Grease: Live

Grease: Live defied modesty, transcended nostalgia, served up cheese as a ten-course gourmet meal.

It’s like Fox took all the best elements of the British pantomime tradition (aggressive celebrity cameos, audience interaction) and fused them with big-budget movie-making and Tony-winning direction to make a musical-theater experience NBC could never, ever top.

Sure, the show’s live sound was spotty in parts (too many lines were inaudible) but its energy was right where it needed to be, particularly in the big dance numbers.

Grease Live! was exactly what it was supposed to be. It was fun. It was entertaining. It was well worth watching.

Kail’s boundless ambition and meticulous execution was the premium gasoline that made not just “Greased Lightning,” but the entire genre, race off towards the future.

Though it’s hard not to wonder how much better Grease Live! would have been with different leads, it was still so solidly and smartly crafted that the dullness of the central duo didn’t matter all that much. Kail and fellow director Alex Rudzinski, a veteran of “Dancing With the Stars,” gave the affair energy and momentum, their cast was game and their commitment never lagged.

The production managed to capture the overall cheesy tone present in the original while moving through the many numbers with lightning speed. The three hours flew by quicker than expected at the outset thanks to giggle-worthy moments and fun numbers, with things really picking up in terms of overall entertainment and production value at the two-hour mark.

Aaron Tveit's Danny won't make anyone forget John Travolta, but his Broadway chops showed in the live format, and Julianne Hough was an enchanting Sandy. Vanessa Hudgens' Rizzo? Adorable. But the MVP of Grease: Live has to be director Thomas Kail, who segued from Broadway's Hamilton to Rydell High and along with Alex Rudzinski, pulled off the most ambitious live TV musical in my memory, anyway.

[An] ambitious, wildly energetic and mostly entertaining Grease: Live. Despite a few missteps, and even though, at three hours, the production seemed incredibly long, Grease: Live was above all a lot of fun.

The three-hour production got off to a shaky start with camera work in the 1959-set Rydell High seemingly ready to trigger mass vertigo. But by the time the cast got to “Greased Lightnin’,” a frenetic dance number that kept building and growing so much, it threatened to spill out onto your floor, the show was rocking.

The little things that fell short of polished paled in comparison to the things that landed against all odds.

There were quibbles to be had with some of the casting--um, Mario Lopez?--some flat punch lines, one major sound glitch, a bizarrely haphazard approach to sanitizing the racier bits, and uneven pacing and tone. But, the frothy ’50s-set high school musical was so expertly executed and choreographed visually and exuberantly performed by most of the actors that it more than compensated for its flaws.

Skillfully directed by Tommy Kail (“Hamilton”) and boasting exuberant choreography by Zach Woodlee and period-perfect costumes by William Ivey Long, Grease went down as easy as a chocolate malted.

It was an exuberant, technically audacious staging.

Regardless of its flaws, Grease is a reason to look forward to the next round of live musicals on TV. When it finally found its stride during “Born to Hand jive,” which was among the finest staged sequences of any live musical telecast so far, the hate-watching subsided and suddenly we were all back in high school again.

Grease: Live was maybe not a slam dunk, but nevertheless was the crowd pleaser it deserves to be and so often has been.

It was kinetically staged and inventively shot by Thomas Kail, the director of the brilliant Broadway sensation Hamilton, who spread the show across multiple stages and filled every musical number with flash and surprise. Yet it was often so flatly acted, those musical numbers came as a much-needed relief.

No, its bubblegum script and inconsistent performances didn’t allow the special to tear down boundaries or redefine the genre. However, with innovative choices from director Thomas Kail and an enthusiastic cast, Grease: Live managed to satiate audiences and pave the way for many more iterations of its kind.

It’s hard to believe that Grease was once subversive; what viewers saw on television Sunday night seemed somehow cleaner and more perfunctory and cute. It was a fabulous, well-scrubbed and flawlessly executed show that could have been just a little bit greasier.

Grease: Live was so crammed with anachronisms--and so weirdly faithful to other things that should have been turned into anachronisms--that it landed somewhere between ‘50s time capsule and ‘50s themed-party, with some ‘50s-themed karaoke tossed in.... But overall, Grease: Live was a lot of fun. There were some poor decisions made by the producers, and some brilliant ones, too.

It lacked, for the most part, the emotional punch and sheer vocal prowess of NBC's recent staging, but the production itself redefined what a live musical could be.