Editor Pick
Grease is Not the Word
- August 4, 2009
- Rated 2 of 5 by
Sonia3 from London, United Kingdom
Last week it was my sisters 9th birthday and she decided that for her birthday she wanted to see a musical. With the whole family being fans of the film grease and the X Factor Grease seemed like the perfect choice.
-Tickets-
I booked the tickets using ticketmaster, the whole thing was very quick and easy. I used their online booking form and the tickets were delivered less than a week later.
The ticket prices from ticketmaster were very competitive. We paid £271.50 for five stalls tickets and this included all fees and delivery.
-The Theatre-
Grease is currently showing at the Piccaddilly Theatre in London.
Getting to the theatre was quite difficult. It's partly our own fault for not printing off a map but we've never had any problem finding theatre's before so we assumed that we could just be pointed in the right direction and find the theatre easily enough. The Piccadilly Theatre is located on what seems to be a little side street and it's quite out of the way so I would definitely recommend using a map.
My initial impression of the threatre was very good. It was like stepping onto the set of grease with the decorations having a 50s theme. The staff were very friendly and helpful and they seemed more relaxed than the staff at other theatres that I've attended. It almost felt very informal and I liked that.
We arrived five minutes before the show was due to start and I was surprised to find that the queues for the bar and the toilets was not very long. We were panicking thinking that we weren't going to be able to get drinks and use the bathroom before the show started but there was really no need to worry. Everything just seemed so organised. My only real complaint is that there isn't really anywhere to queue in the bar. The queue goes out of the door, making it look much longer than it is and it makes it awkward to get in and out of the bar and to the men's toilets (not that I was using them). I think this could have been organised better.
Sitting down to watch the show I was very impressed with our seats. We had a good view and the chairs were very comfortable. As always when I go to the theatre I wished that they had cup holders because it's so awkward balancing a drink on your lap when you want to clap along with the music, especially because they don't put lids on the drinks. Unfortunately it seems like their air conditioning was broken because it was so hot in the theatre. It was a warm day anyway but it felt a lot like sitting in a green house, it was very unpleasant. My sister is only nine and very small for her age so she needed a booster seat. They provided me with a booster seat but charged me £1. I know it's not much but after paying over £50 for her ticket I didn't expect to have to pay more for her to be able to see the show.
-Refreshments-
I was not impressed with the food and drink. I have no idea if my cola was coca cola or pepsi but it tasted like that cheap stuff you get in tesco. I didn't pay for the drinks but if the food prices are anything to go by it probably wasn't cheap. During the interval I queued up at the bar to get food. The queue wasn't very long but I was quite frustrated when I found out that I could buy my pringles at the bar but would have to queue up again if I wanted ice cream. I paid £3 for 2 small pots of pringles. I then joined the queue for the icecream only to discover that the person had run out of ice cream and I would have to queue again. I thought that it would have been better if the woman selling ice cream had just walked over to the other person selling ice cream and taken half of her stock to sell to the people in her queue, rather than making us all queue up again. When I finally managed to buy some ice cream the choice of flavour was very limited because they had sold out of most flavours and it cost me £3 for each ice cream. I was surprised at how disorganised they were, it was a Saturday night, a hot day, an even hotter theatre and they sold out of ice cream.
-The Show-
*Plot*
As many people will be aware Grease was made into a film based on this musical but the plot of the musical and the film are actually quite different.
Danny and Sandy meet one summer at the beach and have a holiday romance. Sandy is new in town and attends Danny's school but when they meet again, in front of his friends, he won't admit that he has feelings for Sandy. This results in Sandy and Danny alternatively trying to make each other jealous and impress each other. Can Sandy and Danny resolve their differences?
*Opinion*
I have to say that overall I wasn't very impressed with this production. I wanted to like it, I love the film and had high expectations for the musical but I just didn't like it. I should point out that my family are divided over this so my opinion probably doesn't represent the majority.
The show felt very flat to me. Being so familiar with all of the songs I thought that it would be one of those musicals that really gets the audience going, where you really feel part of the show but that just wasn't the case. I may as well have been watching it on the television for all the connection I felt with it. At least then I would have been able to switch it off.
I did like the storyline. Of course I was already familiar with it because it is quite similar to the film but there were differences. I don't think these differences added anything to it but they also didn't take anything away from the plot. If anything I think the musical was far more focused on relationships and I thought that this was a good thing. This is a musical about teenagers so it seems realistic that they are focused on sex and who is sleeping with who. Watching the musical I could completely relate it to my own school years, from the boys waiting outside of school to have a fight with people from another school (happened all the time at my school) to the little love triangles and nervousness over asking people out.
Although I liked the storyline it wasn't enough to save this musical from some painful performances.
Ray Quinn plays Danny, leader of the T-Birds. Although his singing is quite good and his dancing is amazing Quinn cannot pull of the role of Danny. His performance is a complete rip off of John Travolta in the film but when Quinn does that accent you can't always understand what he's saying. And Quinn just can't do cool like Travolta could. Perhaps if he had made this role more his own, added some of his own personality to it then it would have worked but he only succeeds in doing a poor imitation of Travolta.
Emma Stephens plays Sandy and I have no idea what they were thinking when they cast her. She sings very well, she can dance but she has completely the wrong look for Sandy. Sandy is supposed to be innocent and naive and Stephens doesn't manage that at all.
The supporting cast are actually very good and I would have been far more entertained if the entire musical had just revolved around them. There are some really amusing scenes involving the supporting cast, the relationships between the other T-Birds and the pink ladies are much more interesting than Danny and Sandy's relationship and the supporting cast have most of the better songs. Whereas Stephens and Quinn can sing and dance but seem to lack any acting skills the supporting cast have it all.
I love the songs from Grease and all of the songs from the film are in the musical with a few extra's in there too. The singing was perhaps the best part of the musical but even the songs were a bit of a disappointment. Quinn's poor attempt at an American accent made some of the songs sound like a cross between someone singing after inhaling helium and a drunken impression of John Travolta. All of the songs sung by Sandy and Danny lacked emotion and seemed lifeless. For me the best performances were Rizzo singing There Are Worse Things I Could Do and Kenickie's Greased Lightning.
From journal London Baby!