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    Did Your School Play Face Pushback? We Want to Hear From You.

    Picking plays and musicals has become more complicated in some school districts. We’d like to hear about your experience.The school play is a cherished ritual for many students — and their proud parents. But choosing shows can also be complicated, and there have been instances of pushback against plays or musicals from people raising concerns about content or language.The Times is trying to assess how such concerns have affected school productions. Have concerns about potential criticism influenced which shows are selected for school productions? Have the concerns prompted changes or cancellations to scheduled shows? We’re interested in hearing from teachers, administrators, parents and students.We will not publish any part of your submission without contacting you first. We may use your contact information to follow up with you. (Please fill out this form only if you live in the U.S. and you’re 14 or older. If you’re between the ages of 14 and 17, The Times will ask to get in touch with your parent or guardian before asking any follow-up questions.) More

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    Alex Edelman, ‘Just for Us’ Comedian, Will Bring Show to Broadway

    The solo performance will open on June 26 at the Hudson Theater.Alex Edelman, a comedian who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home and turned the antisemitism of his online critics into material for his monologues, will bring his much-admired memoiristic show, “Just for Us,” to Broadway this summer.For the past five years, Edelman, 34, has been developing “Just for Us” and, with breaks forced by the pandemic, has performed it in Australia, England, Scotland and Canada, as well as in New York, Washington and, beginning next week, Boston, near where he grew up. The show’s sold-out Off Broadway runs, which started at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2021 and moved last year to the SoHo Playhouse and then the Greenwich House Theater, won a special citation this year at the Obie Awards.The one-man show covers a lot of thematic territory, but it is built around Edelman’s seemingly unlikely (and perhaps unwise) decision to drop in on a meeting of white nationalists gathered in Queens.“The show is about the costs of sublimating parts of ourselves to fit in,” Edelman said in an interview.The Broadway run, scheduled to last for eight weeks, will begin performances on June 22 and open on June 26 at Hudson Theater. The lead producer, Jenny Gersten, is the interim artistic director of the Williamstown Theater Festival, in Massachusetts, which presented Edelman’s show last summer in the Berkshires. This will be Gersten’s first Broadway outing as a lead producer; she will produce it along with Rachel Sussman (“Suffs”) and Seaview, the theater company established by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea. (Seaview is also producing this season’s “Parade” and “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”)Edelman said he had repeatedly reworked the show, primarily at the advice of the comedian Mike Birbiglia, who has had two of his one-man shows on Broadway; Birbiglia produced the Off Broadway runs of Edelman’s show and will help produce the Broadway run as well. The show is directed by Adam Brace, who is an associate director at Soho Theater in London.Edelman splits his time between New York and Los Angeles, where he has done some screenwriting — he worked on an adaptation of the novel “My Name Is Asher Lev” that has stalled — and said he continues to tweak “Just for Us.” A variety of prominent comedians have come to see the show, including Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Crystal, and each time, Edelman has made a point of asking for advice.“Part of the reason you can live with a show for a long time is if you’re meticulous, little changes feel like big changes — one word can change a whole joke,” Edelman said.He is obviously jubilant about the Broadway transfer — he visited the Hudson, where Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed, who are now starring there in a revival of “A Doll’s House,” showed him around.“I never thought I’d get to do a show on Broadway, and I genuinely can’t believe that I have this chance,” he said. “It feels a bit like fantasy camp.” More

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    ‘Thanksgiving Play’ by Larissa FastHorse Comes to Broadway

