INTERVIEW: Hey T-Birds! Now, it’s time to ‘Vape!’
Photo: From left, Meg Guiney, Lara Strong, SLee and Kristen Amanda Smith star in Vape! The Grease Parody. Photo courtesy of Jeremy Daniel / Provided by KSA with permission.
Vape! The Grease Parody is a hilarious sendup of everyone’s favorite movie musical, and now it has landed at Theater 555 in New York City for a 10-week run. Director Jack Plotnick is so enthused to have the parody playing in the Big Apple.
“I think the world needs to laugh right now, and that’s the big driving force for me,” Plotnick said in a recent phone interview.
Vape! follows the storyline of Grease, which was first a successful stage musical and then an iconic movie starring Olivia Newton-John, John Travolta and Stockard Channing. The original show tells the story of young people falling in love, greasing up their cars and dreaming of what may come next in their lives. Most audiences know the memorable tunes of the musical, including “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” “Greased Lightin'” and “Beauty School Dropout,” among many others.
Vape!, on the other hand, is the creation of Catie Hogan and Sketchworks Comedy, with lyrics and additional book by Billy Recce and Danny Salles.
“What you can expect is just a fresh and wickedly funny new way to enjoy, for a lot of people, our absolute favorite movie in the world, Grease,” Plotnick said. “Anyone who loved that movie as I did just has such a connection with it, and this is such a fun, new way to experience it. We’ve got all the characters and the songs, but with new lyrics because we’re setting it in today. We’re bringing it up to modern times. But what I love about this show is it finds its comedy from so many different avenues. We poke fun at the movie. We poke fun at the actors in the movie, and we make fun of this generation of kids right now who are just as crazy as those kids were but in different ways.”
Plotnick, who co-wrote and directed the Broadway musical Disaster, counts himself a card-carrying member of the Grease fan base. He said that every image of the movie is burned into his memory, and he has been obsessed with the musical since he was 12 years old.
“I would entertain adults at parties by lip-synching to ‘Summer Nights,’ and, of course, I’d play Danny and Sandy,” he said with a laugh. “I would just jump back and forth. I have the album memorized, saw it so many times. I have the photo novel. Do you remember photo novels when they would take a movie and turn it into a comic book? … My mom says I would fantasize while I was mowing the lawn that I was cast as Danny in Grease, and I would sing all his songs at the top of my lungs thinking the sound of the lawnmower would be covering it. It wasn’t until I was an adult, my mom said that everyone could hear me singing. I really didn’t know that, that the whole neighborhood heard me singing because I thought the lawnmower sound was covering it, but anyway it was a really big deal.”
When Salles sent Plotnick the script for Vape!, with all the new lyrics to his favorite songs, the director was blown away and couldn’t wait to sign on the dotted line. “It’s a genuinely laugh-out-loud script, and it is a parody,” he said. “But it’s also an homage. It’s also a whole new take on the material. It just really blew me away. I happily got involved.”
Plotnick said the many jokes in Vape! are meant to be taken as love for the original musical and movie. He said the creators and cast are obsessed with this story, so they are simply poking fun in order to elevate the original material. They are punching up, not punching down.
“This is a show written by people who love the movie,” the director said. “We found that even people who never saw the movie still were able to enjoy it and laugh at it. It’s not a show where you need to have the movie memorized to laugh at it. They made sure of that, which is really smart, I think.”
Plotnick added: “It’s exactly like a MAD magazine poking fun at the movie Grease in that there are all new things to enjoy and laugh at, but at the same time, the movie is screening in your head. You’re seeing Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta all over again but in a new way, so it lets you enjoy what you love about Grease but in a way that is new and fresh and therefore exciting and funny.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Vape! The Grease Parody, directed by Jack Plotnick, is now playing Theater 555 in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
