“Latin people were here, ambitious women were here, queer people were here, Asian people were here in the '50s,” Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies showrunner and executive producer Annabel Oakes declared during a TCA press conference for the new Paramount+ series. A prequel set 4 years before the events of Grease, the musical series follows the rise of the pink jacket-wearing group that was formed to rival the T-Birds. As a huge fan of the original musical and film, taking on the project was one that Annabel was prepared to turn down until she realized that despite so much progress since the 1950s, the high school experience is also very much the same. And while the original film has some elements that wouldn’t fly by today’s standards, the series allows for more types of stories to be told at Rydell High. “I kept writing the script and being, like, ‘Are you sure this is the plan? We are going to make a musical with 30 original songs on TV, which has never, ever, ever been done?’ And they kept saying, ‘Write it big. Write it cinematic.’”
(Randy Shropshire/Getty Images/Paramount+)
The 30 original songs come from award-winning pop songwriter and producer Justin Tranter, whose songs have become hits for artists like Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Sara Bareilles, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, and Demi Lovato, just to name a few. “The Grease that we all know and worship is very much sonically a late '70s version of the '50s,” Justin explained about how the property has always left room for contemporization. “Grease is the Word,” for example, is pure disco, a song that invites audiences back into this world as the opening of the series, but done in a 50’s style by the cast. “Doing a disco version of that song in 2022 wouldn't make as much sense. So, it was this whole journey of paying respect to something that was very much of the time, looking back at the '50s… Lyrically, it's 2023 looking back at the '70s and the '50s. We tried to incorporate that sonically as well, which was a beautiful, beautiful challenge to try to figure out.”
“Patricia Birch is a hero of mine,” revealed choreographer Jamal Sims, who looked back on the film’s choreography to inspire the dances in the series. “Her choreography was so cool. It had groove, it had personality. And I was, like, ‘I want to pay homage to what she did.’ But, also, I like to push it a little bit, and I think that that's the fun part of what we all got to do with this particular show was we get to push in areas that maybe if we were doing it years ago, we wouldn't have, but now we are in the 2020s and we can push it just a little bit and also give it a little more punch. So that's why I didn't want to hold myself in a jail cell of ‘I can only go into these zones.’ I wanted to be able to open up, and that's kind of what we did. We just opened it up.”
“We were in rehearsals from the beginning to the very end,” shared Marisa Davila, who stars as Jane, the quintessential 50s good girl who quickly finds herself an outcast because of double standards. “It was a lot of layers happening of shooting a scene, rehearsing a scene, going into dance rehearsals, going to the studio and recording a song, all at the same time, for all different episodes in all different orders. So not only were we having to memorize lines, but dance moves and lyrics. And also remembering where our character was in the story depending on what day it was that we were shooting. Sometimes we'd start the day with Scene 9 of Episode 2 and then end the day with Scene 6 from Episode 3. And we'd have to go, ‘Okay, what does my character know right now?’ You know? And then just turn it on for the musical numbers. And they are just showstopping, phenomenal… As a lover of theater and musicals, I am so blessed to be a part of this project. And if I weren't, I would be obsessed with it. And I'm really excited for what we get to give to other theater kids.”
“I did get the chance to speak to a woman who was alive in the 1950s, who was gay in the 1950s,” shared Ari Notartomaso, who plays Cynthia, a character who desperately wants to be a T-Bird and isn’t allowed because of her gender. “I'm also gay, so it was a really lovely experience for me to be able to ask questions about what it meant to be a young woman, a young person of a marginalized experience in the 1950s, and what it meant to exist in the world without the context or knowledge of words to describe yourself or knowing that there's other people like you around you… Annabel said the other day that this show is a bit of a love letter to all the women of the '50s. It's a love letter to the women in Grease. And I think it's also a love letter to all the people who were not given screen time in the 1950s in the original Grease, or really in media generally, especially when it comes to talking about people specifically who were alive in the 1950s, who didn't get the microphone, as it were.”
“For Nancy, she's just recently out of camp, and how to navigate that as a young woman and also still try to navigate high school,” Tricia Fukuhara explained about her character, a Japanese American who recently re-entered public school after living in a World War II internment camp. “Do you assimilate like everyone else is doing, or do you take the Nancy route and do the opposite and try to stand out, see how that goes?” With a passion for fashion and dreams of becoming a designer, when Nancy connects with Jane, Cynthia, and Olivia, there’s nobody better at Rydell High to create a look that will help them stand out against the T-Birds. Tricia also did her own research for the role, drawing on stories passed down by her grandparents, but also speaking with Japanese Americans who lived through World War II. “I would go to these Zoom panels on weekends when we were shooting with different events through the Japanese American Canadian cultural center, just to hear people's stories and to see what it was like. And it's funny in ways that it was so different, but at the same time, so the same as it is now. I feel like there's a lot of shared experiences that we have still from the '50s that we still need to move forward from.”
“I've seen all of my friends do [Grease], and I've auditioned many times, but it never happened,” shared Cheyenne Isabel Wells, who plays Olivia. Justin Tanter’s songwriting partner, Brittany Campbell, had worked with Cheyenne before and knew she would be perfect for the part, so she finally got her chance to do Grease in a way that nobody has done before. “I talked to my grandma when I got the role and asked her some questions. It was a little bit different, because being a Latina woman during the '50s in LA, it was a little difficult. I mean, speaking Spanish wasn't a good thing. So, it didn't really travel on in the family and stuff like that. I do love that we get to tell the story of being a Latina woman during that time.”
“I grew up in rural Australia, so Olivia Newton-John in the '80s was a really big deal,” revealed director and executive producer Althea Jones, who shares everyone’s passion for Grease and was committed to reinvigorating the property with these new stories. “We were all so proud of her, but my brag about that is that she lived in my country town. So, I would have Olivia Newton-John sightings at the grocery store. Her daughter went to the same high school as me, so there were a lot of reenactments with hair brushes, and everyone wanted to be Sandy. And I was often Danny, but that's okay.”
“The more I talk to people in their eighties, who were going to high school in the '50s, and people in my generation, who grew up on Grease, and then younger people, the more I realize how similar the experiences were,” Annabel Oakes concluded. “All teenagers deal with the moral panic of ‘What are teenagers doing?’ And it was just a different moral panic in the '50s than it is now, but it kind of was. Rock and roll was a moral panic about gender-bending and race-mixing and women not acting like ladies, and all of that stuff really exists today, too.”
Grease is once again the word on Friday, April 7th, with the launch of Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies exclusively on Paramount+.