Is Alderson successful in bringing audiences back to a time when people felt joy and aliveness?
While this audience clearly enjoyed themselves, and that is the most important thing for a cottage country summer afternoon or evening at the theatre, Grease does something rather important. It invites renewed consideration of the musical’s period attitudes and satirical intents.
To regard the production solely as nostalgia would be to diminish the art form. At its best, musical theatre can both please an audience and prompt reflection on the cultural values it presents. That tension remains central to this Thousand Islands’ staging.
The show’s buoyant familiarity is evident on the Springer stage. So too is the question of whether Grease has outlived some of its ease. The musical’s book delves into painful aspects of growing up that audience members may have dealt with in high school and don’t want to revisit.
It’s the first day at Rydell High School. Two gangs rule the school – the Pink Ladies and the Burger Boys. Realizing this is their last year together, the kids want to make it memorable. New student Sandy (Paige Foskett) shares with the Pink Ladies all about her summer romance with Danny Zuko (Will Lincoln-Gouett) at the local beach. The romance grew cold as Sandy was to attend another high school. However, there was a change of plans in her family, and Sandy ended up at Rydell. Danny is not the nice guy Sandy remembers from the summer, which causes a rift between them. The climax of the story is a school dance judged by WAXX DJ Vince Fontaine (Kade McCloud), where the kids compete to be the best dancer at the school.
Alderson directs the production creatively, peppering it with the era’s flair and a saucy, naughty dash of double entendre here and there. He makes some imaginative staging choices. The first included a poster on the back wall that initially puzzled me. It reads: Join School Counsel Today. It should be Council. (Even retired, the teacher still comes out in me)
And then I got it.
Is this Alderson’s quiet, satirical manner of not only poking fun at Rydell’s educational system but also perhaps a wink at the turmoil in the Ontario education system? If you didn’t intend that meaning, Thomas, it comes across. Perfectly.
Another imaginative staging moment occurs when the sophisticated Pink Lady beauty, Marty (Sierra Holder), steps through a mirror to sing ‘Freddy My Love’ and enter another world in a doo-wop moment with two other Pink Ladies. It works.
Music Director Rich Coburn elicits vocal richness in several songs; two notable examples are the title song that opens the show and ‘Greased Lightning’, which designer Mikael Kangas nicely lights to bring out the wine-red colour of Kenickie’s auto shop car. Jesse Weafer’s hand-jive choreography remains apt. Costume Designer Beyata Hackborn beautifully captures the look and feel of the era’s fashion, from the girls’ poodle skirts and baby-doll pyjamas to the boys’ tight rolled-up jeans and sneakers.
Freddy Van Camp’s set design uses bright neon arrows to indicate locations such as the Burger Palace, Ray’s Park and Campsite, the Twilite Drive-In, and local radio station WAXX. The design is bright, loud and intentionally expansive, requiring performances scaled to match its visual energy. Richard Feren selects appropriate 50s pre-show music for the audience as they enter the Springer Theatre. Several around me were humming along. However, there are some sound balance issues which occasionally interfered with clarity. Several ensemble numbers, including “Greased Lightning,” “Born to Hand-Jive” and “Those Magic Changes,” lost lyrics in performance. In one repeated phrase of ‘hand-jive’, unclear enunciation created an unintended distraction.
The hard-working, nimble, and agile ensemble cast gets the idea that they are adults playing stereotypical teenagers, changing yet again in their personalities as they venture towards adulthood. Paige Foskett brings a charming, sweet quality to her nice girl Sandy, with a warm vocal presence in “Summer Nights.” Will Lincoln-Gouett’s Danny conveys the awkward bravado and vulnerability of a 17-year-old boy, particularly in the Act 2 solo “Alone at the Drive-In,” after Sandy leaves him following his attempt to make out with her in the car.