    As Larissa FastHorse worked with the Broadway cast of “The Thanksgiving Play,” which centers on four white people trying to put on a “culturally sensitive” holiday production, one of the actors, Katie Finneran, spoke up in a rehearsal with a suggestion: Perhaps she could drop a swear word during one of her more exasperated lines?“I’m the drama teacher!” Finneran’s character exclaims as her plan to make a socially progressive elementary school play begins to fall apart.FastHorse politely declined. From the work’s conception in 2015, she had intended it to be curse-free, in the hopes of finally having a widely produced play. Her other work — including the play “What Would Crazy Horse Do?” — involved Native American characters, leading producers to call them “uncastable.”So, FastHorse wrote one with white characters, while still focusing on contemporary Indigenous issues. If the play were littered with profanity, FastHorse decided, some theater producers or audiences might reject it.Larissa FastHorse instructs children dressed as turkeys on their choreography for the films, which were made at a school in Brooklyn. In the play, the films are shown between scenes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Being from the Midwest, there are people who won’t go to a play with swearing,” said FastHorse, who grew up in South Dakota. “And those are some of the people I want to reach.”Her gambit worked. After “The Thanksgiving Play” had its Off Broadway debut in 2018, it became one of the most produced plays in America, as it found homes at universities, community theaters and regional groups. In 2021, a streamed version starred Keanu Reeves, Bobby Cannavale, Alia Shawkat and Heidi Schreck as the quartet of bumbling thespians. FastHorse has even heard from people who have read the play aloud on Thanksgiving with their families, turning the activity into a yearly tradition.Now, “The Thanksgiving Play” has made it to Broadway, where it is in previews and is set to open on April 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater. This production, directed by Rachel Chavkin, includes a multimedia element not seen in the Off Broadway version: a series of filmed scenes, featuring children who act out cutesy Thanksgiving pageantry — think feathers and pilgrim attire — while also giving voice to some of the casual brutality with which white American culture has long portrayed Native Americans.In one of the films, older children dressed as pilgrims pretend to shoot down younger children dressed as turkeys. (Lux Haac designed the costumes.) The adults instructed the turkeys to “take a nap” when it was their turn to fall.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesFastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, will be among the first Native American artists to have their work on Broadway. It’s the kind of achievement that the theater world likes to applaud, while perhaps also cringing at the fact that it has taken this long.The play’s skewering of the performative progressivism of the white theater world adds another layer. Its central characters tie themselves in knots trying to stage a play for Native American Heritage Month without actually including any Native Americans. They fret over fulfilling the requirements of a grant, sweat over gender stereotypes, debate the merits of colorblind casting and employ terminology like “white allies” and “emotional space.” To make this production even more of the moment, FastHorse added an exchange about pronoun sharing and references to the “post-B.L.M.” world.“Even though it does openly poke fun at a lot of the folks that I work with who are more on the liberal side,” FastHorse said, “I was really trying to make it so everybody can kind of see each other.”The play’s avatar for the more conservative audience members is a newcomer named Alicia (played by D’Arcy Carden), a hired actress who is unfamiliar with the language of social progressivism.What distinguishes Alicia is a complete lack of concern about so-called political correctness. The others are eager to prove themselves as “enlightened white allies,” including the loudly vegan drama teacher (Finneran), her yoga-loving boyfriend (Scott Foley) and a know-it-all history teacher (Chris Sullivan) who likes to preface his insights with, “Actually …”Rachel Chavkin, the director of the Broadway production, with some of her young actors ahead of filming. Chavkin envisioned this video as embodying the “colonialist narrative” that many American students are taught.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesOn Broadway, as in many industries, the anxiety around screwing up was magnified three years ago, after the murder of George Floyd prompted a wider reflection on racism and inequity in myriad industries and fields. In the theater world, that re-evaluation led to the publication of “We See You, White American Theater,” a document calling for an elevation of works by playwrights of color and more people of color in leadership positions, among other demands.So when FastHorse asked Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown,” to oversee the Broadway run of “The Thanksgiving Play,” Chavkin first wanted to make sure that the playwright wouldn’t prefer a person of color to direct.FastHorse said she wanted someone on the creative team — otherwise made up of people of color — who understood what it was like to be a “well-meaning liberal white person.” In other words, someone who has felt the urge to say all the right things and appear as progressive as possible.