

‘Grease the Musical’ review
This review is from May 2022. ‘Grease’ returns for 2023 with a TBC new cast. A gritty version of ‘Grease’? Is such a thing even possible? Well, it’s all relative. The ‘Grease’ that most of us know from the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John film is a lie. Or at least, it’s very much not the original 1971 stage version of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical, which began life with dramatically different songs and a somewhat different story. Nor is it the 1973 version, which set the West End on fire when the show made its UK debut with Richard Gere and Elaine Paige as leads. If the basic, 1959-set plot about the high-school romance between greaser Danny Zucker and nice new girl Sandy Dumbrowski has remained constant, then almost everything else about ‘Grease’ has been chopped and changed at some point or other over the years. It’s a multiversal entity, with no two versions the same. Nikolai Foster’s big West End revival isn’t an aggressively dramatic reappraisal, like the version of ‘Oklahoma!’ currently playing at the Young Vic. It’s more a careful sift through all the songs and story options available, that have then been pieced together into the hardest-edged version available, but without actually dramatically departing from precedent. Plus it’s got Peter Andre in it, who we’ll deal with later. Foster’s key decision is to reinstate swathes of the very first, 1971 version of the musical, which has never been performed professionally in this country (or indeed, outsid