Since I am in London, celebrating my daughter’s thirteenth birthday at an immersive musical evening steeped in Grease-themed nostalgia, let’s talk about the film that has become increasingly iconic over the decades.
Released in 1978, Grease tells a story supposedly set twenty years earlier and is therefore already riding a wave of nostalgia when it first appears. Admittedly, the US of the late 1970s – emerging from the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and a decade of profound political and social upheaval – is greatly in need of a little lightness. The country looks back on the 1950s as a supposedly simpler time, before the great divisions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Realism is therefore hardly the point of Grease. The film is less concerned with faithfully recreating an era than with composing a dreamlike vision of it. The America of Grease is not so much Eisenhower’s America – with its segregation, McCarthyism, repression of sexuality and particularly rigid social order – as the America the 1970s chose to remember: a colourful, effervescent, bubble-gum America in which conflicts are settled during a car race or a dance competition, adults are rarely threatening and often ridiculous, and graduation represents not so much the beginning of adulthood as the apotheosis of adolescence.
The film’s vision is sanitised, that much is clear. Yet it is doubly sanitised when compared with the stage production from which it was adapted.
Directed by Randal Kleiser, the film is based on a musical created for the Chicago stage in 1971 by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. Its title refers to the greasers, a youth subculture that emerges among working-class Americans in the 1950s. The word grease evokes both the oil found in garages and the pomade applied to the hair of these young men who rebelled against the established social order.
Set in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High School – inspired by Chicago’s Taft High School and named in tribute to rock singer Bobby Rydell – the original musical follows working-class teenagers as they confront peer pressure, power dynamics, personal values and love.
In its original Chicago production, Grease is a raw, provocative, dark, aggressive and vulgar show that tackles the weighty social issues of teenage pregnancy, group-imposed conformity and violence between rival gangs. It also explores love, friendship, teenage rebellion and sexual awakening.
The musical, staged at Chicago’s Kingston Mines, a former tram depot converted first into a theatre and later into a club, unfolds in a working-class world inspired by the neighbourhoods of North-West Chicago, where its teenagers drink, smoke, fight, talk about sex and try to survive in a society marked by both human and social violence.
Grease soon enjoys tremendous success in Chicago.
Its content is nevertheless gradually toned down, while its teenage characters, initially deeply rooted in Chicago society, slowly become more generic.
The first Broadway production opens on 7 June 1972, and although Grease retains its energy, it loses some of its brutality. By the time the production closes in 1980, Grease holds the record for the longest-running show in Broadway history – a record later broken by A Chorus Line.
The musical then triumphs in London’s West End before being adapted for the big screen.
Hollywood could hardly remain indifferent to such a success and duly takes possession of the triumphant musical.
And so here we are, with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, in a version of Grease that presents us with a youth that never truly existed. One has already made his mark in Saturday Night Fever; the other is already an accomplished British-Australian singer. Needless to say, both are considerably older than the characters they play.
We all know the story of Grease – the film’s story, at least.
During the summer of 1958, Danny Zuko (John Travolta), a greaser and Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton-John), a well-behaved and proper young Australian woman, fall in love. Although Sandy is supposed to return home, she ultimately finds herself, without initially knowing it, at the same high school as Danny. Intent on preserving his tough-guy image, Danny rejects her when he realises that she is now attending his school. The young lovers eventually find their way back to one another: Danny does his utmost to conform to social expectations, while Sandy allows herself to embrace her sensuality. They are accompanied through their tribulations by a colourful cast of characters: the T-Birds and the Pink Ladies, the latter being led by Betty Rizzo, played by the incomparable Stockard Channing. Believing herself to be pregnant, Rizzo considers having an abortion.
The film is an instant and extraordinary success. Admittedly, the two young lovers are utterly irresistible, carried along by songs that now form part of the world’s musical heritage. Its themes are also universal: love, the construction of identity and peer pressure – all borne along by nostalgia for a time that never really existed, the 1950s, colliding with nostalgia for a time that has very much existed for every one of us: adolescence.
Sheltered from the eyes of others, the wonderful Summer romance that blossoms between Danny and Sandy is shattered at the beginning of the school year by the judgement of their peers. Betty Rizzo quietly mocks the romantic Sandy’s naivety, while Danny recasts their beautiful Summer love as a sexual conquest when recounting it to his gang of leather-jacketed T-Birds (see the song Summer Nights).
Danny may be genuinely in love, but at first he fears losing his status among the T-Birds more than he fears losing Sandy.
Sandy, meanwhile, loves Danny but understands that the deserted, protected stretch of beach where their love first blossomed no longer exists for them (see Hopelessly Devoted to You). She must now love Danny after they have both been thrust back into society – or rather, into several societies, since each belongs to a separate circle.
They are watched, judged and even corrected. At Rydell, everyone plays a part: the boys must display their masculinity, the girls must be desirable without appearing too available, couples must remain detached, as must their feelings. It is not enough to love: one must love in a manner deemed acceptable by others.
Betty Rizzo disrupts this finely tuned social machinery. She refuses to conform to society’s expectations of her, mocking Sandy along the way in Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee. There is nothing gentle, romantic or naïve about her. On the contrary, she is as hard as stone, does precisely the opposite of what is expected of her and fully embraces the role she has chosen for herself, even though she does not really like it and suffers because of it.
When she believes herself to be pregnant, the danger becomes real. Yet Rizzo, singing There Are Worse Things I Could Do, refuses to apologise to her peers or reveal her human vulnerabilities. She knows perfectly well what others think and say about her, but she claims the right to feel, to desire and to make mistakes in her own way, which is ultimately remarkably restrained.
By contrast, Sandy appears to be the archetypal conformist teenager. She is everything Betty Rizzo is not: naïve, romantic, gentle, self-effacing and asexual. And yet she will change – as will Danny.
Because they both change: Danny tries to take part in school activities and adopts the corresponding uniform – a cardigan – while Sandy allows herself to embrace her sensual, even sexual, dimension. The final scene fully reconciles them, accompanied by the song You’re the One That I Want. And although Sandy’s transformation is the more striking – she appears in make-up, tight-fitting leggings, with bare shoulders and tousled hair – she is not the only one who has changed. Danny, now on his knees before Sandy, openly embraces both his love and his desire for her, having already proved that he was prepared to exchange his leather jacket for a cardigan.
Some argue that Sandy’s physical transformation merely brings her into line with social expectations – in other words, she becomes sexy according to the male gaze. I hear you, I hear you, but the same argument can be applied to Danny, who softens and wears that bloody cardigan which, as an opposite effect, is anything but sexy and serves as a perfect illustration of domesticated masculinity. It is a cliché, of course, but the reality is that Sandy and Danny ultimately offer us a perfectly valid message: each person must take a step towards the other if love is to flourish.
Editor’s note: Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical was brilliant. In the heart of Battersea Park, a funfair – a perfect recreation of the one featured in the film – kept us entertained before a highly successful immersive musical performance, with everyone free to decide whether or not to take part in some of the dance or cheerleading numbers. Also, as you will see, my daughter likes photobombing my pictures.
October 2, 2026
