Kids' stuff

Grease! is still rockin'
after all these years

by Bill Rodriguez

You know about all those movies where a young Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland get all stagestruck and say, "Hey, let's put on a show!" Well, something like that happened in a Chicago trolley barn in 1971. An inspired Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey put on a five-hour amateur production that wowed a couple of New York producers. They all worked on slimming down the community theater show to reasonable length, brought it back East the next year and soon it was a mega-hit. Grease ran on Broadway for nearly 71/2 years.

Now a revival is making the rounds, coming to Providence Performing Arts Center May 30-June 1. With the addition of an exclamation point (it worked for Oklahoma!), the musical Grease! packs in enough '50s nostalgia for black leather and poodle skirts to make the by now middle-aged Fonz weep.

Boomers giddy over the Golden Age of innocent juvenile delinquents have rocketed sound track sales to more than 20 million. Yet Grease!'s pumped-up fun has translated well enough to have traveled to 19 countries. Still among karaoke bar favorites are its "You're the One That I Want," "Summer Nights" and "Greased Lightning."

The 1978 movie switched from JD to DJ with a disco transformation of the stage version's rude rock. The inner city surroundings that gave a desperate edge to the frolics were replaced by suburban LA-LA-Land pink flamingos and sunshine.

The tour production's director, Ray DeMattis, has a long-time connection with the show, playing the class clown and mooning expert Roger for a long stretch in the original tour and then on Broadway. He appeared on Broadway most recently in City of Angels and has the recurring role of Alfred Phelps on TV's The Cosby Show. He spoke from the Goodspeed Opera House, in Connecticut, where he is directing another musical.

Q: You came to directing Grease! with more than 1000 performances behind you on stage. Was it a big relief to finally get to do things your way?

A: (laughs) It's fun! What I wanted to do The interest in Grease came back because Tommy Tune had done a [1994] revival of it, and that awakened interest in the show. He did a totally different take on it. I think he decided to do more of a colorful, cartoon kind of thing about the '50s. He went wild and splashy and big and dancey. He decided to emphasize the '50-isms of the show, the overall '50s energy, as opposed to the specific storyline. Whereas the original stage production took itself more seriously. I thought the story could still play and thought that the audience could still care about these kids. And so I went back and emphasized the plot and brought it back to somewhere in the middle.

We add an ensemble, which the original company never had, and some of the pre-show stuff, with the DJ, Nick Fontaine, playing with the audience and a dance contest, things like that. I'm happy with it, because I think it treats the period lovingly, treats the kids lovingly.

The original show was kind of raunchy and a kind of parody of greaser toughness. We softened it a lot. Because of the success of the movie, so many young people come into the show so we wanted to make it as broadly palatable as possible.

Q: The 1978 movie has been described as "frothier" than the stage version. What differences in tone and style do you see?

A: The overall is much sunnier. It even looks like it takes place in California. But really what this was about it was written by two guys from the South Side of Chicago. It's about an inner city school. It's much grittier. The world is kind of inverted, where all of the class valedictorians and the bright kids are the villains, or the ones that are made fun of. The real heroes here are the blue-collar greaser kids who have these gangs because of the thing of replacing the family. As ersatz a gang as it is, they stick together, the gang is important, and this is the best time of their lives.

Q: You talk about the characters as individuals rather than just stereotypes. What opportunities did you find to get them across more fully?

A: Jim and Warren were very specific about who these people were, and what they wanted them to be, and what their contributions to the gang were, and what they added to the overall arc of the evening. I'm indebted to Tom Moore, the original director of the show, who added to the script the most important element, which is all of this tough behavior and tough language and posturing comes from the fact that these kids are terribly, terribly insecure and vulnerable, and that they use this as a facade to face the world and be tough to keep from hurting.

Q: What was it about 1950s teenage life that has kept it interesting all these years?

A: See, that's the point. I think it's that anybody who's ever been a teenager knows what it's like to be bullied or have to act a certain way in front of your friends, to put up some kind of front. The crushes, the secret love affairs, the hurts that happen. All that stuff, all that energy, that hormonal rumbling underneath this thing. I think people can relate to it.