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Grease Live On Fox (1 Viewer)

Aaron Silverman

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So. . .HD on download, but only SD on disc? Is this some kind of a test?

'Cause if it is, Fox, you've FAILED!
 

Wayne_j

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The same thing happened with all of the NBC live musicals. And Paramount has the home video rights.
 

Mike Frezon

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I just watched the first few minutes of the show again on my DVR (in beautiful HD).

My wife kept commenting that Aaron Tveit looked too old to be a high school senior. WAY too old.

I looked it up on IMDB. He's...33! Ridiculous.
 

Stan

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I just watched the first few minutes of the show again on my DVR (in beautiful HD).

My wife kept commenting that Aaron Tveit looked too old to be a high school senior. WAY too old.

I looked it up on IMDB. He's...33! Ridiculous.

In the original film, Olivia Newton-John was 30, Travolta mid '20s, Stockard Channing 34. Yet all supposedly in high school. Just minor details we're supposed to overlook :)

With all the plastic surgery now, a celebrity could be 70 and pass for 40.
 

Matt Hough

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Yes, I didn't think the actors in the movie looked any more like high school students than the actors in the live TV version. It's just suspension of disbelief we all have to engage in if we want to enjoy many shows set in high school.
 

MatthewA

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Boy oh boy, do I have mixed feelings about this production.

First of all, from a technical standpoint, it is a huge, huge, HUGE step up from the NBC musicals. Doing it live on studio sets gave the actors and the camera operators more room to breathe, and we are way past the days when "live theater on TV" meant three bulky RCA TK-41s pointed at a single stage. This is going to raise the bar considerably for future shows.

The cast can sing and dance well, but when it comes to their acting, one wishes they had been a bit bolder in their choices, by which I mean try to actually act and not just impersonate the original actors. So many times the actors copied the movie's cast practically beat-for-beat, it felt like a very expensive karaoke night.

The new song, "All I Need is an Angel" is lackluster; it sounds so far removed from the music of the 1950s it's not even funny, and it sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the score and slows down the diner scene to a halt. If you're going to give Frenchy a solo—she doesn't have one in either the play or the film—it has to be better than this.

Mario Lopez's host segments at the commercial breaks took me out of it way too much, considering they're not in character.

The worst aspect of this production is the unavoidable by-product of being on network TV: they took a lot of the grease out of it! There is little sexual tension between the actors at any moment in time. They cut the T-Birds mooning the camera, making it odd why they would put back a fragment of the stage song "Mooning." At least the censorship of the lyrics of "Greased Lightning" was not nearly as lazy as some who have tried to make this song network TV-friendly, and on this very same network, no less.
 

Mike Frezon

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I could never accept Stockard Channing as Rizzo. That was way too much. Somehow, I was able to let ONJ and Travolta slide...

:D
 

cinemiracle

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It was shown on television in Australia last Tuesday night. At 3 1/2 hours ,I declined to watch it due to not wanting to endure numerous commercial breaks. That would have amounted to almost an hour of commmercials during the lengthy run. I would rather wait and watch it on disc if that ever eventuates.Neither was it 'live' as such-merely recorded for later broadcasting.I still have fond memories of seeing the original film in 70mm at the Ziegfeld in NYC.
 

GlennF

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Finally got to watch this. Enjoyed it quite a lot. The opening, closing, dance at the gym and Greased Lightning, in particular, were high water marks.

The performers were fine, especially the ladies. The choreography was great. The sets were good. I liked the live audience. Not sure why the costumes had to be so similar to the movie, however. In fact, they were alternatively copying and paying homage to the film. (To the point, where Julianne sang "Hopefully Devoted to You", they had a little plastic pool on the front yard....for no other reason I could see than there was one in the movie that played a role in that song.

Like someone else commented, I also found it odd that despite the wild reactions of the audience to the musical numbers, there was not a laugh to be heard from them. That seemed a little weird.

What I liked best was the energy, which I have found seriously lacking in the other live musicals. Also, there was real "joy", for lack of a better word, something that all great musicals should have at some point, that sheer exuberance where only bursting into song is sufficient. I got that from the musical numbers listed at the beginning of my post.

