Grease remains the word.
The fledgling Paramount+ streaming app announced on Friday it has greenlit a prequel series to one of their better-known intellectual properties, Grease.
The title, Rise of the Pink Ladies is a perfect elevator pitch for anyone familiar with the 1978 film, suggesting both an origin story and a focus on its popular women characters.
The new series is set at the same location (Rydell High, for you noobs) four years prior to the events of Grease, according to Variety. The original film, as you may recall, concludes with John Travolta’s Danny and Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy sailing off into the clouds in a 1948 Ford De Luxe convertible.
The Pink Ladies are the tough-girl gang associated with the high school’s greaser T-Birds, of which male lead Danny is a member. (Whether or not newcomer Sandy is ever fully embraced by the Pink Ladies is open to debate!) In the classic film, the Pink Ladies, Rizzo, Frenchy, Jan, and Marty, whose early days the new show will highlight, were played by Stockard Channing (who was already 34 when the movie came out), Didi Conn, Jamie Donnelly, and Dinah Manoff.
The ten hour-long episodes of the prequel, a musical comedy, will be written by Annabel Oakes, the producer, writer, and director of Netflix’s Atypical. (She is also a credited writer on the forthcoming series spinoff of Edge of Seventeen.) She will serve as executive producer alongside Marty Bowen and Erik Feig, who are working on a Grease prequel film, Summer Lovin’.
That film, which Brett Haley will direct from a screenplay by John August and Leah McKendrick, is set during Danny and Sandy’s fling between junior and senior year. That means (consults abacus) it takes place three-and-a-half years after the Rise of the Pink Ladies project.
No casting announcements have been made in either project.
The campy 1950s-set Grease, written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, began its life in Chicago nightclubs in 1971 in a much more risqué form. The show came to New York in 1972 at the downtown Eden Theater, then moved uptown, where it ran until 1980. The original Broadway cast featured Barry Bostwick as Danny and Adrienne Barbeau as Rizzo.
The 1978 film, directed by Randal Kleiser, was and is an absolute sensation, ultimately grossing $400 million compared to its $6 million budget. The 1982 sequel we do not mention, Grease 2, was a comparative dud, although the film, co-starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Adrian Zmed, and Lorna Luft, has found some defenders in recent years.
There have been countless revivals, tours, and international runs of Grease, though it’s undergone changes over the years. (A mid-90s staging in New York ran ads on TV where Lucy Lawless proclaimed, “you can’t be a warrior princess all of your life!”) It got a reboot for millennials in 2016 when Fox broadcast Grease: Live starring Aaron Tveit, Julianne Hough, Vanessa Hudgens, and Carly Rae Jepsen.
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