Lyceum, Sheffield – until 16th November 2024
Reviewed by Alison Beaumont
4****
Grease the Musical is based on the 1978 American musical romantic comedy film starring John Travolta and Oliver Newton John. Grease follows the high school romance between Danny Zuko and Sandy Dumbrowski. During the summer Danny and Sandy fell in love but said their goodbyes and went their separate ways as they didn’t live near each other. However, Sandy then moves to the area and enrolls in Rydell High for her senior year not knowing that Danny also attends the same school. The pair meet up and Sandy is sad to see the Danny she fell in love with on the beach is not the same Danny at Rydell High.
The main characters Danny Zuko and Sandy Dumbrowski are played by Marley Fenton and Hope Dawe who have a very hard act to follow in the footsteps of John Travolta and Oliver Newton John. I particularly liked Hope when she sang the song “It’s raining on Prom Night” and felt that her vocals were better when she sang on her own. Marley had all the fun characteristics of Danny and played the part well.
Some of the scenes had been changed from the original movie and I couldn’t understand why some of these changes had been made, for instance, the dance competition scene when in the movie Danny went with Sandy and then won the competition with Cha Cha (Deena Kapadia) in the stage performance he went with Patty (Phoebe Roberts). I also couldn’t understand why in the cheerleading scene the cheerleaders wore boxing gloves instead of using pom poms.
The hand jive was out of this world and the dancers were all spot on and gave an amazing performance. They certainly had a lot of stamina.
I felt that all the T-birds were stronger as a team in their roles than the pink ladies and that some of the vocals for the females were a bit screechy on the high pitch notes. There were times when the music was a bit too loud to hear the words being sang but if like me you have watched Grease a million times you knew what they were singing anyway.
Ben Nicholas (Kenicie) was really good in the Greased Lightening scene, jumping on and off the car with good vocals too.
Another good song was when Roger (Lewis Day) and Jan (Emerald B) sang “Mooning”, I felt their vocals were good together.
Of course, the musical ended on a high with everyone stood up singing to the remix of songs It was good that everyone managed to respect the show and not sing along to all the favourites that we all know and love.