Grim is the word. This version of the beloved 50s-set high school musical has a hard carapace of professionalism but underneath it’s colourless, charmless, and emptily energetic. The love story of bad boy Danny and goody two-shoes Sandy is insipid, and swamped by a tide of teen-drama clichés. The familiar songs still stand up, but only a few of the big numbers – Greased Lightning, Hopelessly Devoted to You and Hand Jive (here sounding alarmingly like ‘hand-job’) – have real vocal power or choreographic verve.
I love Grease and had one of the most enjoyable interviews of my journalistic career with its surviving creator Jim Jacobs before the 1993 Dominion production, but ooh, ooh, ooh, this isn’t the one that I want.
