Review: Bear Grease Reimagines Danny and Sandy as Indigenous

Imagine an alternate history in which Indigenous peoples successfully beat back the intruding colonizers in 1492. What would the world be like five hundred years later? And, more specifically, how would this seismic shift in events transform the musical Grease?

That’s the initially provocative but instantly abandoned premise of Bear Grease, the totally bewildering though good-natured parody musical that often feels like a low-grade fever dream currently playing at St. Luke’s Theatre.

According to the show’s creators, Henry Cloud Andrade and Crystle Lightning, this is only the second all-native off-Broadway musical (presumably the other is last season’s Distant Thunder). And the effort to bring this peppy cast of young performers, mostly First Nations actors from Canada, to a New York stage is admirable.

But Bear Grease detracts from its own importance by making very little sense in its fragmentary structure. About half of the two-hour running time is spent on prerecorded videos, first a series of tongue-in-cheek trailers and credits for the show, some of them animated, and then several backstage exchanges between scenes showing a tempestuous love affair playing out between the lead actors. There’s even a lengthy video in which cast members go around in a circle and name their favorite member of the Wu-Tang Clan.

After ten minutes of pre-taped introductions and four unrelated production numbers, co-creator Henry Cloud Andrade freestyles a rap based on prompt words provided on cue cards by co-creator and director Crystle Lightning. (I appreciated the inclusion of “Theatermania” among them.) He’s talented, but a full thirty minutes pass before the actual musical begins.

And because Bear Grease is, ostensibly, a show within a show, it’s unclear whether the Grease-like sequences are meant to be as chaotic as they come across. The very slim plotline loosely follows the plot of Grease (which, admittedly, is also pretty slim): Danny (Bryce Morin) and Sandy (Melody McArthur) fell in love at a pow-wow over the summer, but when Sandy shows up at school in the fall, Danny pretends not to know her. He’s showing off for his group of friends, the Thunderbirds, and she’s swiftly initiated into the Pink Aunties, led by Rizzo, here reimagined as—wait for it—Rezzo (Tammy Rae).

Non-native audiences won’t pick up on many of the culturally specific references so there’s a glossary provided in the Playbill (the show’s title, for example, refers to a sacred North American medicine made from bear fat).

While some of the songs are tunes from Grease with parody lyrics (“So we made our true love vow/See you at next year’s pow-wow,” Danny and Sandy croon), others—both from the show and also randomly selected pop songs (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” is one)—are performed as originally written. Bear Grease’s inconsistent relationship with its piecemeal content makes for a dizzying watch.

Having evoked Grease, that most Caucasian of properties, Bear Grease does little to explore with any depth what might be discovered at the intersection of indigenous experience and the white America of the 1950s. There might be something interesting in the rewritten words of “Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” in which Sandy’s new friends mock her desire to assimilate to whiteness and date white boys. But is a song about white America consistent with the all-indigenous alternate timeline the show imagines?

Like its undisciplined logic, Bear Grease’s technical elements also feel undercooked: actors sometimes wait a few seconds for the pre-recorded tracks to play, and, though there are projected subtitles, they’re almost always blocked by the lively choreography.

But in a couple brief moments, Bear Grease suggests a more insightful remixing. We first hear “Hopelessly Devoted to You” sung by Danny in the style of a round dance. Morin accompanies himself on a drum and infuses the melody with traditional riffs. It’s an arresting amalgam of sound worlds, made somehow potent amidst the surrounding mayhem by Morin’s aching inflections.

The other compelling moment occurs when Rezzo sings “Stand By Me” in Cree. Why sing that song? And why the sudden shift to Cree? No clue, but, Rae delivers the number with powerful resolve and a yearning belt. To paraphrase Grease’s Rizzo, there are worse things you could do.