“She said, ‘I need your expertise,’” Chavkin recalled.FASTHORSE, 51, has had a winding path to Broadway. She started out as a professional ballet dancer, before an injury led her toward film and television. After she became exhausted by that industry’s handling of Native American issues, she switched to theater, where she observed that people tended to be more open to doing the work necessary for sensitive and accurate portrayals, she said.Around the same time that she started writing “The Thanksgiving Play,” she co-founded a consulting firm called Indigenous Direction that began advising arts groups on Indigenous issues.From left, Henrik Carlson, Ruhaan Gokhale and Christopher Szabo prepare for their scene. The adults directing them explained that they were demonstrating the troubling way that Thanksgiving has been discussed in schools.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAlong with Ty Defoe, an artist from the Oneida and Ojibwe Nations, FastHorse began working with an important company in Thanksgiving — Macy’s — on a question not unlike the one at the center of her play: How could they make it so the Thanksgiving Day Parade, a celebration of colonialism to many Native Americans, was not causing continued harm?Under FastHorse and Defoe’s counsel, the 2020 parade included a Wampanoag blessing and a land acknowledgment recognizing that Manhattan is part of Lenapehoking, or the land of the Lenape people. Last year’s parade added a float designed in consultation with Wampanoag artists and clan mothers.Macy’s also agreed to make a cosmetic — but, to the consultants, important — change: Tom Turkey lost his belt-buckle hat, and in its place appeared a top hat. He is no longer portrayed as a pilgrim, Defoe said, but a “show turkey.” A Macy’s spokeswoman said the change was part of their “re-evaluation of potentially upsetting symbolism.”On Broadway, it is perhaps unsurprising that the process of staging a play about white people discussing Native American representation can start to mimic the script itself.“We’ve had a lot of questions: a lot of questions about Larissa’s life experiences, a lot of questions about what she wants to accomplish,” said Sullivan, who portrays the history teacher. “I’m coming awake to all of the things I didn’t even realize I needed to be thinking about.”There tends to be some guilt, FastHorse said, in the rehearsal room over a lack of knowledge of the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans, including the Pequot Massacre in 1637, which figures prominently in the show.Though it is first and foremost a comedy, the play does not shy away from violent imagery and rhetoric, even when the actors involved are children.TO FILM THE VIDEOS, which are shown between the live scenes, Chavkin and FastHorse gathered two dozen children and teenagers in February inside the auditorium of the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in Brooklyn. Some were dressed as flamboyant turkeys and others wore stereotypical pilgrim costumes, with belt-buckle hats and wooden guns.For the New York City-based elementary and middle school students dressed as pilgrims for the video, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe vision, Chavkin said, was to chart the course of how young people are taught to understand Thanksgiving, from 5- and 6-year-olds singing a silly song involving pumpkin patches and teepees, to high schoolers discussing the 1997 police crackdown on a march of Native Americans in Plymouth, Mass.“You watch young people move through the educational system,” Chavkin said. “What we’re trying to do over the course of these four films is make that arc really palpable, starting with sort of obediently following a very nationalist, colonialist narrative.”In one scene, four Indigenous children, some flown in from across the country, perform a punk rock version of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” complete with a dummy of Theodore Roosevelt with a plastic saber stuck in him.Of course, if you’re asking 12-year-olds to sing part of “Ten Little Indians,” a 19th-century nursery rhyme that includes disturbing lyrics involving the death of Native Americans, you need to explain why.FastHorse told the children before filming that she had found these lyrics (including the couplet, “Two little Indians foolin’ with a gun …. One shot t’other and then there was one”) in a student activity posted online for teachers.“We want adults to be aware that this isn’t OK,” FastHorse told them. “The song actually exists and is still being put out into the world.”The young actors nodded that they understood. For them, as elementary and middle school students in New York City, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history. These days, they said, their teachers mostly avoid the subject. More

