Teen audiences didn’t want that they wanted High School Hellcats and Teenage Doll. She was a fake – in her life, in her acting style, and in her onscreen emotions. To savvy teenagers, Sandra Dee was a teen sellout, and in a world where authenticity was the goal, there was nothing worse. But the studios’ teen flicks were inevitably artificial in the extreme, creating a freakish – and clueless – adult imitation of the teen world, a kind of cultural Frankenstein, that teens could see right through. Today, it may be hard to understand what Sandra Dee represented, but she was the poster girl for the big studios’ attempts to make teen movies, a genre which was up until that point the exclusive territory of small, low-budget producers like the ubiquitous Roger Corman (The Little Shop of Horrors, Bucket of Blood, and others). Sandra Dee was a big star at this point, and just in the two years that Grease spans, she released The Restless Years (1958), The Reluctant Debutante (1958), A Stranger in My Arms (1959), Gidget (1959), Imitation of Life (1959), The Wild and the Innocent (1959), and A Summer Place (1959), jumping back and forth between empty-headed teen comedies and stark melodrama.
Movie star Sandra Dee becomes Grease‘s overarching metaphor for the artificiality of adult American life, a symbol that needed piercing. Teen sexuality has been an issue in America since the invention of the rumble seat, always moving forward like a freight train, forever going faster and farther and Grease is a snapshot of America right before teen sexuality exploded, examining the early cracks in the armor of middle-class "respectability" and repression, the fantasy American Dream that never was but that came beaming into Americans’ homes over the television airwaves. Like Hair, Grease is an anti-musical, closer to the experimental theatre pieces of New York’s off off Broadway movement in the 60s, and light years from other musicals running on Broadway at the time, like No No Nanette (in a terrible revival), Sugar, The Rothschilds, Applause, or A Little Night Music.Īlso like Hair, Grease is about authenticity, the watchword of that first rock and roll generation. Just as the characters of Hair and Grease reject conformity and authority, so too do both Hair and Grease as theatre pieces. The impact of Hair on Grease can even be seen in the two shows’ titles, both taking as their primary symbols the hairstyles of young Americans as a form of rebellion and cultural declaration of independence. (The phrase rock and roll was originally African American urban slang for sexual intercourse, going as far back as the 1920s, and it made its way onto many rhythm and blues recordings before the 1950s.) As theatre, Grease finds its roots in the rawness, the rowdiness, the lack of polish that made Hair and other experimental pieces in the 1960s such cultural phenomena. It’s about the near carnal passion 1950s teenagers felt for their rock and roll, the first art form that actually changed human sexuality.
Like Hair before it and The Rocky Horror Show which would come a year later, Grease is a show about repression versus freedom in American sexuality, about the clumsy, tentative, but clearly emerging sexual freedom of the late 1950s, seen through the lens of the middle of the Sexual Revolution in the 1970s. Originally a rowdy, dangerous, over-sexed, and insightful piece of alternative theatre, Grease was inspired by the rule-busting success of Hair and shows like it, rejecting the trappings of other Broadway musicals for a more authentic, more visceral, more radical theatre experience that revealed great cultural truths about America.Īn experience largely forgotten by most productions of the show today. Grease, generally considered a trivial little musical about The Fabulous Fifties, is really the story of America’s tumultuous crossing over from the 50s to the 60s, throwing over repression and tradition for freedom and adventure (and a generous helping of cultural chaos), a time when the styles and culture of the disengaged and disenfranchised became overpowering symbols of teenage power and autonomy.
Record companies were releasing more than a hundred singles every week and the country was about to explode. The year is 1959, a pivotal moment in American cultural history, when rock and roll was giving birth to the Sexual Revolution and everything in America culture was about to be turned upside down.