Granville Island Stage to May 17, 2026
Tickets from $41 plus web processing fee from www.ticketspice.com
Posted May 12, 2026
I have been writing this review in my head since opening night three evenings ago. It’s a terrific show with more than two dozen, extremely good, mostly non-professional performers, singing and dancing their hearts out and their butts off. Dynamic choreography by Ken Overbey. A live, on-stage, seven-piece band under Jeremy Hoffman’s musical direction. A very cool set design by Brian Ball who also designed the costumes: pleated plaid skirts, crinolines, bobby sox on the girls and a whole lot of leather on the main heartthrob, Danny Zuko (Stephen Thakkar), a mover and shaker in the gang, the Burger Palace Boys.
Amazing direction for CTORA Productions by United Players’ artistic director Sarah Rodgers who must be suffering whiplash going from the tight, small-cast show, Network, at Jericho Arts Centre to this huge show on the Granville Island Stage. It’s a major pivot for Rodgers and, wow, does she ever pull it off. The opening night crowd was whooping and hollering, cheering and even, at times, singing along. There were gals in satin bomber jackets with ‘Pink Ladies’ – the name of the girls’ clique in the musical – emblazoned on the back. It was a raucous opening the likes of which that theatre seldom sees.
But here’s what I found, well, strange: with book, music and lyrics written by American writers Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey in 1972, Grease harkens back to the late 1950s at Rydell High, a fictitious Chicago high school (very like the one Jacobs went to). While the audience in the Granville Island Stage theatre was close to ecstatic for much of the evening, there was probably only a handful who actually were teenagers in the 50s. It was nostalgia for a time most of this audience never experienced: they weren’t even born then. And yet they were over the moon.
It’s entirely possible that the nostalgia was really for the 1972 movie starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, not the original Broadway production.
I was actually in high school in Vancouver in the 50s and I and the friends I mostly hung out with were into Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Lionel Hampton and Louis Armstrong. Oh, sure, we were also mad about Elvis Presley and Bill Haley and the Comets; I sang backup for Presley sing-alike, guitar-playing Frank Reynold. But “Greased Lightnin’”, “Hopelessly Devoted to You” and “Summer Nights” were not on my radar at all. No one I knew talked about giving someone a “knuckle sandwich”. We didn’t have “rumbles”. Any guy that spent a lot of time combing his hair or posturing in tight leather pants was a joke.
And by the time the movie came out, I was a young mom and back at school. Travolta? Pfft.
But this production is undeniably first-class. Danny Zuko (Stephen Thakkar) flips good-girl Sandy Dumbrowski (Ava Stark) into a fully-fledged member of the Pink Ladies. She swaps her primrose yellow tartan skirt and cardigan for skintight black leather pants because she is so “hopelessly devoted” to Danny and he’s not interested in a ‘good girl’. Good lord.
Tough girl Betty Rizzo (Manuela Palmieri) gets pregnant; the father is probably but not necessarily Kenickie (Connor Hawkins). Marty (Amanda Lourenço) continues to get gifts from ‘Freddie’, an older guy in the military. There’s nerdy guy Eugene (Owen Connolly) and foxy gal Cha Cha (Isabelle Madrigal). The usual suspects. Sort of West Side Story lite.
I’m suffering a bit of whiplash myself. One night it was Itai Erdal’s Soldiers of Tomorrow, an intimate, moving and highly personal look at the Israeli/Palestine strife. A few days later it was Grease.
Credit: Canna Zhou
How is one aging critic supposed to process all this? I could fall and break a hip trying to pivot from one to the other. The good news for CTORA Productions is that the show is quickly selling out and those who weren’t even born in the 50s – or maybe even the 70s or 80s – are loving every minute of it.