Inside GREASE By Scott Miller - New Line Theatre

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Inside GREASE background and analysis by Scott Miller

The year is 1959, a pivotal moment in American cultural history, when rock and roll was giving birth to the Sexual Revolution and everything in America culture was about to be turned upside down. Record companies were releasing more than a hundred singles every week and the country was about to explode. Grease, generally considered a trivial little musical about The Fabulous Fifties, is really the story of America’s tumultuous crossing over from the 50s to the 60s, throwing over repression and tradition for freedom and adventure (and a generous helping of cultural chaos), a time when the styles and culture of the disengaged and disenfranchised became overpowering symbols of teenage power and autonomy. Originally a rowdy, dangerous, over-sexed, and insightful piece of alternative theatre, Grease was inspired by the rule-busting success of Hair and shows like it, rejecting the trappings of other Broadway musicals for a more authentic, more visceral, more radical theatre experience that revealed great cultural truths about America. An experience largely forgotten by most productions of the show today. Like Hair before it and The Rocky Horror Show which would come a year later, Grease is a show about repression versus freedom in American sexuality, about the clumsy, tentative, but clearly emerging sexual freedom of the late 1950s, seen through the lens of the middle of the Sexual Revolution in the 1970s. It’s about the near carnal passion 1950s teenagers felt for their rock and roll, the first art form that actually changed human sexuality. (The phrase rock and roll was originally African American urban slang for sexual intercourse, going as far back as the 1920s, and it made its way onto many rhythm and blues recordings before the 1950s.) As theatre, Grease finds its roots in the rawness, the rowdiness, the lack of polish that made Hair and other experimental pieces in the 1960s such cultural phenomena. The impact of Hair on Grease can even be seen in the two shows’ titles, both taking as their primary symbols the hairstyles of young Americans as a form of rebellion and cultural declaration of independence. Just as the characters of Hair and Grease reject conformity and authority, so too do both Hair and Grease as theatre pieces. Like Hair, Grease is an anti-musical, closer to the experimental theatre pieces of New York’s off off Broadway movement in the 60s, and light years from other musicals running on Broadway at the time, like No No Nanette (in a terrible revival), Sugar, The Rothschilds, Applause, or A Little Night Music.

Goodbye to Sandra Dee

Also like Hair, Grease is about authenticity, the watchword of that first rock and roll generation. Teen sexuality has been an issue in America since the invention of the rumble seat, always moving forward like a freight train, forever going faster and farther; and Grease is a snapshot of America right before teen sexuality exploded, examining the early cracks in the armor of middle-class "respectability" and repression, the fantasy American Dream that never was but that came beaming into Americans’ homes over the television airwaves. Movie star Sandra Dee becomes Grease‘s overarching metaphor for the artificiality of adult American life, a symbol that needed piercing. Sandra Dee was a big star at this point, and just in the two years that Grease spans, she released The Restless Years (1958), The Reluctant Debutante (1958), A Stranger in My Arms (1959), Gidget (1959), Imitation of Life (1959), The Wild and the Innocent (1959), and A Summer Place (1959), jumping back and forth between empty-headed teen comedies and stark melodrama. Today, it may be hard to understand what Sandra Dee represented, but she was the poster girl for the big studios’ attempts to make teen movies, a genre which was up until that point the exclusive territory of small, low-budget producers like the ubiquitous Roger Corman (The Little Shop of Horrors, Bucket of Blood, and others). But the studios’ teen flicks were inevitably artificial in the extreme, creating a freakish – and clueless – adult imitation of the teen world, a kind of cultural Frankenstein, that teens could see right through. To savvy teenagers, Sandra Dee was a teen sellout, and in a world where authenticity was the goal, there was nothing worse. She was a fake – in her life, in her acting style, and in her onscreen emotions. Teen audiences didn’t want that; they wanted High School Hellcats and Teenage Doll. But adults loved Sandra Dee; she reassured them that their teen was a "good girl." And many American girls took Sandra Dee as a role model – but not the real Sandra Dee, the cheery public character Sandra Dee, confusing her onscreen persona with her real life. Millions of Americans in postwar America were trying to live an American Dream that was pure fiction, particularly for the working class; and that fiction is symbolized by Sandra Dee, a fiction at the heart of Sandy’s arc in Grease. But on another level, the metaphor gets even deeper – and this demonstrates the craftsmanship of this script – because Sandy’s relationship with Danny mirrors Sandra Dee’s difficult real life relationship with Bobby Darin. As Rizzo taunts Sandy with "Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee," she doesn’t really know how dark that dark underbelly really is… Darphne Merkin wrote in The New York Times in 2005 at the time of Sandra Dee’s death:

