Pontiac High School’s auditorium was transformed into the halls of Rydell High last week for five sold-out shows of the school’s musical production of Grease.
The play, which is set inside the 1950s Chicago working-class subculture known as greasers, follows two crowds of high-school kids as they navigate young love, peer pressure, and personal values.
One group, the leather jacket-clad T-Birds, are macho, crass, and steal hubcaps for fun. Their leader is Danny Zuko, (played by Isaac Graham) a womanizing greaser who, as we learn in the play’s first act, had a summer fling that he describes in crude detail to his pals.
Also in the first act we learn the object of Danny’s summer lust is Sandy Dombrowski, (played by Emma Frobel) a well-to-do Catholic girl who just transferred to Rydell High and is trying to fit in with the Pink Ladies, the school’s female counterparts to the T-Birds. She tells the girls of her romantic love affair with Danny.
Sandy struggles to fit in with the wine-drinking, cigarette-smoking Pink Ladies, while Zuko has a hard time admitting to himself – and to his fellow T-Birds – he might see the preppy Sandy as more than just a summer fling.
Other struggles arise along the way as Rizzo, one Pink Lady, played by Faith Hamilton, has a pregnancy scare with T-Bird Kenickie, played by Ewan Smith, while Frenchy, another Pink Lady, played by Laura Graham, decides to drop out of beauty school.
In the end, though, Danny admits his love for Sandy, there is no pregnancy after all, and Frenchy finds a job at a beauty store. All ends happily as the cast breaks out into the show’s final musical number, We Go Together.
Co-director Phil Holmes said he was happy to see some of his standout seniors get a chance to shine in leading roles, including Isaac Graham as Danny and Allie Benoit as Marty, another Pink Lady.
“[Benoit] has been in four of my shows and she adds a wonderful character to what she does, she’s got a beautiful little singing voice and I know that she’d do a great job as Marty, and she didn’t disappoint,” he said.
“And then Isaac Graham, I imagined that he’d pull off Danny [Zuko] quite well and that he’d also be able to have fun with that role.”
Holmes said he likes to give actors more wiggle room to express themselves in their roles instead of the more rigid approach that some high school theatre directors can take, telling actors exactly what to do and how to do it.
“They’ve got two rules when they’re on stage, they’ve got to have fun and they’ve got to have the characters come alive,” he said.
Holmes pointed out this was the theatre program’s fourth musical theatre production since returning from covid. Holmes, himself a former student in PHS’s musical theatre program, said he is pleased to be able to play a role in the program’s return.
“When I was in high school, the musical theatre program, everyone wanted to be a part of it, and then it really died for some time,” he said, adding that PHS teacher Gord Graham began to rekindle the program before the pandemic started.
“We were putting on Chicago together, and then covid hit, and there was nothing for a couple of years.”
He said he was happy to see the students he has directed for four years take the lead, including student Eleanor Landry, who he gave free reign to design the sets.
“After doing high school theatre for 18 years, when you’re starting a theatre program sometimes they don’t know how hard you have to work. But once they get that, once your theatre program has been rolling for a number of years and they understand it, the more trust you can put in the students to get it done themselves.”
Debra Paquette, the show’s co-director who was in charge of costumes, set design, and other behind-the-scenes things, said they had initially looked at renting the show’s costumes from a theatre company, but ended up crowdsourcing many of the outfits.
“We were lucky enough to have someone in the Shawville community who had Pink Ladies jackets that they had used,” she said. “One of the parents came to me and said, ‘There were kids in Pink Ladies jackets at the figure-skating show.’ Obviously we were like ‘Yes, please, that would be amazing.’”
She said she was impressed with how the students came together to help each other make the production as good as it could be.
“Inevitably when you’re dealing with high-schoolers, things get thrown everywhere backstage [ . . . ]
And anyone who was not on stage dropped everything to make sure they could help that person find that piece they were missing because they want everyone to do just the very best that they could do.”
She said she was pleased to see the tickets had sold out in advance, something that hasn’t happened yet since she joined the program three years ago and something she attributes to the popularity of the Grease franchise.
She said she was happy for all the students, but especially for the seniors who she worked alongside for three years and who she had the pleasure of working with in their journey.
“[It] was a warm and fuzzy feeling that kind of reminds you after seven months of doing this and you feel like you’re in the trenches, it’s that really nice feeling that is why I do this again at the end of the day, is to see the kids really coming into their own.”
