How do you even start to reboot one thing as iconic as “Grease”? It’s no simple job, however “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies” proves that it’s definitely attainable.
The hit Paramount+ collection takes audiences back to the 1950s — even additional again than the unique 1978 movie did. Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson fell in love in the summertime of 1958, however “Rise of the Pink Girls” begins in 1954 because the lady gang that Bettie Rizzo would finally rule is trying to reverse their fortunes and rise to prominence within the halls of Rydell Excessive Faculty. The collection expands on the lore that made “Grease” so beloved, and provides origin tales for a number of of the movie’s hottest songs — whereas introducing a new set of tunes which can be fashionable classics in their very own proper.
Attendees at IndieWire’s Consider This Event in Los Angeles on Saturday had been handled to a panel that includes “Rise of the Pink Girls” director and govt producer Alethea Jones, choreographer Jamal Sims, costume designer Samantha Hawkins, and hair division head Jaala Leis Wanless. The largest distinction in presenting the Nineteen Fifties the staff wished to convey? Simply how various the ’50s was.
“Over the pandemic I watched plenty of Technicolor musicals [from the ’50s],” Jones mentioned. “I believe they’re wonderful and spectacular, however they’re extremely white and straight. And there have been far more than simply white folks within the ‘50s. Range was there then, it simply wasn’t represented.”
LA’s Jefferson Excessive Faculty was the place a lot of 1978’s “Grease” was shot, and collection creator Annabel Oakes found one thing distinctive about it. “The yearbook was from 1954,” Jones mentioned. “And there have been plenty of Black children, Latinx children, Japanese-American children too, and finally it mirrored one thing that was not within the 1978 film.”
Choreographer Jamal Sims associated his mother’s expertise to the work he contributed to “Rise of the Pink Girls” to deliver a extra various imaginative and prescient to the “Grease” prequel. “My mother was within the homecoming courtroom and she or he was the one Black lady on that stage,” he mentioned. “Everybody else was white. When taking a look at these pictures I assumed, wow, how courageous she was.”
The unique “Grease” was primarily based on co-writer Jim Jacobs’ personal ’50s highschool expertise, and the factor Sims beloved essentially the most was discovering that there in truth had been an actual girl-gang at that faculty: one which instantly impressed the Pink Girls.
For Hawkins and Wanless, the problem to offer a brand new dimension to the “Grease” lore was daunting. However they had been impressed by how they might present a special aspect to the ’50s.
“Dressing greasers who had been from the Latinx group, and Nancy [Tricia Fukuhara] is Japanese, was so significant as a result of they had been there within the ‘50s and a part of this tradition, however you to have dig deeper to search out them as a result of they weren’t depicted,” Hawkins mentioned.
“Annabel Oakes did a tremendous job of speaking to individuals who lived in that period and had been a part of this sort of setting,” Wanless mentioned. “I then checked out outdated problems with Jet and researched doo-wop tradition. We wished it to be traditionally correct however by a modern-day lens.”
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