…the "darling, pink world," as she herself characterized it, that Sandra Dee was thought to inhabit by her fans had always been a grotesque mockery, plagued not by an overripened case of virginity but by childhood incest. The girl with brimming brown eyes and a fizzy lilt to her voice was born Alexandria Zuck in Bayonne, New Jersey. Her parents divorced when she was five; her father, a bus driver, disappeared from her life shortly thereafter, and her mother, Mary, married a much-older real-estate entrepreneur named Eugene Duvan within a few years. . . Worse yet, Dee's devoted but manipulative mother turned a conveniently blind eye to the defiled sexual appetites of her new husband. Duvan, who liked to tease his wife that he married her "just to get Sandy," started having sex with his beautiful stepdaughter when she was 8 and continued doing so almost until his death when she was 12.

As a result, Sandra Dee later suffered from anorexia, depression, and alcoholism throughout her life. All this made her cynically manufactured façade of sweetness even darker and more complex. This was the conventional, repressed, hypocritical, manufactured life from which Sandy Dumbrowski must escape. Merkin wrote:

The thing is, [her career] happened so fast, was over practically before it began, that we can almost be forgiven for misconstruing her as a cultural simulacrum: a blip on the monitor, a media invention, an adorable incarnation of a feminine ideal of the reluctant or unwitting nymphet, rather than a flesh-and-blood creature with needs and wishes (not to mention raging demons) of her own.

Grease looks at the fifties with twenty-twenty hindsight and it sees the darkness and deception of the decade’s role models and authority figures. Sandra Dee wasn’t happy in her real life because she was never allowed to be herself – to be authentic – and Sandy Dumbrowski suffers the same problem. Sandra Dee represents not just strict morality and virginity in Grease, but the entire manufactured mainstream culture of 1950s America, a culture the kids of Grease reject. Rizzo’s pretty great at choosing metaphors… Still, for most kids, the fifties were a time when America caught its breath. After decades of upheaval – World War I, Prohibition, the Depression, World War II, and the Korean War – suddenly times weren’t so hard and the world didn’t seem as dangerous. (Kids were told about the threat of a Cold War nuclear attack, but it didn’t mean much to them and didn’t really affect their lives.) Before the 50s, if kids worked it was for the family’s survival. During the 50s, if kids worked it was because they were saving up to buy a car or buy parts for the car they had. It was a happy, playful decade for many (white) Americans, even those in the working class, as family cars transformed adult culture and rock and roll transformed teen culture. And one of the points of Grease is that kids of the 50s could afford to worry only about their own trivial problems; there was no world war, no Hitler to fear anymore. Though Grease implies many complex things, it is actually about the ordinary, everyday lives of a group of teenagers. Their chief worries are whether or not they’ll have a date to the dance and can they get the car. But the fifties were only a brief window of respite before the dark, dangerous times would return, with Vietnam, race riots, the anti-war movement, Watergate, and recession. Today, some conservatives idealize the 1950s as a time of moral clarity, patriotism, family stability, and traditional values, a time to which America should return. But that 1950s never actually existed. What looks to them like moral clarity was actually well-masked racism, sexism, and economic oppression. The only people who were safe and comfortable were middle class and upper class white men (the only demographics that still idealize that time). What they see as patriotism was more like nationalistic terrorism, demagoguery, witch hunts. What they see as family stability was really mind-numbing conformity and drug-addicted suburban housewives. What they label "traditional values" were nothing short of race, class, and gender warfare. And it all boiled down to two central bogeymen, inextricably linked in the minds of the mainstream: sex and rock and roll. The Twin Gods of Grease. As Grace Palladino asks in Teenagers: An American History, "Did the world really work better when girls had no choice in life but to get married, blacks knew their servile place, and kids who lived outside the charmed circle of upper-middle class life were invisible?" The story of Grease is set during the 1958-59 school year, at exactly the same time that America was facing the preliminary rumblings of the Sexual Revolution that would arrive in the mid-1960s and blossom in the 70s, only to be ended by AIDS in the early 80s. And like The Rocky Horror Show did later, Grease shows us how America reacted to this tumultuous time though two of its main characters. Danny Zuko (along with Rizzo and Kenickie) represents that segment of American teens already sexually active in the 1940s and 50s, who ultimately frees the conforming Sandy to express her sexuality without fear or shame, leading her into a new life and a new decade of sexual freedom – a theme also at the heart, though far more cautiously, of the 1959 film A Summer Place, starring Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. Sandy Dumbrowski (notice how ethnic all the character names are, to suggest that they are working class) is mainstream America, reluctant to throw off the sexual repression of the conforming 1950s for the sexual adventuring of the 1960s. That is the story of Grease –and the story of America – the way sex was changing and the part rock and roll and cars and drive-ins played in that transformation. In the movie, the central love story may be the point, but on stage the romance is just a device for making a larger, more interesting point. Grease isn’t about Danny and Sandy (which is why fifteen of the show’s twenty songs have nothing at all to do with them); Grease is about how rock and roll changed sex in America. And those who criticize Grease for its "immoral" ending don’t understand what this show is really about – and they really haven’t paid attention to the lyric of "All Choked Up."

