Tomorrow night on Fox, there's a live presentation of the musical, Grease, which sounds like it's got a pretty good cast. Aaron Tveit, who is terrific, has the male lead. Tveit, by the way, is 32 years old and the other actors are all, as is customary with this show, close to twice the age of the characters they're playing.
I'm not a huge fan of Grease. I think it's a lightweight piece of work with a few good songs…and when I've seen it on stage, which I have four or five times, I've always had the feeling the cast was having a better time than the audience. It's had an active history of revivals and restagings because it's easy to cast and cheap to stage. Sets and costumes are pretty simple and it doesn't hurt the show much if they look cheap and amateurish.
It also doesn't need a big orchestra and the nature of the show makes it attractive to folks who aren't hardcore playgoers, especially since the movie. In fact, since the movie came out, most groups that stage the show try to make their stage versions more closely resemble the movie, adding in songs written for the film and casting leads who resemble John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
Unlike the recent live musicals on NBC, this version will have a live audience, though reportedly a lot of the audience members will be watching much of the show on monitors. There are many sets and apparently what they're doing is placing a portion of the audience in front of each set (or sometimes in it like extras) and letting them watch the scenes on other sets on TV. So if you're there, you'll see some of the show right in front of you and much of it the same way folks at home will be watching.
More interesting is that several scenes are being staged outside. They're saying these scenes will be done "rain or shine." At the moment, there's a 100% chance of rain in the afternoon in Los Angeles (where the production is being done) and about a 70% chance during the broadcast. But as they say, the show must go on. There's a song in the show called "It's Raining on Prom Night." Let's see if it does. There could even be actual "Greased Lightning."