When you're looking for just the right musical to be your new college's first big theatrical production then Grease is the one that you want. Oo oo oo, honey! Yes, it's the one that you want. Oo oo oo! It's the one you need! Oh yes indeed!
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Sorry, your columnist got a little carried away there, thinking of the great movie version (1978, with John Travolta as Danny and Olivia Newton-John as Sandy) and of its exuberant greatest hit You're the One That I Want and of the way Gungahlin College is about to show the similar-to-the-movie 1971 stage version.
Pioneering comes in all sorts of forms and this production of Grease is quite a rite of pioneering passage for young Gungahlin. The show's director and college teacher Maria Stewart explains that it's not only the first theatrical extravaganza for a youthful college that only opened last year but also appears to be the baby suburb's, Gungahlin's, first major theatrical occasion.
And why, Gang-gang asked her, did you decide that Grease was the one you'd want? The one you'd need. Oh yes indeed.
For this pioneering venture, she explains, ''We wanted something everybody would know, with songs everybody knows''. She's sure the students' parents all saw the film and have found it and its music unforgettable.
Yes, the 1978 movie was and remains fabulously popular. It's finale-approaching dance-song duet for the two happy lovers Danny and Sandy, You're The One That I Want, was top-of-the-pops all over the world for weeks and weeks. It is a very dull, tightly corseted, Taliban-hearted person who doesn't twitch with delight to hear it.
This columnist sallied forth yesterday afternoon to a Grease rehearsal in the college's swish new theatre, blessed with what must surely be the most spacious theatre stage in Canberra. Even Verdi's Aida, which requires armies and some elephants, could fit on a stage like that. I'd hoped to be there for You're The One That I Want but with Stewart's call of ''Ready people? Standing by. Beginning of Act Two. Three, two, one, go!'' the youngsters launched into an earlier passage of the musical adorned with lots of dynamic dancing invited by an MC ordering ''OK cats. Put your mittens around your kittens''. This is 1959-speak for ''Gentlemen, take your partners.''
Then there was a touching, plaintive Hopelessly Devoted to You sung by Mai Miller as Sandy.
Grease is wonderful stuff, but, we put it to Stewart, isn't the show, set in a US high school in politically incorrect 1959, a blush-makingly rude, pre-feminist and sexist entertainment?
Stewart said, with feeling, that, yes, ''All this has all caused us a lot of discussion'' because the story is riddled with smoking and drinking and sex. There are gangs. There are things spoken and sung that are toe-curlingly wrong to modern ears, and there is at least one unfamiliar word (Betty Rizzo sings it at Sandy) that no one should go home and look up.
But Stewart said that in the end there's been cleaning-up and political correcting of the script, and anyway it's a condition of the owner's permission to stage it that to the script you must be true. And so the college is making it clear that this production isn't an endorsement of any of the wickednesses portrayed. It is very much a cameo of the US high school culture of the 1950s. ''It celebrates that time. The way people were then,'' Stewart emphasises.
Alligators! Cats! If you've got a steady/Get her ready. Put your mittens/round your kittens and take them to Gungahlin College's Grease at the college's theatre from Tuesday to Saturday, September 18-22, at 7.30. For bookings call 6142 1000.