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    ‘Beef’ Review: Mad in America

    A thrilling dark comedy explores the complexity of anger, through a road-rage feud between two drivers who are more alike than it seems.“I’m so sick of smiling,” says Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) in the first episode of Netflix’s “Beef.” You may have noticed that he’s not alone in this. Blame it on the pandemic, the culture, the economy, but people are mad right now, on planes and on trains and — like Danny and his car-crossed antagonist, Amy Lau (Ali Wong) — in automobiles.“Beef,” a dark comedy about a road-rage incident that careers disastrously off-road, has good timing, but that’s not enough to make a great TV series. What makes this one of the most invigorating, surprising and insightful debuts of the past year is how personally and culturally specific its study of anger is. Every unhappy person in it is unhappy in a different and fascinating way.Amy and Danny’s high-speed chase through suburban Los Angeles, following a run-in at a big-box-store parking lot, sets the tone for all 10 episodes (which arrive on Thursday). The show floors the accelerator with heedless gusto, racing a course of revenge, subterfuge and terrible decisions.But what gives “Beef” its interest is its attention to the motivations that brought the pair to that parking lot in the first place.Danny, a hard-working, hapless contractor saving to build a house for his Korean parents, is trying to return merchandise while fretting over his family and finances. Amy, an entrepreneur who married into art-world money, is trying to sell her small business to the big store’s owner, a deal she hopes will finally allow her to exhale after years of pressure. Each is this close to breaking, and each, after their near fender-bender, ends up being the other’s last straw.It is easy to see how this could have become a cynical class-war story: His working-class struggle vs. her upscale ennui, his pickup vs. her Mercedes. Instead the creator, Lee Sung Jin (“Dave”), couples a raucous story with a generous spin on the truism that the biggest jerk you meet is fighting battles you know nothing about.Danny’s problems are more existential and dire: He is the hard-working son who has taken his family on his back, including not only his parents but also his crypto-bro younger brother (Young Mazino) and his ex-convict cousin (a volatile David Choe), who become dangerously entangled in his payback schemes. It’s not just cash that he lacks; he feels an emptiness, which he tries to fill by stress-eating Burger King chicken sandwiches and by joining a rock-gospel church, an intriguing if underdeveloped subplot.Steven Yeun in “Beef.” Most of the major characters are shaped by their family and upbringing.NetflixAmy has a cushier living situation, but her stressors are not so different. She smiles through endless microaggressions from Jordan (Maria Bello), her business’s rich white potential buyer, and the intrusions of her wealthy mother-in law (Patti Yasutake). Her husband, George (Joseph Lee), has the sweet but irritating chill of privilege. She keeps a gun (paging Mr. Chekhov) in a home safe, a seeming symbol of Amy herself — a sleek container that keeps something dangerous locked away.As their battle escalates, Amy and Danny become enmeshed in each other’s lives, and their similarities become clearer. “Beef” develops into something of a love story, except about hate. You’d expect Yeun (“Minari,” “The Walking Dead”) to excel in the show’s drama and the comedian Wong (“Tuca & Bertie”) to nail the humor, but they do the reverse just as well. Wong especially taps the tension behind Amy’s exquisite octagonal glasses, the pressure to provide and be perfect — she’s like Rachel Fleishman with a gun instead of yoga.That nearly all of the major characters in “Beef” are Asian is both a casual fact of the setting and integral to its themes. These are characters given less social permission for anger in America, in part because of “model minority” stereotypes of docility. (“You have this serene Zen Buddhist thing going on,” Jordan tells Amy.)But they’re also shaped by their family and upbringing. Amy describes learning to repress her emotions from her father — “Chinese guy from the Midwest, I mean, communication wasn’t his forte” — and her mother, a Vietnamese immigrant who “thought talking about your feelings was the same thing as complaining.”As philosophy, self-help and “Star Wars” have taught us, anger is a destructive emotion. “Beef” provides ample evidence of this, in the cascade of escalations that builds to a climax so weird and explosive that it defies spoiling. And the personal war brings out the best in neither Amy, who insults Danny as “poor,” nor Danny, who calls Amy “some rich bitch from Calabasas.”But “Beef” also pushes past easy cant to explore the idea that anger — even petty, stupid anger — can be liberating. At the end of the first episode, Amy and Danny meet face to face, and it does not end well; she winds up chasing him down the street on foot. He, despite having bought himself trouble he can’t afford, wears a wide, childlike smile. She, planning her next countermove, relaxes into a tiny grin.It’s the first lightness you see on either of their faces. Their dispute will prove to be the worst thing that has happened to either of them, but in the moment, it is also the best. They fight not just out of pride but also out of their seeming belief that their rage might somehow make everything right.Among the motifs that Lee Sung Jin weaves through “Beef” is hunger. Danny has his Burger King addiction — he eats like it’s his job, straining and puffing — while Amy has a sweet tooth, a legacy of her depressed childhood, that she has passed on to her daughter. Which brings us back to this weird, remarkable show’s title.Colloquially, “Beef” means “feud.” But this series shows you how anger can also, for some people, be meat. It fills an emptiness, it sustains, it momentarily satisfies — even if, in excess, it’s terrible for your heart. More

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    Late Night Celebrates Donald Trump’s History-Making Arrest

