HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL Osnes and Crumm
recall a summer romance.

Photo: Joan Marcus

Perhaps you’re wondering which is worse: Grease the reality-TV talent competition or Grease the Broadway revival? Considering that the stage show didn’t cause spontaneous bleeding from my eyeballs, I guess the technical winner is the live option. But it’s live only in the sense that Victor Frankenstein might use. At least the small-screen abomination had commercial breaks, so I could mop up the blood. To change channels at the desperate, synthetic bore on display at the Brooks Atkinson, your only hope is a self-induced coma or cataleptic fit.

The audience-vote casting of charisma-free Laura Osnes and Max Crumm would be a pity if the stakes weren’t so low. Grease has always been a trashy cultural fluke that worked better as a movie: a cheeky homage to the early days of rock & roll filtered through a sleazy mid-’70s ethos of hedonism and simplistic, prefeminist nostalgia. The one attempt at emotional depth, Rizzo’s “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” offers a sympathetic view of the knocked-up bad girl (Jenny Powers), which inspires goody-goody Sandy (Osnes) to embrace her inner slut, but the lesson is lost in weak performances. And not all the robotic ululations of “You’re the One That I Want” can catalyze chemistry between Crumm and Osnes: They come across as a very affectionate brother-and-sister team. Osnes is perky and pretty enough, but Crumm, a gawky, middling singer and dancer, would barely rate for the bus-and-truck tour.

Kathleen Marshall’s directorial hand—which seems forever reaching for its own signature—cannot pull her uneven cast together, and the whole sorry enterprise seems covered in a thin layer of embarrassed anxiety. Tears, spittle and flop sweat: three fluids that combine to make Grease.