The Power of “Grease”

Julianne Hough and Aaron Tveit as Sandy and Danny during a rehearsal for Foxs “Grease Live.”
Julianne Hough and Aaron Tveit as Sandy and Danny during a rehearsal for Fox’s “Grease: Live.”PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL BECKER / FOX

Sunday night saw the première of “Grease: Live,” a television adaptation of the original musical that no one really needed but was wholly entertaining nonetheless. The revival came after a series of similar live renditions of old beloved musicals, carried off with varying degrees of success: the crackling charm of “The Wiz” compared with the awkwardness of “Peter Pan.” After the feature-film trainwreck that was “Grease 2,” the producers of “Grease: Live” might be called brave, or reckless, for running the risk of ruining the story for longtime fans.

Sunday was only partly for those of us who grew up with “Grease,” and for whom the opening theme, performed by Jessie J in this version, provokes spine tingles. Our quibbles (Aaron Tveit is no seventies-era John Travolta) gave way to pure glee. After all, the appeal of “Grease,” set in the late nineteen-fifties, has never been just its infectious songs and outlandish get-ups. It has been the sense that the musical represents a time lost to us—an era of virtue, innocence, and harmless mischief that we can never get back. The fact that this time never existed doesn’t really matter; the idea of it, and its potential to guide and reform our lives, has fuelled our longings for several generations.

When I first watched the movie version of “Grease,” on VHS, in the nineties, the popular girls at my elementary school all fell within a sleek mold: they wore preppy, expensive clothes (with bras, I marvelled), put on makeup, and shaved their legs. My clothes were somehow never quite the same, even when I shopped at similar stores, and I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup. Then there was my last name. Plainly foreign, my name and I battled over how I would be defined, my relentless attempts to be like everyone else accompanied by the creeping sensation that I would always be different. To compensate, I wanted to cake on mascara and perfume and go out to late-night parties, anything to prove I could be part of a crowd, regular. Because my mother left most of those decisions to my father, I fought with him for autonomy, and mostly lost. I wondered why he couldn’t be like my friends’ parents, who gave them more freedom.

But, when I stretched out on the couch in our beige-toned den to watch my dad’s worn videotape of “Grease” and he settled into the armchair to join me halfway through, it felt like we were on the same wavelength. When my father was a boy, growing up in the Nigerian megacity of Lagos, he watched any Western he could find; Clint Eastwood was one of his idols. He eventually ended up at Alabama State University, in the mid-seventies, after consulting a directory of inexpensive state schools to which he could apply. Alabama was not exactly the land of his Western daydreams, but it was one of the first states, alphabetically, on the list.

My dad observed his new home with the wariness of an outsider undecided if he wanted to commit. He tried to insulate himself as best he could with a band of African immigrant students who cooked their own food and organized their own gatherings. They were part of their school, but also apart, protecting themselves from the unfamiliar. Racism and xenophobia didn’t matter, as long as he did what he came to do: get his degree. His single-mindedness, the same single-mindedness of most immigrants, enveloped him and held him steady against a tidal wave of change.

One night in Alabama, he ended up at a drive-in theatre, now extinct, to see “Grease.” He loved it. The film reminded him of his own relatively wholesome upbringing. My grandmother had sheltered her children from Lagos’s vices. “Grease” made him wish for the time before he came to America, and he especially admired the naïve lead Sandy, played by Olivia Newton-John, for her strong morals and good sense. It was how he later wanted me, his bookish but rebellious daughter, to be: a serious student free of alcohol, drugs, and the risk of teen pregnancy. I didn’t see the film exactly the way he did. Sandy was the hero of the smart girls who cared about being popular, and was clever enough to do something about it without losing herself. The idyllic, slightly mythic world of “Grease” was perfect for distilling our separate lessons: how things once were, how they should be. We knew “Grease” wasn’t real, but wasn’t life once this simple and straightforward? And couldn’t it be again?

The narrative power of “Grease” lies in its high-school setting, that last cocoon of childhood. You think you're an adult but are secretly afraid of what awaits. It seems like one of your final chances to decide who you want to be and what your life will look like, and “Grease” presents a vision of what we all would like it to be. High school itself is the nineteen-fifties of our imagination, always easier in our memories than it was in reality. With “Grease,” we can pretend we still want to go back.