Remembrance of Whatevuh

Grease, in its present form, is the theatrical equivalent of an asteroid: a chunk of old rock that, when it was young and hot, broke loose from the reality to which it had been anchored and now, cooled down, drifts aimlessly through space, accumulating royalties the way an asteroid accumulates specks of cosmic dust. It may have once had some meaning or function on its home planet, but it is so small a chunk, and has been drifting for so many aeons, that you would need a magnifying spectroscope to locate its contents. It exists, it drifts, it's there; that's all. Unless it happens to collide with you, there's no particular reason to bother about it.

The worst part, I'm afraid, is that it's all my fault. You see, back when I was a small child, the Voice encouraged me to write about theater outside New York. And so, one balmy night in Chicago, I went to see a non-Equity off-Loop show I'd heard was fun, at a theater called Kingston Mines. I enjoyed myself and said so in print. Somebody apparently thought this was a good omen, and the next thing I knew, Grease had become the longest-running musical on Broadway, and had spawned a gigantically successful movie version. The shock made me fall into an inexplicable torpor, from which I only awoke when Kerry Butler started mimicking Olivia Newton-John's accent in Xanadu.

That, at any rate, is the short version of the story. The missing details have to do with what Grease was and how it has evolved into something quite different. It began as a parody, of '50s rock and the teen movies that often encased it, to amuse the generation for which they were an adolescent rite of passage, welded to the greasers-vs.-nice-kids conflict that dogged middle-class high schools in the late Eisenhower era. By the early '70s, those high-schoolers had settled into their young urban professionalism; those who'd grown up in suburbia were moving back into the cities their parents' generation had fled, and they could look back on the foolishness of their high-school years with a rueful snicker.

Grease is, or was, that rueful snicker. The original New York production, in which director Tom Moore and choreographer Patricia Birch whipped the amicable japes of writers Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey into a giddy souffle, never lost sight of the regret under the foolery: It was cast with performers whose adolescent years dated from the era spoofed by the songs, a fact underscored by the presence— at least when the production began Off-Broadway—of their actual high-school yearbook photographs, strung out across the proscenium arch. For theatergoers in that age range, it was like using Dick Clark's American Bandstand in place of Proust's madeleine—a notion that's a big, silly, good-humored American joke. As Grease itself is.

Or was, at least. Nothing kills jokes like mass manufacture—if Walter Benjamin had had any sense, he'd have bemoaned the fate of the good laugh in the age of mechanical reproduction—and once Grease had been souped up into movie-blockbuster status, it was already well on its downward trajectory, destined to become the diluted thing it is now. The watery, wannabe-hit songs added for the movie, by more "professional" but emptier hands, now soften the brash edges of the show's cheerfully parodic score, while some of the original numbers have been junked, moved about, or had their lyrics tinkered with to preserve family values that were nowhere near the original's way of thinking. The original book made a tenuous, loose-limbed, silly sort of sense; the current one doesn't even try to make any, retaining scenes while cutting the songs that were their only reason for existing, and other such tricks.