Before watching Grease Live, we had low expectations due to our love for the 1978 movie, but we were pleasantly surprised when Fox nailed the performance.

Grease has been one of our all time favorite movies since we were little and to hear Fox was doing a live production made us a little nervous. With the cast being popular celebrities from today, there was concern for how they would pull off the iconic roles. As we found out who was casted for each part, we became more interested in the idea of seeing them not only sing and dance, but act their part.

Julianne Hough, who played the role of Sandy, did a phenomenal job of doing justice to Olivia Newton-John’s famous character. She was quoted saying, “It was truly the most magical experience.” On the other hand, Aaron Tveit as Danny Zuko was not as convincing due to his lack of  “bad boy toughness” that John Travolta played so well.

Knowing Grease the movie really well, we noticed some small changes made in the musical. Of course it was still set in the 50’s era, but the producers managed to modernize it with a gender neutral cast and adding African Americans into the mix. Along with casting changes, they added some new songs that we personally feel weren’t all that great.

They even added a modernized classic 20th Century cell phone scene in as a part of the special. This was one of those moments that really showed us how much they tried to give it a modern twist. It definitely added a little humor to the classic scene.

One of our favorite parts of the live musical was seeing that they snuck in an original cast member, Didi Con. She originally played the famous multi hair colored Pink Lady, Frenchy, but was casted as the waitress for the musical. It was fun for us to watch an original be a part of the televised remake.

Even though we knew it would have been hard to recreate every scene exactly the same as the movie, we didn’t feel that was an excuse for the amount of cheesy remakes. We feel Fox could have done more with their sets by utilizing the outdoors. For example, the car race down thunder road was hardly believable and did not need to be made so obviously fake.

Understanding that they couldn’t actually race cars on set, we felt like the Thunder Road scene just wasn’t given enough movie magic. To us, we saw it as a car moving three feet back and forth past another car while the lights flashed and the set made noise, kind of lame if you ask us. On the contrary though, Fox did not disappoint us when it came to making our favorite scenes just as special as the original, such as the ending when Sandy and Danny sung “You’re The One That I Want”.

All in all, we loved Grease Live the Musical. They managed to stick to the story line but make it their own without losing Grease fan’s interest. We can’t wait to see how Fox tops this!