Nostalgic high-energy fun with Grease in Portsmouth

Performances run at the Southsea venue from April 9-14 – a musical Nick is delighted to return to.

“I was brought in to direct it. It came about through Jack Edwards at the Kings. He was originally going to be directing it himself but he soon realised that he is very busy spinning an awful lot of plates and so he started looking for somebody else to come in and he asked me to direct the show. Within the last 12 to 18 months he has been very familiar with some of the other directorial work that I have done in the local area. I've been working with the Portsmouth Players and the South Downe Musical Society and CAOS in Chichester. I am very well versed in the local amateur theatre community landscape. But I've only really been directing for the last five or six years. My love for theatre was generated through being on stage from quite a young age. I was nine or ten with my first show which was Oklahoma! at the Ferneham hall in Fareham.

“But Grease had an immediate appeal to me. I've been in a production before with the South Downe Musical Society. That was about 2016 or 2017 and I played Kenickie, who is Danny's right-hand man. So on occasion with this I feel I can fill in a bit where cast members might be missing. But I think my love for Grease came about when I first did the production. At the time the director was desperately looking for men to join the cast which is a recurring theme in amateur theatre unfortunately. She brought me in to play Kenickie, and she was also looking for someone to play Danny. I was fortunate enough to be able to bring in one of my best friends for the role so between us we played the lead and the second lead in the show and ever since then I've always loved it.

“It is such a great show. There is so much energy throughout the whole production. There are very few numbers where you are just stripped back to one character being sad or suffering on stage. It is just so energetic and happy and you've got such a great sense of camaraderie throughout the whole show. There is fun with the boys and you've also got the Pink Ladies who are a very close-knit group. They are making jokes at each other’s expense but the moment that one of them is threatened they will all protect each other.”

One possible criticism of the show is that effectively Sandie sells out to Danny at the end. Nick is trying to see it all in a different way: “You could say she does sell out and that's probably more in keeping with the way it was all originally written at the time. I think if Grease had been written nowadays you would have been looking at a slightly different plot! But the messaging that we're trying to get across about Sandie is that it is more about her being empowered after having led a really sheltered life. She starts off very shy and bottled up but she is taken under the wing of the Pink Ladies who are much more confident and much more sure of who they are and what they want to achieve. She becomes one of the Pink Ladies and she becomes so much more confident and that's the stance that we're taking on what happens with Sandie.”