The "Word" Made Flesh

Grease first opened in Chicago, where its story is set, in 1971. To a large extent, the 1970s marked the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution. It was the decade that gave permanent berth to both the concept musical and the rock musical, both explored during the sixties but now taking their rightful place in mainstream musical theatre. These were shows that rejected the sunny optimism of earlier decades and instead revealed the feelings of rage and loss that pervaded America in this era of Vietnam and Watergate. The concept musical had been germinating since Marc Blitzstein’s very political, very angry The Cradle Will Rock in 1937, but it wasn’t until Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince’s Company in 1970 that the concept musical was in a position to change everything. The rock musical had been born with Expresso Bongo in 1958 and became mainstream with Hair in 1968, but it became a fixture on Broadway during the seventies, partly because the definition of rock was so pliable, so inclusive by then. A rock musical could be Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Rocky Horror Show, or Grease, none of which sounded anything like the others; and yet they all shared a disdain for authority, a taste for rebellion, and a sexual frankness to which only the language of rock and roll could give full voice. The phenomenon that was Grease began its long life in the summer of 1971 at Chicago’s Kingston Mines Theatre, in which its authors Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey were acting ensemble members. The show opened February 5, 1971, in a basement theatre where an audience of a hundred sat on the floor on newspaper. The set consisted of backdrops painted on brown paper. At that time the show had far less music, far less plot, and no central characters. But it did have infectious songs like "Greased Lightning," "Beauty School Dropout," "Those Magic Changes," and "We Go Together," and a solo for Patty Simcox that was later cut, "Yuck." New York producers Ken Waissman and Maxine Fox saw the show and recognized its surprising honesty and the appeal of its rough edges. Two of the Chicago cast members, Dinah Manoff (Marty) and James Canning (Doody) would play those roles on Broadway. Manoff would continue her role in the film. Once the producers decided to bring Grease to New York, they set about finding a production staff. One agent tried to sell them on hiring the bright young director-choreographer Michael Bennett, but they didn’t think he was right for Grease. They were probably right. They asked Gerald Freedman to direct, since he had helmed the original off Broadway production of Hair, but Freedman turned them down without even reading the script. They finally settled on director Tom Moore and choreographer Patricia Birch who had created such interesting, real staging and choreography for The Me Nobody Knows¸ a show about homeless kids. The producers wanted everything about the show to feel rough, unpolished, de-glamorized – honest and authentic, like Hair – a concept the subsequent film and revivals did not understand. According to Adrienne Barbeau’s autobiography There Are Worse Things I Could Do, the producers hired Moore to direct because "Tom's strength was getting performances that were so realistic the audience didn't believe they were watching actors. That's what Ken [Waissman] and Maxine [Fox] wanted for Grease. What they didn't want was a cotton-candy musical." It’s easy to hear on the original 1972 Grease cast album the raw, pure, untrained sound of 1950s rock and roll. Grease knows that sound because its creators lived it, the sound of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley. The earliest rock and roll was never about polish or precision; this was the punk rock of the fifties, purposefully rejecting mainstream necessities like playing in tune, singing on pitch, keeping the tempo, staying together. It was a wholesale rejection of the values of their parents and their parents’ culture, an aggressive fuck you to Pat Boone and the like. Three decades later, American kids in the Reagan Era (The Neo-50s) would rebel in much the same way with the creation of punk rock. Just as the greasers sported leather jackets, engineer boots, crazy hairstyles, and other rebellious fashions, so did their descendants, the punks, have their rebellious fashion statements in tattoos, piercings, and occult symbols. And now, so does the hip-hop community. Critic Michael Feingold wrote in his introduction to the 1972 published Grease script:

