Grease: Live

Grease‘s live audience and inconsequential snafus served to underscore its meticulous production and allowed us to get swept up in a joyous and uniformly powerful set of performances.

Grease Live! was exactly what it was supposed to be. It was fun. It was entertaining. It was well worth watching.

The production managed to capture the overall cheesy tone present in the original while moving through the many numbers with lightning speed. The three hours flew by quicker than expected at the outset thanks to giggle-worthy moments and fun numbers, with things really picking up in terms of overall entertainment and production value at the two-hour mark.

The three-hour production got off to a shaky start with camera work in the 1959-set Rydell High seemingly ready to trigger mass vertigo. But by the time the cast got to “Greased Lightnin’,” a frenetic dance number that kept building and growing so much, it threatened to spill out onto your floor, the show was rocking.

Regardless of its flaws, Grease is a reason to look forward to the next round of live musicals on TV. When it finally found its stride during “Born to Hand jive,” which was among the finest staged sequences of any live musical telecast so far, the hate-watching subsided and suddenly we were all back in high school again.

No, its bubblegum script and inconsistent performances didn’t allow the special to tear down boundaries or redefine the genre. However, with innovative choices from director Thomas Kail and an enthusiastic cast, Grease: Live managed to satiate audiences and pave the way for many more iterations of its kind.

The actors did fine, but the characters and their arcs became secondary to executing the grand scheme. This, in other words, was a show that was more about individual moments than about building a story.