Playwright: Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey
At: Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire
Phone: 847-634-0200; $42-$45
Runs through: April 22
By Jonathan Abarbanel
Any Chicagoan worth his Old Style knows that the perpetual phenomenon, Grease, began life in a former trolley barn on Lincoln Avenue. It was inspired by the Taft High School Class of 1957. The Pink Ladies of Grease were a real girl gang while the T-Birds really were the Goombas. Author Jim Jacobs, who went to Taft, hasn’t changed much. Watching him on You’re the One that I Want, he has the same nonchalant boyish manner, despite a few more pounds and a gray cast to his blond curls.
When Grease first became a Broadway hit in 1972, I remember Jim complaining that ‘They suburbanized it.’ The Chicago-specific song Foster Beach was replaced by the generic Summer Nights. A line about the boys watching The Mickey Mouse Club because ‘Annette is starting to get knockers’ was cut. And the song lyric that originally was ‘The girls will cream’ became ‘The kids will scream’ for Greased Lightnin’. Jacobs and his co-author, the late Warren Casey, might have protested—but not too loudly—as they trooped merrily to the bank. From what I’ve seen of the reality show selecting the new Grease leads, it isn’t likely that the original low-life urban grit will be restored in the upcoming Broadway revival.
The current production of Grease at the Marriott Theatre (and there will be another at Theatre at the Center in Muncie, Ind., opening May 3) at least makes a modest effort to restore some reality to the work, if not references to Annette’s hooters. It obliquely acknowledges that the last big revival and national tour of Grease (with ex-Monkee Peter Jones doing a turn as a DJ) totally buried its pleasant but small story in an overbearingly hyped-up show—not merely suburbanized, but over-glitzed and heartless. Marriott director and choreographer Marc Robin has taken it all down a few notches to a far more human level—sometimes quiet and sometimes funny—and showcases each cast member with at least one good number. Robin and musical director Ryan T. Nelson also have kept in mind that the score of Grease is late 1950s-style music and need not—should not—sound like the 1990s or 2000s.
The vivacious and energetic cast looks normal, not like sex goddesses or muscle boys, although everyone of them knows how to shake his/her booty. They succeed with freshness and by not overselling the product. A few may be just a tad long in the tooth to be 17 years old, but we’re willing to suspend disbelief for anyone who moves as well as they do.
Meanwhile, the Taft Class of ’57 recently had its 50th reunion (for real). The Goombas sported new leather jackets for the occasion.