“Grease”: a slicked-back return to mythical 1950s high school days

Grease has been a perennial favorite since it first arrived on Broadway in 1972. Its raucous, raunchy ebullience, created by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, has spawned many productions on stage and in the movies. It’s now the turn of New Hope’s venerable Bucks County Playhouse to mount a late summer revival that aims to be an entertaining time in the theater.

By now, just about everyone knows the show. It’s senior year for Rydell High School’s class of 1959, and the student body is starting to sense the end of their close-knit class friendships. The main focus of the minimal plot is on bad boy Danny Zuko (Keaton Miller), leader of the T-Birds, and his summer crush, Sandy Dumbrowski (Stephanie Prestage), a transfer into Rydell. Danny, although having already fallen for Sandy, maintains his cool façade by treating her as nothing special. Sandy finds herself taken under the wing of the tough girls group, the Pink Ladies, led by Betty Rizzo (Giuliana Augello), the main squeeze of Danny’s best friend Kenickie (Hank Santos).

Most of the rest of the cast portray stereotypes: Jan (Sunayna Smith), the pudgy, giggly girl; Marty (Alyssa Wray), who has no problem using her feminine allure to get what she wants; Doody (Joe Montoya), whose voice and behavior indicates that puberty is taking its time with him; Roger aka ”Rump” (David Nick Alea), the class mooning champ; Sonny (Lorenzo Pugliese), the short-statured self-styled ladies’ man; Frenchy (Erin Kommor), a make-up artist and hairstylist in the making; Patty (Brianna Ascione), the goody-goody cheerleader with a thing for Danny; and Eugene (Seth Clayton), the tall, awkward butt of the T-Birds’ pranks.

There is also Miss Lynch (Toni DiBuono), the overbearing English teacher; small-time singer-guitarist Johnny Casino (Stanley Martin); and radio celebrity Vince Fontaine (Nathan Cockroft), whose attempts to sound cool are painfully corny.

As directed by Bucks County favorite Hunter Foster, most of the actors mine comic gold out of their characters. Chief among these are Hank Santos and Guiliana Augello, who strike sparks as the bickering couple Kenickie and Rizzo; you can almost feel the heat of their attraction to each other. Brianna Brito Mooney, as Cha-Cha DiGregorio, a kinetic Latina spitfire who spices up the senior prom, and Sherrod T. Brown, who performs the Teen Angel’s song “Beauty School Dropout” as a flamboyant Prince-in-the-making, dig into their small parts for all they’re worth, while Allyssa Wray’s Marty is an imposingly tall gold digger who somehow projects a believable innocence.

As for the dancing, the entire cast acquits itself quite well with Alison Solomon’s hyperactive ’50s-style choreography, with the two best dancers being David Nick Alea’s Roger, paired with Sunayna Smith’s Jan. The two biggest numbers, “Hand Jive,” a dance competition at the prom, and “We Go Together,” a paean to eternal friendship that closes both acts, show off the cast’s buoyant, seemingly inexhaustible energy.

Luke Molloy and his seven-piece orchestra deftly handle the pastiche score of ’50s era pop music. Their pitch-perfect renditions sound like songs that might have been heard on jukeboxes and in the movies of the era.

Grease has made it through three Broadway productions, a film version (with an abysmal sequel), and countless productions across the country. It is now making a lively appearance at the Bucks County Playhouse. If, like me, you’re willing to give in to its goofy energy, suspending your disbelief enough to travel back to a late 1950s that never really was, you’ll have a fantastic time at Grease!

Grease is presented at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, PA, through Sept. 8, 2024. For more information or to purchase tickets, go to bcptheater.org or call 215-862-2121.