Rockin’ (with an option to roll): Drury Lane’s ‘Grease’ and Paramount’s ‘School of Rock’
L to R: Nick Kmiecik, Billy Rude, Jake DiMaggio Lopez, Jordan Arredondo, Ben Dow. Photo by Brett Beiner.
Speaking as someone whose ten-year high school reunion was cancelled due to apparent lack of interest, I can’t help but wonder if my class will be missing out on something, especially if the crowd at Drury Lane’s production of Grease was any indication. More or less a high school reunion on steroids, theirs is a solid-enough production of the ultimate hang-out musical. Like meeting with an old friend, you settle into the old grooves, you bop your head along to the old songs, and you remember the indulgences you have to make.
The big indulgence: the influence of Grease’s 1978 film adaptation, which eclipsed the record-breaking Broadway run which itself was a top-to-bottom reno on Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s Kingston Mines original, denuding it of any local specificity. (Apparently, Milwaukee Avenue is a street too far for 7th Avenue.)
Director Paul Stancato’s stated goal was to bring Grease home and to find some happy balance between the grit of its origins and the sheen that people have come to expect. On the first front, he succeeds—in addition to a couple of changes of address in the script, Jeff Kmiec’s brick proscenium is painted with vintage ads for the Jewels, Wimpy’s, and assurances that mowimy po polski.
Balancing the grit and the sheen? Well, the Burger Palace Boys (not the T-Birds) do come charging on stage with pipes and chains for a rumble at one point, but the sheen still wins out. Perhaps there’s only so much one can do when Barry Gibb’s gleefully anachronistic film theme is the opening number.
What Stancato gets absolutely right is the camaraderie, most of which is in the casting. His is an ensemble you feel like you’d want to spend time with—even have their backs when they’re in a jam—even as they’re casually razzing you. And while Jake DiMaggio Lopez and Emily Schultheis are an appealing Danny and Sandy, ably riding the waves between Jacobs and Casey’s wise-ass period pastiches and the movie’s more earnest ones, for my money, Alina Taber as Pink Lady Rizzo walks off with the show in her pocket of her pedal pushers. The American musical theatre doesn’t lack for snarkers with secret hearts of gold, but Taber’s performance certainly shows Rizzo’s application for the patron saint’s slot is in order.
Seeing so many blue-hairs at Drury Lane also got me wondering about Grease’s staying power. As the Boomers leave one by one for that Malt Shop in the Sky, the visceral nostalgic connection to the era it depicts will disappear, leaving only a fuzzy snapshot of a sociological phenomenon when the teenager emerged in full force and rock ‘n’ roll proved it was here to stay.
In fairness, though, a snapshot is what Grease is and has been ever since Kingston Mines: a concept, a time, a place.
Though this Grease may not be the last word, it at least got those right, Gibb notwithstanding.
Grease runs through June 4th at Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace, IL. For tickets or more information, please call (630) 530-0111 or visit drurylanetheatre.com.
The Company. Photo by Liz Lauren.
When Andrew Lloyd Webber announced his intent to adapt the film School of Rock into a musical, to say it was met with skepticism is an understatement. Not that it was an outré idea—the man’s made a career on outré ideas—but the film is comedy with a capital K, which has never really been his wheelhouse.
When he then announced Julian (Downton flippin’ Abbey) Fellowes was on book detail, it was like Vernon Wormer shouting “Screw it, I’m slumming it with Delta House.” Like Ed Rooney ditching work to pal it up with Ferris Bueller. Like Steve Buscemi hailing his fellow youths. In other words, a violation of sense.
But, opening as cold as a musical can open on Broadway post-Internet, it clicked. It even held its own against Hamilton. And it had strong-enough legs post-pandemic to make its regional debut in Aurora.
Lloyd Webber certainly learned something from his forebear Lionel Bart: a gaggle of kids on stage is cash in the bank. Granted, the Artful Dodger never had to shred on top of singing and dancing, unlike the kids at Paramount.
Indeed, though it’s been called the slacker’s Music Man, School of Rock is just as much the slacker’s Oliver!, from the gaggle of kids on up to its Fagin, though here, Fagin is called Dewey Finn (Nick Druzbanski), a layabout whose quixotic dreams of rock stardom are face-planting. His show-boating gets him kicked out of his own band, his laziness costs him his record store job, and his mooching is wearing thin even on his pushover best friend and roommate Ned (Jackson Evans). With the rent on his heels, Dewey, posing as Ned, shenanigans his way into a substitute teaching gig at a tony prep school. Though run by the martially uptight Ms. Mullins (Veronica Garza), Horace Green Prep is liberal enough to provide music education for its student body. With this nugget of info, Dewey sees the kids as his in on winning the upcoming Battle of the Bands, oodles of cash, and validation of his dreams.
Slob-versus-snob musical comedy with a capital K (with a heaping helping of artistic enrichment) ensues.
As material, it’s definitely a more caffeinated up-to-eleven take on Mike White’s screenplay than the shaggy vérité that the film went for, and its ethos that rock can change the world is embraced with an earnestness not seen since Kilroy Was Here. But rock (and Rock) have their alchemy, and it works a treat. Lloyd Webber’s original music puts away the longhair stuff, teams up with Glenn Slater’s lyrics, and the two plop down on the couch and chug Dos Equis while shaking it all night long—the lyrics do the job, just, but the tunes stick.
And some get real mileage. “You’re in the Band”, wherein Dewey slots the kids into place, is Druzbanski at his hyped-up right-for-maybe-the-wrong-reasons best. (He’s also played the “Jack Black” role way back when in the dearly departed Refuge Theatre’s High Fidelity, so this seems very much a forte.) And Veronica Garza lets loose with “Where Did the Rock Go,” Mullins’s eulogy for her long-lost sense of loosey-goosiness; in this world, Stevie Nicks fandom and fifty-thousand-dollar tuitions aren’t a happy combo.
Given dad rock these days, I might beg to differ on that point. But in musical comedy with a capital K, sense belongs up in SRO, and it ain’t nothing but a good time to be had on stage. A good time, and a gaggle of bright young talents actually shredding, popping, and drumming up there. They have good music teachers, after all. May all kids be so lucky.
School of Rock runs through June 4th at Paramount Theatre, 23 E Galena Blvd, Aurora, IL. For tickets or more information, please call (630) 896-6666 or visit paramountaurora.com.
For more reviews on these or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.