Admit it — when you started watching Grease Live! (exclamation point required, folks) on Fox this past Sunday, you were fully intending to hate-watch it. I know I was. After all, most of these recent live musicals on TV have been pretty lame so far. The less said about Sound of Music Live and Peter Pan Live, the better. And for many of us, we have very fond memories of John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, and Stockard Channing in the 1978 Grease, and didn’t feel the need to have them replaced with a new batch of thirty-year-olds playing teenagers, thank you very much.
But then, something happened. At some point, while we are all preparing to snark the crap out of this on social media, we started to realize these new guys were nailing it. Instead of trying to replace Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, the new Danny and Sandy, actors Aaron Tveit and Julianne Hough, actually complemented them. They did enough differently from the originals to avoid straight imitation but were similar enough to still feel familiar.
Also, expanding roles from the original Broadway show like Doody and Marty, who were reduced to non-entities in the original movie, was a great move and brought much welcome racial diversity to the usually vanilla-as-all get-out show. And can we just that say Miss Vanessa Hudgens straight killed it as Rizzo?
By the time it was all over, you were singing along to “We Go Together” for the finale. And now, to satisfy our new love for this cast of Grease, the official soundtrack has become available for purchase on iTunes, and you can stream it on Spotify.
Sing-along to the new cast in your car, or the shower, or just annoy your family and co-workers as you belt out “There Are Worse Things I Could Do.” Fox has also released several numbers from the show on YouTube, like the big Boyz II Men number, which you can watch above. For the tenth time.
—
Are you ready to sing along to the new Grease soundtrack? Let us know your thoughts on Grease Live! in the comments below!
IMAGE: Fox Networks
