Critic Reviews

Grease: Live defied modesty, transcended nostalgia, served up cheese as a ten-course gourmet meal.

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.

Skillfully directed by Tommy Kail (“Hamilton”) and boasting exuberant choreography by Zach Woodlee and period-perfect costumes by William Ivey Long, Grease went down as easy as a chocolate malted.

There were quibbles to be had with some of the casting--um, Mario Lopez?--some flat punch lines, one major sound glitch, a bizarrely haphazard approach to sanitizing the racier bits, and uneven pacing and tone. But, the frothy ’50s-set high school musical was so expertly executed and choreographed visually and exuberantly performed by most of the actors that it more than compensated for its flaws.

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.

The little things that fell short of polished paled in comparison to the things that landed against all odds.

[An] ambitious, wildly energetic and mostly entertaining Grease: Live. Despite a few missteps, and even though, at three hours, the production seemed incredibly long, Grease: Live was above all a lot of fun.

Aaron Tveit's Danny won't make anyone forget John Travolta, but his Broadway chops showed in the live format, and Julianne Hough was an enchanting Sandy. Vanessa Hudgens' Rizzo? Adorable. But the MVP of Grease: Live has to be director Thomas Kail, who segued from Broadway's Hamilton to Rydell High and along with Alex Rudzinski, pulled off the most ambitious live TV musical in my memory, anyway.

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.

Kail’s boundless ambition and meticulous execution was the premium gasoline that made not just “Greased Lightning,” but the entire genre, race off towards the future.