Grease is a room-filling spectacle tinged with nostalgia – review
What do you do with a show like Grease? It’s so well known – largely for the 1978 film starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John although the original 1971 musical still has a substantial following – that it’s hard to imagine anyone doing anything radically different with the staging.
Director Nikolai Foster doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel, although this Grease does draw heavily from the original, slightly grittier musical – while thankfully retaining many of the crowd-pleasing songs which were introduced for the film version.
It gets many things right – most notably Arlene Phillips’ room-filling choreography which does a good job of holding our attention in the cavernous Dominion Theatre, which often swallows up less ambitious shows.
In terms of the casting we were most taken with Olivia Moore – who we caught last year in the West End production of Heathers – as Sandy, who portrays the role with sensitivity and delivers a show-stopping Hopelessly Devoted To You.