NBC is going to have to alter their game. The bar has been set much higher.
 

GlennF

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Just watch some of this again. (The joys of PVRs). After reading Mike's and Patrick's comments it is interesting that what we got broadcast here in Toronto (it was live) on our CTV network was different than what you got in the U.S. (Perhaps Fox controlled their own feed and another one was sent out internationally.) During Born to Hand Jive we got 34 seconds of complete silence and then the sound came back in all channels and was great - but boy those 34 seconds seemed long the first time I saw it. During "Hopelessly Devoted to You", there was no cuts to anything else - we saw the number completely through from beginning to end. There was some static in the music in the background, but it improved after the intro.

Liked the fact there were just a few (very minor) bumps. Otherwise I might have suspected some of it had been filmed before...like when they were driving in the "golf carts" at the end and the second one ran over the curb. If you watch, take a look at the coach's face as he looks at the dancer who is doing the driving. And during the bows, the school secretary drops a brooch. Without missing a beat, the actor who is next to her picks it up as he exits. Or the look on Julianne's face at the end of the song "You're The One That I Want", of, "We've almost made it to the end!" (Well, perhaps I am reading into that.)

Why did they let the music group at the dance look so obviously 2015?

The main marvel of the show was the technical aspect. The direction was amazing. Who would be nominated for the Emmy? The television director or the stage director? (As it was two separate people.) Perhaps they would be jointly nominated. Someone certainly needs to be.
 

Mike Frezon

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Glenn:

Watch Vanessa Hudgens carefully during that final number (We Go Together) from the camera which were high up (drones/jib?). She was obviously having some kind of malfunction with her blouse and was holding things together (for dear life!). :biggrin:
 

Mike Frezon

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Ya know what else I noticed...but forgot to report on? ...even though I told my wife that THIS would be the main issue we'd be talking about on the OAR-sensitive Home Theater Forum.

Remember how cool it was when the broadcast within the broadcast started in the gymnasium of Rydell High? Our HD color 16:9 image shrunk to an SD B&W 4:3 image!

I thought that was pretty well-done. A nice touch. But then when they go the shots of Vi and some others watching the broadcast on a small TV on the diner counter, the B&W image on the little portable 4:3 TV was wide-screen letterboxed! Fail!

But still...a good effort! :thumbsup:

:D
 

Todd J Moore

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I do wonder if we all saw the same thing. I watched this mostly live (I missed the first 15 minutes) and Hopelessly Devoted To You didn't cut away but had the aforementioned static.

Funny thing, I decided to watch it again today on On Demand. I was originally just going to watch what I missed but ended up watching the whole thing. The long sound drop wasn't there and I might have missed it but I don't think Mario Lopez's flub (calling it American Bandstand when they came back from commercial) was there either. Maybe that was and I just missed it.
 

Brian Kidd

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I've never been much of a fan of Grease, but I did enjoy the technical aspect of the production quite a bit. I noticed during the credits that the costume designer was William Ivey Long, who does the costumes and scenic design for a show I spent my summers in college doing, The Lost Colony. He's won a fistful of Tonys, so they certainly didn't scrimp on the costumes.
 

Mike Frezon

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He was actually featured in one of the behind-the-scenes features used as a commercial bumper. They focused on his creative quick-change costume for Marty (KeKe Palmer). They actually showed the same featurette twice during the east coast broadcast.
 
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GlennF

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A great designer. (He did the quick changes for the current Broadway production of Cinderella). Too bad he was obviously told to stick pretty close to some of the fashions in the movie. Of course, as mentioned above, it was definitely in large part a homage to the movie version. You know this off the top when Jessie J walks down a hallway and every poster (there are several) is for the movie version of Grease!
 

cinemiracle

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I saw the original stage show when it was on Broadway and that was hugely successful and brilliant. The film version was also great in 70mm.
 

MatthewA

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I could never accept Stockard Channing as Rizzo. That was way too much. Somehow, I was able to let ONJ and Travolta slide...

:D

Here's what Stockard Channing looked like as an actual teenager for comparison. She was actually in high school in 1959!

And before Grease, she played a college student in a wonderful TV movie called The Girl Most Likely To…
 

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