I have the sneaking suspicion there’s not much point in writing a review of Grease: your initial reaction to even the word is probably all you need to know.
If your reaction is a positive one, I’m happy to tell you the Pittsburgh CLO production currently playing at the Benedum Center is a solid one. The cast (excellent across the board and led by the winning duo of Zach Adkins and Kristen Martin) is talented and appealing, the direction and choreography (both by Barry Ivan) are peppy and playful; the sets (by Cliff Simon) are appropriately nostalgic; the costumes (by Gail Baldoni) are perfectly candy-colored; and the songs are still the songs—as they were in the beginning and ever shall be, amen. If you’re looking to see Grease, you won’t be disappointed.
There’s certainly nothing major to fault with this production, so if you’re hesitant to go, your qualms will have to be based on Grease itself. If your reaction is, at best, tepid—maybe you’ve been burned by a lesser production before, or maybe you find it hard to stomach something that has such a close association with John Travolta—I’m hoping I can convince you to give it another chance. My initial reaction was also tepid, but I walked out a believer.
I walked into this production with almost no prior experience with the show (I’ve seen the movie exactly once), though like many people, I know most of the story and songs through cultural osmosis. Still, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I assumed (rightly) that some of the material would have aged poorly. I also assumed (also rightly) that the show would unavoidably, though not unpleasantly, have a paint-by-numbers quality often found in productions of well-known pieces of theater: in many ways, Grease has essentially become a jukebox musical of itself.
All that being said, plenty of my expectations were, if not entirely subverted, then at least complicated. Don’t get me wrong: the show is still a theatrical hamburger. It’s not going to fundamentally expand your palate—but when you’re in the mood for it, nothing else will do. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, the chef will add new spices or toppings that’ll make you pay closer attention.
This production does a wonderful job of delivering Grease as expected, but it brings out certain threads in the material that made me reconsider my assumptions as well. Though there is that classic boys-versus-girls dichotomy observed in nearly every scene, the strong casting here allows for truly equal weight and importance to be given to each half of the equation. And despite the much-maligned ending of the film, Sandy at the end of this production isn’t subsuming her identity into Danny’s as much as mocking that very idea. The message, then, has less to do with girls accommodating boys than teenagers trying on different identities to find a middle ground between extremes that are easy to perform but don’t add much value to anyone’s lives. There’s more nuance in this story than it’s often given credit for, a fact this production highlights beautifully.
I certainly wasn’t expecting the Teen Angel sequence, a storytelling inch that this production takes as a weird and wonderful mile. Clay Aiken (dressed in a truly fantastic outfit that even Liberace might have dismissed as too much) is clearly having a ball chewing the scenery as thoroughly as he can, and while I can’t say I quite understood the staging, I appreciated its sheer and earnest excess, as well as the thumbing of the nose it gives to the compulsory heterosexuality woven into the rest of the story.
Unlike books, TV, or movies, theater doesn’t have much of a capacity for sequels or series. Instead, we have shows like Grease, done often and done everywhere, the musical equivalent of a summer blockbuster. So what if we know what’s going to happen? So what if it’s going to be pretty much exactly what we expect? There’s a real joy in sitting back in an air-conditioned room for two hours on a hot day and enjoying how something unfolds rather than trying to guess where it’ll go. Sometimes you want to watch attractive superheroes saving the world for the umpteenth time; sometimes you want to watch attractive performers singing catchy songs for the umpteenth time. I’d suggest that, this summer, you let Grease be that experience. There are, after all, worse things you could do.
Grease runs through June 16th. For ticket information, visit Pittsburgh CLO’s site.
Laura Caton grew up as a military brat and has lived in six states and two countries, but considers Pittsburgh her adopted hometown. She moved back to Pittsburgh in 2017 after four years of working in theater administration in New York City. When she’s not writing about theater, she can be found translating German novels, watching anything that bears even a passing resemblance to a Nora Ephron movie, and reading omnivorously.
Categories: Archived Reviews