The people of Grease are a special class of aliens, self-appointed cynics in a work-oriented, upwardly mobile world. We know from the prologue that history has played its dirty trick on them before they even appear. They are not at the reunion; they will not be found among the prosperous Mrs. Honeywells and the go-getting vice presidents of Straight-Shooters, Unlimited. Nor, on the other hand, did they actively drop out; that was left to their younger siblings and cousins. (Memory of a line too explicit, and cut from the script early on: "Course I like life. Whaddaya think I am, a beatnik?") They were the group who thought they had, or chose to have, nowhere to go. They stayed in the monotonous work routine of the lower middle class, acquiring, if they were lucky, enough status to move to one of the more nondescript suburbs, and losing their strongest virtue – the group solidarity that had made them, in high school, a force to be reckoned with. It is appropriate that the finale of Grease celebrates that solidarity, with the saving of its heroine, and the reclamation of its hero from the clutches of respectability – a good lusty razz at the sanctimonious endings of those Sal Mineo j.d. [juvenile delinquent] movies (Somebody Up There Likes Me, remember?) wherein the tough punk is saved for society at the end. Everybody knew you didn’t go to those films to see that part.

After only three and a half weeks of rehearsal (again, in an effort to keep it from looking too polished), Grease opened off Broadway at the Eden Theatre on Valentine’s Day 1972. The reviews were negative to mixed. One hapless television reviewer said, "The worst thing I’ve ever seen opened tonight at the Eden Theatre." It ran 128 performances anyway. And then the show moved uptown in June 1972 to the Broadhurst Theatre. In December 1979, Grease broke Broadway’s long-run record. It made several moves during its Broadway run and finally closed April 13, 1980, after a total run of 3,388 performances. It was nominated for seven Tony Awards but won none. The original production paid back its investors four thousand percent. The show also ran for over two years in Mexico under the title Vaselina, becoming the longest-running musical there. The watered-down 1978 film version starring John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, and Stockard Channing became one of the most successful movie musicals of all time. After fifteen years of declining numbers, the teenage population in America began to grow again in the early 1990s – "They’re Back," said one Business Week cover – and so a glitzy, brainless, neon-scorched revival of Grease opened on Broadway in May 1994, painfully misdirected and misunderstood by Tommy Tune’s protégé, director-choreographer Jeff Calhoun (who would years later direct a brilliant revival of Big River for Deaf West Theatre). Completely ignoring (or just missing) Grease’s agenda as social commentary, this terrible revival decked out its set in bright, neon colors, making it into a simple-minded cartoon, and it added an actual 50s song, "Since I Don’t Have You," a song completely without the irony of the rest of the score and therefore completely out of synch with the rest of the show. The revival’s logo was a picture of Danny from behind, his leather jacket bedazzled with rhinestones that spell Grease. Could they have misunderstood the Burger Palace Boys any more? But despite the lack of taste or honesty, it was apparently perfect for the theme park Broadway had become by that point and it ran 1,503 performances. It was not, however, Grease. Over its life, Grease gave starts to many now well-known actors, including John Travolta (who had begun as Doody in the first national tour), Richard Gere, Treat Williams, Patrick Swayze, Adrienne Barbeau, Barry Bostwick, Jeff Conaway, Greg Evigan, Marilu Henner, and Judy Kaye, among others. In 2003 the British television network Channel 4 held a poll to determine the greatest musicals of all time. Grease won the top honor. In 2007, NBC created a reality show through which to choose the two leads for a new Broadway revival helmed by Kathleen Marshall, though any hopes of authenticity from a new Broadway Grease were slight. But perhaps it’s time for Grease in its original form to return at last, in this new Age of Ironic Detachment. In 2005, Norman Lebrecht wrote about the new postmodern musicals (Urinetown, Bat Boy, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Spelling Bee) in his online column: "The music in each of these shows amplifies this element of separation, licensing us to stand apart from what we are seeing and enter a third dimension where each of us can individually decide whether to take the plot literally or sardonically, whether to take offense or simply collapse in giggles. This degree of Ironic Detachment is the very making of the postmodern hit musical. Ironic Detachment would be unattainable in a Tom Stoppard play because I.D. requires musical inflexion; it is impossible in opera and ballet, which are stiffened by tradition against self-mockery. Its application is unique to the musical comedy, an ephemeral entertainment which has found new relevance through its philosophical engagement with 21st century concepts of irony and alienation." Still, Ironic Detachment isn’t entirely new in musical theatre – we’ve seen it before, periodically over the twentieth century, in The Threepenny Opera (1928), Of Thee I Sing (1931), The Cradle Will Rock (1937), Guys and Dolls (1950), The Fantasticks (1959), How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), Promenade (1965), Cabaret (1966), Promises, Promises (1969), Company (1970), The Rocky Horror Show (1973), The Robber Bridegroom (1974), and yes, Grease.

Sock Hop Baby, Roll Up Your Crazy Jeans!

