Grease: Live!: cinematic is the word for this live TV Musical

New York

WHEN Fox's Grease: Live! reached its celebratory conclusion on Sunday, opinions about it no doubt differed, but one thing was clear: The live-musicals-on-television trend is no longer about trying to capture the magic of being in a Broadway house, if it ever was.

The Grease that the director Thomas Kail (of Broadway's Hamilton) served up was cinematic, impressively so, with its countless cameras, its tracking shots, its zooms, its galloping from soundstage to soundstage. Executing such a production live must have required an unbelievable amount of coordination and technical expertise. But, despite the presence of a live audience for parts of it, the experience for viewers wasn't remotely theatre. Good theatre is spine-tingling; Grease: Live! was spectacle.