In Which We Watch Grease
Jul. 22nd, 2018 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aWe saw Grease, the musical today. A first for me, as I've never seen the musical or the movie. And, it was ... OK.
The best song of the play is surely "Summer Nights", a song that I've heard a million times, but never knew was from Grease. It's a great song with a clever look at the different points of view of the sexes, and it feels even more fun in the context of the play, as you see the entire cast come together to sing the two sides of the duet. And the rest of the songs: they're OK too. Lots of early Rock & Roll influence. I kept swearing that I was hearing the chords of Ritchie Valens' "Hey Donna" ("I had a girl, Donna was her name ..."). Actually, there was one other that was great, "Born to Hand Jive", but that was largely because of great choreography, which I'm sure is usually the case.
The storyline of the musical was ... basic. It was mostly about a love story between two unlike people (Sandy and Danny). The thing I did appreciate, though, was how many of the other characters got their own songs (Marty's "Freddy, My Love", Kenickie's "Greased Lightning", Roger's "Mooning", Frenchy's "Beauty School Dropout", Rizzo's "There Are Worse Things I Can Do"), revealing who they were in this wide world of 1959 high school.
I do wonder how shocking the story points were back in 1971-1972 when the original versions of the musical appeared or even in 1978 when the movie debuted. I'm talking about the kids having frank discussions of sex and pregnancy as they smoke, drink, and make-out. I mean, post the '80s, it seems pretty expected, but it might have been different in the same era that Happy Days (1974-1984) was projecting a white-washed picture of '50s innocence.
The ending of Grease, though, what a mess. Sandy changes everything about what and who she is to be accepted by Danny, which is pretty disgusting on the face of it. Maybe it was intended as a response to Rizzo's "Worse Things", where she says she could "throw my life away / On a dream that won't come true", but if so it's lost by the other ideas of that same song and the fact that there's no connective tissue. Absent that, Sandy's decision comes out of nowhere. Then there's the fact that the play ends on the oft-repeated song "We Go Together", which talks about how they're all going to be together, which links well to Sandy's decision to give up her self-identity for the community, but poorly with the fact that the play has a framing sequence of a twenty-year reunion, where it feels like none of these people have seen each other for years. But, that framing sequence isn't repeated at the end, so again we get a muddy, muddy story. Was the song intended to be genuine or ironic?
I have to wonder if the ending of Grease got workshopped to death, and express some surprise that it's such a popular hit. But maybe it was the same nostalgia as Happy Days, just with a more realistic point of view.
The best song of the play is surely "Summer Nights", a song that I've heard a million times, but never knew was from Grease. It's a great song with a clever look at the different points of view of the sexes, and it feels even more fun in the context of the play, as you see the entire cast come together to sing the two sides of the duet. And the rest of the songs: they're OK too. Lots of early Rock & Roll influence. I kept swearing that I was hearing the chords of Ritchie Valens' "Hey Donna" ("I had a girl, Donna was her name ..."). Actually, there was one other that was great, "Born to Hand Jive", but that was largely because of great choreography, which I'm sure is usually the case.
The storyline of the musical was ... basic. It was mostly about a love story between two unlike people (Sandy and Danny). The thing I did appreciate, though, was how many of the other characters got their own songs (Marty's "Freddy, My Love", Kenickie's "Greased Lightning", Roger's "Mooning", Frenchy's "Beauty School Dropout", Rizzo's "There Are Worse Things I Can Do"), revealing who they were in this wide world of 1959 high school.
I do wonder how shocking the story points were back in 1971-1972 when the original versions of the musical appeared or even in 1978 when the movie debuted. I'm talking about the kids having frank discussions of sex and pregnancy as they smoke, drink, and make-out. I mean, post the '80s, it seems pretty expected, but it might have been different in the same era that Happy Days (1974-1984) was projecting a white-washed picture of '50s innocence.
The ending of Grease, though, what a mess. Sandy changes everything about what and who she is to be accepted by Danny, which is pretty disgusting on the face of it. Maybe it was intended as a response to Rizzo's "Worse Things", where she says she could "throw my life away / On a dream that won't come true", but if so it's lost by the other ideas of that same song and the fact that there's no connective tissue. Absent that, Sandy's decision comes out of nowhere. Then there's the fact that the play ends on the oft-repeated song "We Go Together", which talks about how they're all going to be together, which links well to Sandy's decision to give up her self-identity for the community, but poorly with the fact that the play has a framing sequence of a twenty-year reunion, where it feels like none of these people have seen each other for years. But, that framing sequence isn't repeated at the end, so again we get a muddy, muddy story. Was the song intended to be genuine or ironic?
I have to wonder if the ending of Grease got workshopped to death, and express some surprise that it's such a popular hit. But maybe it was the same nostalgia as Happy Days, just with a more realistic point of view.