Almost every American musical sets up the same challenge for the protagonist – assimilate or be removed. These central characters must make a choice to either change in certain ways in order to join the existing community or they must be removed from that community either by leaving or by dying. In The Music Man, Harold Hill turns legit in order to join the River City community. In Sweeney Todd, Jesus Christ Superstar, Bat Boy, and Evita, the main characters will not (or cannot) change so they must be removed by death. In Brigadoon, Tommy decides he must reject his previous life and change everything in order to stay in Brigadoon and become part of the community. In Show Boat, Julie and Steve will not play by mainstream society’s rules, so they must be removed, and they leave the Cotton Blossom. In Man of La Mancha, Quixote/Quijana refuses to live by conventional rules of behavior, so he must die. In Grease, Sandy ultimately assimilates into the greaser community, rejecting her parents’ world view. Many people are uncomfortable with the show’s ending because they miss the fact that Sandy doesn’t actually become a slut in the finale; she just learns how to dress like one, finally letting go of the tendency of too many Americans to stigmatize sexuality as dirty and shameful. She gives up the desexualizing poodle skirt that hid away her female form and replaces it with clothing that reveals and celebrates – and takes ownership of – her body and its adult curves. This is not a descent into decadence for Sandy; it is a throwing open of the doors of her moral prison. The authors’ intentions are clear in a stage direction in the final scene. After describing Sandy’s new hypersexual look – the tight pants, leather jacket, earrings, wild new hair – the script says, "Yet she actually looks prettier and more alive than she ever has." Teenagers’ clothing was a major source of contention at the time. Grace Palladino writes in her fascinating history Teenagers:

School authorities solved the immediate problem (teenage "delinquency") with dress and behavior codes. Tight blue jeans, ducktail haircuts, and excessive makeup were prohibited in school. "Dress Right" campaigns set appropriate high school styles that drew national attention in the late 1950s. Boys were required to wear shirts and ties, standard trousers (or neatly pressed khakis), and polished shoes (or clean white bucks). Girls were required to wear dresses or shirts and forgo pincurls, dungarees, and slacks. As an article in Newsweek explained the theory: "Bejeaned girls behave better when they’re in ladylike dress."

Sandy’s clothing in "All Choked Up" is extraordinarily subversive. The end of Grease suggests that a lasting, healthy relationship is only possible when both partners are openly and completely themselves, without regard for other people’s opinions, social conventions, or personal insecurities – and also when neither of them are afraid of their sexuality. This was not the message of the conforming adult world; this was a uniquely teen perspective. Both Sandy and Danny have to learn to be themselves, to shake off the masks of "cool" and "respectable." If there is any question about who the protagonist of the show is, Sandy is primary; she’s the one who has changed, who has learned something significant. The same may be true of Danny, but to a much lesser extent. But the ending of Grease isn’t a "moral" and shouldn’t be read that way. It doesn’t declare what we should or shouldn't do; it's an objective and accurate description of America in 1959. Sandy is America in its progression from puritanical repression in the 50s to sexual freedom in the Sexual Revolution of the 60s. (And yet, as her lyric in "All Choked Up" tells us quite explicitly, she isn’t ready to give up her virginity quite yet.) In 1959 America was about to "grow up" sexually, into adolescence in the 60s (Hair), and into full sexual adulthood in the 70s (Rocky Horror). Too many people believe that the message of Grease is that to win the man you love, you have to be a slut. But there's not a single line or lyric anywhere in the show to suggest Sandy has changed anything but her looks. Like Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady, Sandy learns The Secret, that anyone can Fit In just by talking and looking the right way (and don’t we all do that to some extent?), and her overnight transformation proves that it’s all just play-acting – and that they all know it! She has learned what Rizzo and the girls have known all along. Sandy has become one of them just by changing her clothes! She throws off the weight and triviality of 1950s conformity and allows herself the freedom of the coming 1960s, a refusal to fear her own sexuality, to see sex as dirty, the freedom to be able to talk and laugh openly about sex. But behind all the rest, there’s a simpler, more subversive message. Sandy isn’t just saved by how she dresses; she’s saved by singing rock and roll. It isn’t until she can achieve the authenticity and sexual frankness of rock and roll, that she can be healed. Grease doesn’t moralize; it just reports. Grease is set in 1958 and 1959 for a good reason – it’s not just about the changing of decades but also the changing of eras. Sandy’s triumphant line late in the show, "Goodbye to Sandra Dee," puts away not only Sandy’s false good-girl persona, but also the 1950s as a whole, a world in which the goody-goody Sandra Dee can be a role model, in which facades were cracking. We were moving on…

The Fabulous Fractious Fifties