Rydell High Water Mark
Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical (Battersea Park) - Guest Review by Dr Terror
I have seen several productions of Grease over the years, including an excellent one by the Windsor local amdram group which, whether through royal patronage (or possibly that of Ruthie Henshall, for whom life has certainly been a cabaret?) or some other reason, was better than most professional productions. To be frank, not many groups of part-time strolling players have the clout to get a personally-recorded good luck message from John Travolta (the future Lord Travolta?).
As for Secret Cinema, the mysterious body behind this (spoiler alert) mind-blowingly wonderful production, my experiences have been more mixed. Merely raising a few quid for charity by watching a film from an iconic-looking, purpose-built set has never really flicked my switch, though I have friends who go to every single one. I attended only the Baz Luhrman Romeo + Juliet one in an ersatz Verona, looking like an LA beach resort. The company's draconian policy on handing in mobile phones made me grumpy after what had been an annoying week, and it was their humourless heavy-handedness that I took home with me in my memories.
I read with interest as they will now be using a building to house all their future sets indoors as protection from the rain and this, perhaps, represented one last hurrah, but what a hurrah it was - and how ironic that it should occur in a summer where rain was something furthest from anybody's mind (beyond praying for some ASAP).
Battersea Park was a magnificent setting in which to build ol' Rydell and, as I walked into a fairground identical to the one at the end of the film, with ferris wheel, fun house and 'shake shack' (remember that from 'You're the One That I Want?'), I marvelled at how effortlessly that and a soundtrack consisting of Billy Fury and Marty Robbins singing Halfway to Paradise and El Paso respectively created instant nostalgia for a decade I'd never lived through in a small American town which didn't exist. The fact that Rydell now sported a huge four-chimney power station, ideal for a flying pig to drift over humming less about summer nights and more about not needing no education, is neither here nor there.
But it was indoors where the set builders had had their greatest triumph - a high school gym decked out for a televised dance context, an ice cream parlour with its own teen angel played by the lead singer of the Kaiser Chiefs (he later stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me and I so regret not casually observing that I predicted a riot), the garage of a Kenickie more human and vulnerable than any I'd seen before and, perhaps most spectacularly, an entire drive-in movie theatre with seats (in little cars) for dozens upon dozens of horny teenagers...the ones in the film might have been in their thirties; a significant number of us were in our sixties!
Everything here worked, as the film (projected on screen after screen everywhere you turned) gave way to live action acting which then gave way to FILMED live action acting, care of the day's energetic camera crew, which in turn bled back into the film. Several stunts were magically creative: Danny's swing being hoisted high above the audience's heads as he sang 'Sandy'; members of the ensemble each carrying a piece of Greased Lightning's chassis and coming together around Danny to form a complete car as he drove in the climactic race...
It was simply terrific. And the songs? If you haven't heard a couple of hundred flat baritones singing '...as for you, Troy Donahue, I know what YOU wanna do,' you haven't lived.