The Original Grease

Before Grease became a popular movie, subsequently sanitized into just another high school musical, it was a darker stage musical with a real underbelly of teenage angst and delinquency. It was far edgier, raunchier, and more brutal, especially so in this ‘original’ pre-Broadway version, currently being presented by Squabbalogic.

While the Grease we know now is full-on 50s nostalgia, this raw original version was a kind of anti-nostalgia. The coarse language, attitude, cruelty and bullying of delinquent teenagers are far more in-your face.

For a night at the Seymour Centre, we’re transported back to the original out-of-town tryout of the musical, and a worts-and-all, rough-edged, unpolished early version, full of songs subsequently discarded and replaced by now-popular standards, heard in different, earlier forms, or even sung by different characters. We also get a couple of cringeworthy, long-since cut scenes, and much material that was awaiting fine tuning.

For anyone like myself who remembers productions of Grease as seen here in 1970’s and early 1980s, this ‘original’ is the rough and ready precursor which has morphed rom that far tougher musical into the G-Rated, family-friendly extravaganza which recently toured nationally.

There’s a whole different ensemble balance to the show, and a vibrant, energetic, young cast relish the opportunity to keep things pumping.

The Sandy / Danny romance doesn’t dominate, in a version that is far more bad girl Rizzo’s show, including a snappy verse of her own in the now all-male ‘Greased Lightning’, while it’s not Danny Zuko who ends up alone at the Drive-in movie.

Whether it’s in the writing or the performance, Coral Mercer-Jones creates a more layered, sometimes poignant Rizzo, with vulnerability underlying the tough façade.

Sandy feels distinctly under-written in this early draft, giving Emily Hart little to work with, while Temujin Terra’s lively, cocky Kenickie steals much of the anticipated focus from Brendan Xavier’s Danny.

Both Patti Simcox and Miss Lynch have their own songs, with Patti a far more substantial role than the one which has survived, placing a stronger emphasis on her unrequited attraction to bad-boy Danny. Matilda Moran stamps her mark on this better-developed version of Patti, while Miss Lynch gets a late-show moment with her song, allowing Michele Lansdown to momentarily move beyond the two-dimensional school-marm Miss Lynch has become of late.

An unaccompanied version of act one closer ‘We Go Together’ really does feel like a gathering of friends in a park, spontaneously joining in on a song, stamping a vastly different feel on the scene.

I’m not sure whether the part of Marty was better written at this early stage, or whether Caroline Oayda is such a fine young musical theatre performer that she makes it seem that way. The relationship of overweight teens Roger (Jason Mobbs-Green) and Jan (Stephanie Priest) also plays with an unexpected warmth and humanity.

Daniella Mirels is an engaging Frenchy, Victoria Knowles nails the cameo of Cha Cha, but nerdy Eugene (Gareth Isaac), it appears, has always been an under-written stereotype on the margins of the text.

Georgia Hopkins’ basic, grungy setting leaves the visual hard-lifting to the splendid costumes (Brendan Hay), shoes and hairdos (Dianne Murphy).

A terrific rock band powers punches out the score effectively.

Short on dance breaks and heavy on angst, drama and very dark comedy, this isn’t a Grease for young kids, though I suspect teenagers will readily identify.

OIn and of itself The Original Grease isn’t a great musical in this out-of-town tryout version, a rough draft of what was to come, but for musical theatre fans in particular, intrigued by the way in which shows develop, it is well worth seeing.

Neil Litchfield

Images: Michael Francis, Francis Fotography