Danny Bayne and Susan McFadden
in Grease
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Does it matter what the critics say about
Grease? Not one iota, which is good, since they're not going to be kind. So perhaps it's worth stating at the outset that this reprise of David Gilmore's earlier, definitely sexier production of over a decade ago isn't that different from the current
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat revival of the late Steven Pimlott's revival of that undemanding show. Between these two productions, not to mention the newly reawakened
Buddy , it seems increasingly apparent that shows don't close, they just go away at some point to return. The new marketing trick, meanwhile, is to spice them up with Real People chosen from television competitions that, I have to say, I don't watch. That in itself says something about a theatrical culture nowadays so lacking in real stars that it has to manufacture them, though it's unfair perhaps to blame the individuals themselves for a phenomenon in which they are merely so many willing pawns.
Danny Bayne in a scene from Grease
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But I digress. What is
Grease like in this go-round? Loud, fast, defiantly charmless, utterly painless and possessed of enough genuinely dynamic dance sequences courtesy Arlene Phillips that one doesn't have that much time to ponder the peculiar and apparently ceaseless hold exerted by '50s Americana over the U.K. Phillips sends her company into a veritable finger-snapping, clap-happy frenzy at the top of the second act on "Born To Hand Jive," while "Beauty School Drop Out" registers as a cloud-filled, smoky Busby Berkeley pastiche, here displaced to Rydell High ca. 1955, a milieu where the men spend most of their time slicking back their hair and the women gossip and giggle like some not quite human high-pitched harem. There wasn't much personality to the recent
Joseph, nor is there here, and it doesn't help that a considerable portion of the cast look old enough to be the parents of their characters. This is particularly true of Jayde Westaby's strong-voiced Rizzo, who communicates none of the raunchy fun one associates with the part but compensates by bringing an 11th-hour dollop of pathos and fervour to "There Are Worse Things I Could Do"—her outburst of anger at a putative pregnancy suggesting that all the show's synthetic discussion of sex may in fact have genuine consequences.
And what of the stars who sometimes have to shout to be heard over a band that plays the overture to the Jim Jacobs/Warren Casey with an urgency by way of
Gypsy? Dubliner Susan McFadden—sister of Westlife's Brian—has the harder role as Sandy, the goody two-shoes who turns out to be cannier than her surname (Dumbrowski) would indicate; I warmed to her most once she let her hair down and emerged sporting curls reminiscent of a pubescent Bernadette Peters. It's hardly McFadden's fault that her acting is scarcely tested. After all, Olivia Newton-John's film career didn't exactly skyrocket following a movie still remembered all these years later chiefly for Stockard Channing's Rizzo. The open-faced Danny Bayne isn't quite the physical specimen one might have anticipated, but then again Lee Mead can't be in everything (though give him time). Bayne's proven skills in freestyle, hip-hop and Latin American dance do all prove useful once he departs the inert book scenes and starts gyrating with an abandon pretty much unequalled anywhere else on the West End. His leather-jacketed Danny suggests unexpected goofiness at moments that find him squirting mouth spray in his eye during a bout of adolescent dysfunction while taking Sandy to a drive-in. And you can feel the audience in the newly smoke-free London wanting to get down and be baaaad when Danny lights up at the Burger Palace that is his mates' de facto home. The point is, the people who feasted on ITV's
Grease Is the Word on the small screen will lap it up on stage. As for the rest of us? Well, there's always
The Sound of Music, the one stage production so far where reality TV and real emotion have somehow managed against the odds to coalesce.
Grease
Book, Music and Lyrics by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey
Directed by David Gilmore
Piccadilly Theatre