Megan Dallan’s Patty is an energetic school busybody, inserting herself into others’ affairs with calculated friendliness. Her cheerleading sequence is sharply comic because she does make what might be construed as an unladylike move. Zoe O’Connor’s Frenchy is a delightfully sounding bleach-blonde-haired Betty Boop whose sadness when she drops out of beauty school is felt. As Rizzo, Amy Holden emphasizes the character’s toughness and sexual confidence, while Alex Fellowes Smith’s suave, tight-jeaned and swivelling-hipped Kenickie remains focused and present throughout “Greased Lightning.”
Other members of the gangs lean into the musical’s broad stereotypes, including Acacia Roshel’s ever-hungry Jan, Luca McPhee’s guitar-struggling Doody and Ben Cameron’s Sonny, a tough talker whose self-image as a ladies’ man is undercut by his comic foolishness.
To return to the question asked earlier.
Alderson can hold his head high, as can his creative team and actors. This audience clearly enjoyed themselves on a nostalgic journey back to the 50s, so it is successful. This Grease gives audiences many of the images, sounds, and attitudes associated with the film and the era, while framing the characters as exaggerated adult interpretations of youthful 1950s and 1960s types. The inclusion of songs familiar from the film, though not all part of the original stage version, serves the production’s audience-forward approach and proves effective.
But herein lies the challenge in staging Grease in the twenty-first century.
There are two moments when I felt a cinematic quality in Alderson’s blocking rather than a stage play. During ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You ’, Foskett is wearing a nightgown and sitting on stairs in a manner akin to what the late Olivia Newton-John did in the film. The choice made by Alderson and choreographer Weafer in ‘Beauty School Dropout’ to have tap dancers remains puzzling. It’s a moment when O’Connor’s Frenchy genuinely looks devastated to be a beauty school dropout. But to bring tap dancers in to take the focus off Frenchy? It comes across as a Busby Berkeley musical at that moment. Yes, it’s fine to showcase tap dancers, but the choice remains unclear since it’s Frenchy’s song.
Rizzo’s pregnancy ‘scare’ and the fact that it was later sloughed off as a false alarm appear rather cold and nonchalant. Beneath her outer shell of toughness, Amy Holden reveals a momentarily frightened Rizzo in her ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’. This very real moment might bring back some unpleasant memories. Another occurs in the way the gang speak, refers to and treats Thomas Winkler’s Eugene, an awkwardly shy kid who only wants to fit in with the others.
I saw only the film in 1978 and then travelled to Manhattan in the mid-’90s with the show’s revival, where Brooke Shields played Rizzo and Adrian Zmed played Danny. In the mid 90s, there wasn’t the idea that the world would become a place where some individuals could be easily offended by satirical humour or innuendo of any kind.
Fast forward and look where we are.
Still, The Thousand Islands’ staging of Grease is worth a visit for a trip down memory lane. I hear it’s nearly sold out and had to be extended as ticket demand was high. That’s wonderful to hear.
It’s still important that theatre can make audiences think about what they’ve seen.
That’s a healthy thing to do.
Running time: approximately two hours and ten minutes with one intermission.
The production runs to August 15 at The Springer Theatre, 185 South Street, Gananoque. For tickets: https://1000islandsplayhouse.com/grease/ or call (613) 382-7020.
THOUSAND ISLANDS PLAYHOUSE presents GREASE with Book, Music and Lyrics by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey
Directed by Thomas Alderson
Music Direction: Rich Coburn
Choreographer: Jesse Weafer
Set Designer: Freddy Van Camp
Costume Designer: Beyata Hackborn
Lighting Designer: Mikael Kangas
Sound Designer: Richard Feren
Stage Manager: Jessica Severin
Band: Rich Coburn, Matthew Souaid, Sean Donaldson, James D. Taylor, Alec Barken
Performers: Will Lincoln-Gouett, Paige Foskett, Amy Holden, Alex Fellowes Smith, Zoë O’Connor, Sierra Holder, Michele Shuster, Kade McCloud, Acacia Roshel, Megan Dallan, Jameson Mosher, Luca McPhee, Ben Cameron, Thomas Winiker, Tyler Pearse, Robyn Esson
