Grease : a case study of the cinematic influence on the staging of musical theatre

Abstract

Grease is a story that revolves around high school drama, love, identity, the 1950s, and Rock and Roll. The film adaptation released almost a decade after the first staging of the musical helped make it one of the most famous musicals of the twentieth century, to the extent that the musical’s origins have nearly been buried under the film’s significance. This dissertation will make use of notions from adaptation studies to investigate how the film’s popularity has impacted Grease’s journey. The timeline of how adaptations have evolved and changed the earlier stages of Grease is fascinating and its results will reflect on how mediums affect one another respectively, thus, implicating how audiences perceive and react to adaptational differences. As a case study, I will discuss Masquerade’s production of Grease. This was staged in 2023 at the Manoel theatre and through a series of observations and interviews with the cast and crew, the film’s influence will be analysed.