Grease @ The Pantages Monday, March 16, 2009
Born of NBC's reality-TV casting competition Grease: You're the One That I Want, this latest take on Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey's Broadway-hit malt-shop musical features perfunctory performances by Eric Schneider and Emily Padgett as the star-crossed summer lovers, Danny and Sandy. This may explain why headliner status went to American Idol winner Taylor Hicks, despite his mere cameo appearance. He's the Teen Angel ("teen"? wait, what?) who advises beauty school dropout Frenchy (Kate Morgan Chadwick) to go back to high school. Hicks' turn is actually the most effective part of the show, with him crooning to her swooning, as he descends from above amid wafting curls of smoke — but that's not saying much. Director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall's staging generally involves the cast just walking around or, worse, sitting or standing in one place as they belt out their numbers. Can we get these kids some roller skates or something? The actors' voices are uniformly strong, though Schneider's is unremarkable, and Padgett often tackles the Olivia Newton-John songs like they're arias. Paul Huntley's wig stylings and Martin Pakledinaz's costume design provide delightfully retro coifs on the ladies and snazzy duds on the dudes, but Derek McLane's cartoon set looks like it was designed by a middle school stagecraft club. And what's with censoring the explicit lyrics? The Greased Lightnin' car is no longer "a real pussy wagon," it's a "dragon wagon." What the hell does that even mean? Make no mistake, I love Grease, with its timeless plot of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, girl-sluts-it-up-to-get-boy-back, but this not the one that you want. Pantages Theater, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., L.A.; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 1 & 6:30 p.m.; thru March 22. (Originally published in L.A. Weekly, March 20, 2009.)
posted by Derek Thomas @ 12:25 AM,
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