. The producers wanted everything about the show to feel rough, unpolished, de-glamorized – honest and authentic, like Hair – a concept the subsequent film and revivals did not understand. According to Adrienne Barbeau’s autobiography There Are Worse Things I Could Do, the producers hired Moore to direct because “Tom’s strength was getting performances that were so realistic the audience didn’t believe they were watching actors. That’s what Ken and Maxine wanted for Grease. What they didn’t want was a cotton-candy musical.”
After only three weeks of rehearsal (on purpose—to aim for that raw, uncut feeling), the show opened at the Eden Theatre on Valentine’s Day 1972. The reviews were negative to mixed, one reviewer even said, “The worst thing I’ve ever seen opened tonight at the Eden Theatre.” Nevertheless the show ran for 128 performances.
June of 1972 the show moved Uptown, to the Broadhurst Theatre. In December 1979, Grease broke Broadway’s long-run record. It made several moves during its Broadway run and finally closed April 13, 1980, after a total run of 3,388 performances. The original production paid back its investors four thousand percent and was nominated for seven Tony Awards.
It’s easy to hear on the original 1972 Grease cast album the pure, untrained sound of 1950s rock and roll. Grease knows that sound because its creators lived it, the sound of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley. The earliest rock and roll was never about polish or precision; purposefully rejecting mainstream necessities like playing in tune, singing on pitch, keeping the tempo, staying together. It was a wholesale rejection of the values of their parents and their parents’ culture, an aggressive fuck you to Pat Boone and the like. But what has stuck the strongest (through its revivals and the film) is the story.
The story of Grease is set during the 1958-59 school year, at exactly the same time that America was facing the preliminary rumblings of the Sexual Revolution that would arrive in the mid-1960s and blossom in the 70s, only to be ended by AIDS in the early 80s. And like The Rocky Horror Show did later, Grease shows us how America reacted to this tumultuous time though two of its main characters. Danny Zuko (along with Rizzo and Kenickie) represents that segment of American teens already sexually active in the 1940s and 50s, who ultimately frees the conforming Sandy to express her sexuality without fear or shame, leading her into a new life and a new decade of sexual freedom. Sandy Dumbrowski is mainstream America, reluctant to throw off the sexual repression of the conforming 1950s for the sexual adventuring of the 1960s.
Many people are uncomfortable with the show’s ending because they miss the fact that Sandy doesn’t actually become a slut in the finale; she just learns how to dress like one, finally letting go of the tendency of too many Americans to stigmatize sexuality as dirty and shameful. 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. This is not a descent into decadence for Sandy; it is a throwing open of the doors of her moral prison. The authors’ intentions are clear in a stage direction in the final scene. After describing Sandy’s new hypersexual look – the tight pants, leather jacket, earrings, wild new hair – the script says, “Yet she actually looks prettier and more alive than she ever has.”
This is one of the fewer elements of Sandy’s character trajectory that the film adaptation gets right.
In 1978, the film version was released by Paramount. Directed by Randal Kleiser (who had only ever directed TV series before his turn with Grease), produced by Allan Carr, and starring Australian country-lite singer Olivia Newton John, fresh face John Travolta, and 33 year old stage and screen veteran Stockard Channing.
It was a slapdash production, mapped out in five weeks and shot over two months. It was given a modest $6 million budget by Paramount C.E.O. Barry Diller, who dismissed the whole thing as cinematic cotton candy. Its leading lady was foreign and untried, its cast was too old, its score uneven, its choreography and staging more often than not thought up on the fly, its supporting cast was made up largely of a ragtag cluster of 1950s has-beens, and its second lead actor was a wild child who would later die of complications from drug abuse. And yet the movie managed to single-handedly revive a genre of tinselly filmmaking left for dead, while producing the highest grossing American movie-musical of the entire 20th century.
The films leading producer Allan Carr knew how to balance what the studio wanted with what the film needed. Not unlike the teen market they were targeting, teenage exploitation films were full of sex and sin and booze and cars, but many of them also had a sanctimonious “moral” laid out explicitly, at the beginning or end of the film, and Grease did just that. It was watered down from its predecessor, but it wouldn’t have sold at the box office with f*ck bombs and boozing. Carr did throw a Molotov cocktail into the works by casting Harry Reems, the porn star who became famous as the recipient of Linda Lovelace’s oral talents in 1972’s Deep Throat, as Coach Calhoun. “It was the 70s, and at that time it was sort of anything goes,” Kleiser says. “The sexual revolution was happening, and porn stars were becoming somewhat accepted in media. I didn’t think it would be a problem. But Paramount did.” The studio axed the Reems idea, and the role eventually went to Sid Caesar. Guilt-ridden, Carr gave a devastated Reems $5,000 out of his own bank account as an apology.
In the stage production, Grease is the story of star-crossed Danny and Sandy, but it’s equally about the ethos of the street toughs and gum-cracking tarts who populate their high-school world. Carr guessed—correctly, it turned out—that what mass audiences would really want to see was the love story between Travolta and Newton-John, set amid a sea of creamy lighting and finned cars and augmented by a menu of new, radio-friendly pop songs. Devotees of the original, such as choreographer Patricia Birch (who had studied under Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille and was one of the original dancers in West Side Story on Broadway), watched as their beloved salty musical was frothed into a sweet milk shake. “I fought the palm trees,” she says, “and I lost.”
Despite the film’s weak critical reception, it brought in $9.3 million its opening weekend, just behind Jaws 2, and would spend the next five weeks atop the box office; the soundtrack would land four singles in the Billboard Top 10 and sell 13 million copies in its first year alone, going on to become one of the top-selling soundtracks ever. (It’s still in the Top 10.)
In its legacy, Grease has given way to five revivals, five national tours, a live-television broadcast, and countless high school productions in barn theatre basements, where it all began. In his introduction to the Samuel French publication of the script, critic Micheal Feingold writes:
“Grease does not discourse about our presence in Saigon. Nor does it contain in-depth study of such other 50s developments as the growth of mega-corporations and conglomerates, the suburban building boom that broke the backs of our cities, the separation of labor’s political power from the workers by union leaders and organization men. Although set in and around an urban high school, it does not even discuss one of the decade’s dominant news stories, the massive expansion of the university system, and the directing of a whole generation of war babies toward the pursuit of college degrees. Grease is an escape, a musical designed to entertain, not to concern itself with serious political and social matters. But because it is truthful, because it spares neither the details nor the larger shapes of the narrow experience on which it focuses so tightly, Grease implies the topics I have raised, and many others. So I think it is a work of art, a firm image that projects, by means of what it does contain, everything it has chosen to leave out. And between the throbs of its ebullience, charm, and comedy, it conveys a feeling, about where we have been and how we got to where we are.”
Grease is well crafted, authentic, insightful, and truthful about an incredibly volatile, fascinating moment in American history.