Grease comes to PPAC Tuesday

When Legally Blonde The Musical launched its national tour at the Providence Performing Arts Center back in September it grossed just under $1 million during the week it was in town.

Now another national tour is getting its start at PPAC, Grease, and organizers, based on advance ticket sales, are hoping to top that figure. In fact, Nick Scandalios, a vice president for the producing Nederlander Presentations in New York has a one-dollar bet with PPAC’s Lynn Singelton, wagering that the run of Grease, which opens Tuesday, will break the $1.2-million mark.

One reason for that, said Scandalios, is that despite tough economic times, Grease is a proven commodity. Patrons might not be willing to plunk down $70 for a ticket to an unknown show, but who doesn’t look forward to slipping back into the late 1950s, to a more innocent time of fast cars and raging teenage hormones, along with the on-and-off-again relationship of high school sweethearts Danny Zuko, the tough guy greaser, and sweet Sandy Dumbroski?

Even if you haven’t seen the musical a lot of people know tunes such as “Greased Lightning.” And a lot of fans have seen the popular 1978 screen adaptation with John Travolta as Danny and Olivia Newton-John as innocent Sandy. That has bred “affection” for the show, said Scandalios, who played Danny when he was a high school senior growing up on Long Island.

“Say Grease to people,” said Scandalios, “and they start singing the songs. It’s unique that way. It’s sort of special.”

Grease was at one point the longest-running show in Broadway history until it was unseated by A Chorus Line. Still it remains a staple of regional theater, summer stock and high school drama groups. Just because you’re under 30 doesn’t mean Grease is unfamiliar fare.

“So many kids have grown up performing it,” said Scandalios. “People get personally attached to it.”

The show, which opened in New York in 1972, was originally a play with incidental music staged at a theater in the Old Town section of Chicago. A couple of producers saw it and suggested it might fare better as a full-blown musical.

Grease was successfully revived on Broadway in 1994.

But his current touring version is slightly different. It contains for the first time several songs from the film that were not in the original Broadway show, tunes such as “You’re the One That I Want,” “Sandy,” and “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” That has given the show a “fresh dynamic,” said Scandalios.

It also has at least one popular face among the cast, Taylor Hicks of American Idol fame, who plays Teen Angel. Hicks, who won the season-five sing off, made his Broadway debut in that role this summer.

The show has also gotten a boost no doubt from the American Idol-style television contest Grease: You’re The One That I Want, which aired on NBC almost two years ago. The winners of that show — Laura Osnes and Max Crumm — went on to star in the Broadway production.. (Allie Schulz, one of the runners-up in the show, has been picked up by the tour as Rizzo.)

The TV show was a ratings loser but was a huge boost for the Broadway revival, which opened in August of last year. By April of last year, advance sales had topped $9 million, or 90 percent of co-producer David Ian’s investment. The show is now making a profit — always a good thing, Scandalios noted.

At this point Scandalios said there’s no end in sight.

“It’s looking great in other cities,” he said. “We couldn’t be happier.”

Scandalios, who started out answering the phones at the Nederlander organization, was instrumental in picking the leads for the tour, and lining up Providence as the starting point. Scandalios has long been a fan of PPAC. He attended a performance of Dream Girls there when he was a senior at Boston College in the late 1980s getting a finance degree. While there was competition among cities to launch the tour, Providence won out because of its proximity to New York, where many of the crew and cast are based, and because it is less expensive to do business here than some bigger and better known locales.

“It was the right combination of a sophisticated audience and the economics,” said Scandalios.

Grease opens Tuesday at the Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St., Providence and runs through next Sunday. Tickets range from $68 to $41. Call (401) 421-2787 or log on to www.ppacri.org.
http://www.projo.com/theater/content/artsun_grease_11-30-08_87CC7OQ_v18.21daf1e.html

Woah, cool - it started in Chicago?!?!?!?!?
~tyg