On the 17th October 2019 the cast of our school production of Grease went to Wales Millennium Centre to watch the UK Touring cast of Grease the musical. We decided to go on this trip so we could grab ideas and aspects of the show we liked and didn't like, to add to our performance in December. We also went to be inspired by the professionals in the show and get our cast ready to work hard to get the musical to where it needs to be. personally, I was going to look out for 2 things: Danny's non-verbal communication (i.e. his greetings with the other boys, his walk, body language and use of props), and also any dance moves or lifts I could use within my dances.
We all found the first act very disappointing. I think it was hard to separate characters, especially the t-birds as they didn't bring individual characters. As we were sat quite far away I couldn't separate them by their faces so we were doing it with how they spoke and their characterization which they didn't have so therefore it was impossible to know who was speaking at what time. This meant that we found it hard to follow some of the story. Obviously we all know the story really well so we knew what was going on all of the time but for people who have never watched the movie or weren't sure on the story-line, they would've been confused throughout the whole show. Although, I did like the way they interacted with the stairs in Act 1 Scene 2 and the way they all greeted each other as it made the scene feel really alive and intrigued the audience, however there wasn't clear distinctions in the way the characters greeted each other which is what I was particularly looking out for so that I could take ideas for my target of improving non-verbal communication skills.
Focusing on the T-Birds, the production didn't create clear distinctions in personalities between the boys which was disappointing as it really let down the performance as you no longer had the clear roles provided by each member of the group and no sense of real status between them. Danny and Kinickie were far too similar for me and it wasn't clear who had the higher status within the group. I also think they missed the opportunity to show Danny's 3-dimensional sense as instead of portraying his emotional and caring side through tone of voice or body language changes, they decided to give him an extra song that to all of us felt totally forced and unneeded. As for the other 3 T-Birds, Sonny was forced and tried too hard for the jokes and Doody and Roger were completely merged with no sense of character and so we left the theatre still unable to tell who was who between them- these 3 also were all on the same level of status which was confusing.
As I went with the sole focus of trying to pick up ideas to improve my non-verbal communication skills I was disappointed with Dan Partridge's portrayal of Danny as I believe he missed a lot of opportunities to strengthen his character through the use of changes in body language or the way he greets characters. By throwing away the opportunity to have distinct greetings with each of the boys it meant we didn't get that initial sense of relationships within the group and so this has reinforced to me that I need to work on creating solid greetings with each T-Bird to establish believable relationships. On top of this, Danny was clearly not one of the strongest dancers and quite a lot of the time was not in the foreground of the dancers which, especially in born to hand-jive, meant that the idea of this multi-talented 'stud' was lost. However, he was a very strong singer and was very capable of belting Sandy but because he was so strong of a singer I feel like he tried to make up for his poor dancing by outdoing the singing which actually meant a bit of lost emotion as the song "Sandy" in my opinion should be softer and more gentle as he is announcing his love for the girl of his dreams and completely breaking down his exterior shell of being cool and collected.
As a whole, the show was disappointing: despite the few moments of good, they were heavily outweighed by the poor distinction of characters, lack of non-verbal communication, and underwhelming amount of triple-threats. However, it has helped us as we felt very disappointed by the performance and therefore have been given motivation to up our game so that our audience members don't feel the same way when they leave our shows. Following watching this performance i know i need to do more research via YouTube on greetings between the T-Birds so that in our production we can show the distinction between the relationships of the boys.
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