Yesterday, the actress took to Instagram to thank her fans for all the support they have shown over the last few days. But in the court of popular opinion – Facebook and Twitter – the show was a worthy successor to the classic John Travolta-Olivia Newton-John movie. “Greased Lightning” had perhaps the most jaw-dropping choreography I’ve ever seen in a musical, but I’m no expert.
Advertisement
Vanessa Hudgens as “Rizzo” rehearses for GREASE: LIVE airing LIVE Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016 (7:00-10:00 PM ET live/PT tape-delayed), on FOX.
This image released by Fox, Juliane Hough and Aaron Tveit appear during a performance of “Grease: Live”.
While some people may think of Grease as a fairly innocuous musical for kids, remember that when Paramount re-released the film in theaters in 2010, it was rated PG-13. With this hectic, ambitious and hormonal “Grease”, Fox proved it could up the ante in the new mini-industry of musicals on TV, an industry so far controlled by NBC, with its “The Sound of Music Live!“.
“‘Grease: Live’ reconfirms all the possibilities of the live musical event as a genuine transcendent pop experience: Clever, funny, rapturously huge in a way showbiz used to only want to be”, Entertainment Weekly raved.
Look to director Thomas Kail (of Broadway’s smash-hit “Hamilton”) as the reason “Grease: Live” worked on so many levels. As of Monday morning, more than one million Tweets had circulated with the #greaselive hashtag. I was with her mom.
“If you would have asked me two years ago what I thought of cancer, I would have said, ‘Man, you know it sucks”.
Overall, this wasn’t really a traditional musical or a made-for-TV movie. No one is going to compete with those numbers, but Grease Live did well with the adult rating comparison.
Advertisement
CBS was the only network with all-original competition for Fox. “Singing live for all to hear!!!!”
