Well, I Feel So Strange

As I watched our run-through tonight, I tried to see the show through the eyes of a stranger who just bought a ticket. What will people think of this enterprise of ours? I laughed so many times imagining the shocked faces that will dot the audience like a mixture of Where's Waldo and The Scream.

I think our audience members will fall into one of three categories...

Category One: Holy Fucking Shit, I Fucking Love This! These are the folks who have no emotional stake coming in. Either they know absolutely nothing about Grease or they know the movie but carry no expectations about what the stage show will be like. I think these people will really embrace our show, delight in our madness, and leave having had a total fucking blast.

Category Two: Why'd You Have to Dirty It Up Like That? These are the folks who know the movie and in some cases have seen those Grease tours, so ill-conceived they make Jekyll & Hyde seem like Sweeney Todd. Many in this category have seen Grease many times, performed by high schools, middle schools, church groups, summer camps, student-directed college groups, and The Muny. They live in blissful ignorance of the Dark Side of the Grease, believing the show to be nothing more than a cheery romp through Cupid's grove with some mischievous suburbanettes. They've never heard the whole lyric to "Greased Lightning," thinking that the dozen or so jump cuts the broadcast networks insert, leaving barely a single angry inch of the original song, is just some edgy new-fangled style of editing. They'll literally shit themselves in shock when Sandy punches Patty in the last scene and then says "Fuck it!" These decent folks won't hate the show, but will be disappointed in us for having a rusted moral compass. They won't care that we're just doing the show the way it was written. We haven't added a word.

Category Three: You killed Grease! These are the folks who are going to hate, hate, HATE our production. Most of this group knows the movie inside and out. They can reproduce the staging for "Hopelessly Devoted to You" and "You're the One That I Want" with one saddle shoe tied behind their back. Nearly a quarter of them have actually bought a wading pool for their backyard, and a fun house. (That last statistic provided by the U.S. Census Bureau.) These are the people responsible for making the shallow stench of the movie forever stick to the stage show like poop on a shoe. They will hate that our show isn't the movie. But the truth is, we already know these folks -- we met them when we did The Rocky Horror Show. They hated that too.

I'm pretty confident that everyone will fall into one of these three categories. The fun will be in predicting who will fall where...

Stay tuned...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott


1 comments:

Richard Roland | February 18, 2007 at 10:32 PM

I love your breakdown of the audiences. That's pretty much how I thought of our audiences when I was playing Danny in a production in Akron. It was directed by an original Broadway company member and included much of the original text. It shocked the hell out of most people.

I was fortunate enough to see (and am old enough to have seen) the show on Broadway in 1977 a year before the film version came out and will always think of GREASE as that loud and scary show that played at the Royale Theatre on 45th St. I feel you don't give the film its credit. While it's very much a different story than the stage version, it certainly has its merits. But, I agree that it does not represent GREASE in the way it was originally conceived.

Which is why I wish I could see your production! I start rehearsals on the 26th of this month for the production I'm directing, and, while I'm doing the "original" version, it is still the "clean" version. I am not allowed to implement any changes to the script to bring it back to the original '72 version, being that the theatre is so close to Manhattan and so close to the opening of the impending revival.

There is a great interview with Carole Demas in Playbill.com. She actually talks about what may have been the first turn of events towards a "cleaner" GREASE...events which would cascade throughout the original run, then reappear during the 1994 revival when Kathie Lee Gifford spoke out about the language on her morning TV show. So the Samuel French version that we receive today is light years away from what Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey had originally penned and given birth to on February 14, 1972 at the Eden Theatre in New York.

May you shock audiences as they were meant to be shocked in '72. And may you woo, thrill and excite audiences as they were meant to be wooed, thrilled and excited in '72. GREASE has an awesome power to do all that and more to its observers.

Have great run.

Rich

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