Boys against girls.
The T-Birds gang, bad bad guys, in constant flirting-confrontation with the Pink Ladies, the prettiest in school.
End of the fifties, advent of rock, car culture, leather jackets, lacquered long hair and bangs sculpted with hair gel.
“
Grease
is the time, it is the place, it is the movement.
Grease
is the way we feel”, they sang.
And they sing.
More than half a century after the premiere of the musical and 45 years after its film version hit the screens, the series
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies,
on SkyShowtime, returns to the student universe that was born from the teenage memories of a working-class Chicago actor and songwriter, Jim Jacobs, whose idols were Elvis Presley and Little Richard.
More information
Olivia Newton-John, 'Grease' star, dies at 73
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies,
set in 1954, four years before the events of
Grease,
traces the origins of the Pink Ladies girl band.
The critics speak of a derailment as a musical, but a certain charm as a celebration of adolescence.
Just the opposite of the original
Grease
.
With the 1978 film and subsequent adaptations, the story became more sanctimonious and puritanical.
When the musical opened on February 5, 1971 in a small Chicago nightclub, its authors, Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, were honoring the working-class youth of the 1950s, the greasers
.
The word with which this urban tribe was baptized has multiple parents: it could refer to the gel with which they held their impossible bangs or to the vehicle grease with which mechanics stain themselves.
Most of those adolescents who grew up in the postwar period came from Polish, Italian, Greek, Mexican or Puerto Rican families, workers who only had a car as a luxury good.
Olivia Newton-John, as Sandy, and John Travolta, as Danny Zuko, in an image from the movie 'Grease'.CBS Photo Archive
That
Grease
was much more sexual, risqué and attached to the harsh reality of the end of the fifties than the later versions.
It took place at the Rydell Institute (inspired by a real one in Chicago, Taft, where Jacobs had studied, and named on stage in homage to rocker Bobby Rydell).
There was talk of violence, beatings, teenage pregnancies, youthful exhaustion and street language typical of Chicago at the time was used: the characters had Italian and Polish names.
In less than a year he was already in the New York
off
Broadway.
“It was three quarters script and one quarter songs;
when traveling to New York the percentage changed to the opposite”, recalls Jacobs.
The success led the production to move from theater to theater with larger seating areas until the curtain fell in 1980 after 3,388 performances.
In those jumps and in the record recordings, the message was sweetened, the plot trivialized and any trace of Poland was eliminated: only Caucasians and Italians remained.
Among the actors who went through those theatrical versions were posh names such as Jeff Conaway, Richard Gere, Patrick Swayze, John Travolta or Treat Williams.
Conaway and Travolta appeared in the 1978 film version, released just two decades after the time of the action: the 1958-1959 school year.
Screening at the Autocine Madrid Race of 'Grease' at the end of the confinement in May 2020. David Benito (Getty Images)
In the cinema, the syrupiness increased under the command of producer Allan Carr and the direction of Randal Kleiser.
John Travolta was about to release
Saturday Night Fever
—a more ambitious and realistic film, although always from the perspective of a musical— and had signed a contract with Paramount for three feature films: hence he was the first to enter the project .
Since he had succeeded with the telefilm
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,
Led by Kleiser, Travolta put his name on Carr's table. It was also Travolta's idea to recruit Olivia Newton-John, an English singer who had made a career in her adopted Australia.
Because Newton-John was unable to imitate a convincing American accent, his Sandy referred a recently moved Australian student to a suburban high school in a big city, in imitation of the suburban Philadelphia college where Kleiser attended: lost the original urban soul.
The musical 'Grease', at the Nuevo Teatro de Alcalá in Madrid.Javier Naval
As Jordi Amat wrote in EL PAÍS after the death of the actress, “the original sexual drive was ridiculed in the drive-in sequence, when he tries to touch her chest and she reacts with such sanctimoniousness that it can only be resolved in a comic way.
But the most distorting thing was the incorporation of two songs that were not in the theater and would be decisive in the plot of the film.
There are two devastatingly cheesy ballads:
Hopelessly Devoted to You,
which she sings, and
Sandy,
which he sings and further sabotages Zuko's character.
No less significant was the disappearance of the penultimate
All Choked Up
.
That song with sick lyrics and a besieging tone could not lead the protagonists to heaven, which seems like the antechamber of the altar, but back to the drive-in with Sandy ready to have a good fuck so that it would finally go away for both of them, the heater”.
Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta at the premiere of 'Grease' in 1978.Michael Ochs Archives
For Amat, the film is a “delicious moral fraud”, but a moral fraud nonetheless.
“The message would be the opposite of the original: a calming mirror of the conscience of
baby boomers
who were already or soon to be parents.
This operation required self-parody galore and kitsch
treatment.
so that the adolescent fable was transformed into a banal palliative.
Everything would be cliché.
All recycled."
In the cinema, anything goes: until a 33-year-old actress, Stockard Channing, eventually a legendary performer, played Rizzo for a powerful reason: she was represented by Carr. substitute in the first production on Broadway) and cinema was Jamie Donnelly as Jan, one of the Pink Ladies;
when the film was released she was 31 years old, she was gray and they had to bleach her hair to keep her magic.
Michelle Pfeiffer, right, in 'Grease 2'
The film business turned out well: Pepsi-Cola paid good money to appear featured on the screen, and despite starting second at the box office (after
Jaws 2)
,
Grease
increased its profits, and when it ended its run in American theaters, it managed to be, with $132 million, the second-highest-grossing film in Paramount history, second only to
The Godfather.
The critics, on the other hand, sounded bittersweet when stressing that there was a good show, although the intentions of the original work had been forgotten during some
summer night.
The protagonists of 'Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies'.
Its reruns, its releases on video and DVD, the tours of the musical (which arrived in Barcelona in 2006 in Spanish and in Madrid two years later) have only multiplied its fame.
His fans love just what was added to the cinema: the love story, falling in love over sexual impulses, the triumph of a certain naivety over the frenzy of adolescent hormones and the defeat of the working class.
What the public has forgotten about is the continuation in the cinema,
Grease 2,
in which most of the teachers and workers of the institute repeat the original, and that it is only worth recovering for taking the minutes of the first footsteps on the screen by Michelle Pfeiffer.
With the film, the friendship between Travolta (who shot it at the age of 23) and Newton-John (then 28) was born.
During filming, the actress knew how to deal with the love impulses of her partner.
Over time, they supported each other through successive life misfortunes—in both cases, certainly numerous—until Newton-John passed away last August.