‘Grease: Live!’ Review: Spectacle Puts Moments Above Story
- 8 years ago
When Fox’s “Grease: Live!”
reached its celebratory conclusion on Sunday, opinions about it no doubt differed, but one thing was clear: The live-musicals-on-television trend is no longer about trying to capture the magic of being in a Broadway house, if it ever was.
The “Grease” that the director Thomas Kail (of Broadway’s “Hamilton”) served up was cinematic, impressively so, with its countless cameras, its tracking shots, its zooms, its galloping from soundstage to soundstage.
Executing such a production live must have required an unbelievable amount of coordination and technical expertise.
But, despite the presence of a live audience for parts of it, the experience for viewers wasn’t remotely theater.
Good theater is spine-tingling; “Grease: Live!”
was spectacle.
reached its celebratory conclusion on Sunday, opinions about it no doubt differed, but one thing was clear: The live-musicals-on-television trend is no longer about trying to capture the magic of being in a Broadway house, if it ever was.
The “Grease” that the director Thomas Kail (of Broadway’s “Hamilton”) served up was cinematic, impressively so, with its countless cameras, its tracking shots, its zooms, its galloping from soundstage to soundstage.
Executing such a production live must have required an unbelievable amount of coordination and technical expertise.
But, despite the presence of a live audience for parts of it, the experience for viewers wasn’t remotely theater.
Good theater is spine-tingling; “Grease: Live!”
was spectacle.