    “It is a great day to be in New York City — well, unless you’re one person,” Jimmy Fallon joked on Tuesday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Trump Makes History“It is a great day to be in New York City — well, unless you’re one person,” Jimmy Fallon joked on Tuesday night. Stephen Colbert said the day was “70 degrees and sunny with a chance of jail.”Former President Donald Trump’s arraignment was the talk of late night, with hosts noting he was the first U.S. president ever to be arrested and face criminal charges.“Trump made history. The only good news for Trump: In Florida, all the history books have been thrown out, so it’s all right.” — JIMMY FALLON“That guy was the president of the country. If you asked for the manager at Best Buy and that guy came over, you’d say, ‘No, the manager.’” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, former President Trump was arraigned today in Manhattan. And, like anyone else, Trump is presumed innocent until he outright confesses on Truth Social.” — SETH MEYERS“At that point, of course, he was read his Miranda rights. Then he claimed Miranda wasn’t even his type, asked her to sign an N.D.A. and got indicted again.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Once he got inside the courtroom, Trump was formally charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, which are class E felonies. Yep, Trump was like, [imitating Trump] ‘Of course they were very classy felonies. Some would say the classiest of felonies.’” — JIMMY FALLON“And he alone. Ain’t none of your boys around no more — you gave them all pardons. And everybody know you don’t pardon all of your partners — you got to leave one in jail so you have somebody to talk to.” — ROY WOOD JR., guest host of ‘The Daily Show”The Punchiest Punchlines (Trump in Court Edition)“That’s him in court. Look at his face. This is the first time in his life anything’s ever dawned on him.” — SETH MEYERS, on a photo of Trump in the courtroom“Look at how sad Trump looks. My man look like somebody told him his dog died or that Mike Pence is still alive.” — ROY WOOD JR.“He looks like he’s watching another table at Applebee’s get their food first.” — JIMMY FALLON“Looks like he had to sit through two unskippable ads on YouTube.” — JIMMY FALLON“He looks like Ben Affleck at the Grammys.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe former host Jon Stewart popped by “The Daily Show” to talk about Trump’s arrest.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightCecily Strong, who stars in “Schmigadoon!” will appear on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutChucky, the sinister doll behind a horror franchise, is the subject of the documentary “Living With Chucky.”Cinedigm/ScreamBoxThe documentary “Living With Chucky” takes a personal look at the legacy of one of horror’s most lasting and loved villains. More

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    Review: ‘Berlusconi: A New Musical’ Is Hammy and Hamstrung

    The show, in London, skewers its protagonist through maximalist kitsch, but it comes with a tone of finger-wagging moralism that’s no fun.When we first meet Silvio Berlusconi, the title character in “Berlusconi: A New Musical,” the former populist prime minister of Italy is awaiting the verdict of a tax fraud trial in 2012. But this is not some courtroom drama about white-collar crime: The case is merely a framing device for a more comprehensive indictment of Berlusconi’s life and character.As he awaits his fate, a succession of women reproach the beleaguered media mogul in song: The state prosecutor, Ilda (Sally Ann Triplett), enumerates his alleged sexual and financial wrongdoings; his ex-wife Veronica (Emma Hatton) laments his many infidelities; Fama (Jenny Fitzpatrick), a TV reporter who had a relationship with him during the early stages of her career, tells her story, as does Bella (Natalie Kassanga), a young woman whom he seduced at one of his notorious “Bunga Bunga” parties; and his mother (Susan Fay) chides him from beyond the grave — “I raised you to be good!”Running at the Southwark Playhouse, in London, through April 29, “Berlusconi: A New Musical” is a maximalist kitsch cabaret that carries a serious message about power and hubris. Written by Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan, it skewers its protagonist for the vacuous cynicism of his political demagogy, as well as his considerable personal shortcomings. But it is also hamstrung by its earnestness, with a tone of finger-wagging moralism that is the antithesis of fun.Sebastien Torkia performs the title role with a smirking, camp swagger. It feels like an amusingly counterintuitive rendering of the famously macho womanizer, until we recall that Berlusconi was a cruise ship crooner in the 1960s; in Torkia’s rendering, he still is. The music comprises a broad repertoire of finger-clicking ditties and soaring power ballads. But there’s a shift in tone for Bella’s segment, which deals with sexual exploitation: The director James Grieve and the choreographer Rebecca Howell render it in an appropriately sensitive and solemn manner, though the timbre of this sequence sails dangerously close to gooey melodrama, and may strike some as patronizing. This is tricky terrain.From left: Emma Hatton, Jenny Fitzpatrick, Torkia and Sally Ann Triplett. Throughout the show, a succession of women reproach Berlusconi in song.Nick RutterThere are some smart touches with the set design, by Lucy Osborne. The stage is filled by a steep staircase representing the courtroom steps, cleverly opening up the space for the performers to caper on multiple levels. Fitzpatrick delivers the standout vocal performance as Fama, whose parts are addressed to a camcorder synced up to the big screen in the back, as well as smaller TVs on either side. She appears onscreen in real time, complete with news graphics and captions that vividly evoke the psychological stress of personal drama played out in the media glare.Like many a puffed-up strongman, the figure of Berlusconi is ripe for satire. But Simmonds and Vaughan, the show’s writers, haven’t made the most of the comic potential in his vanity and libidinousness. The gags — including a dig at his penchant for facial filler and a somewhat puerile riff on the supposed homoeroticism of his friendship with Vladimir Putin — are mildly funny but not exactly sidesplitting.The show also suffers slightly from a lack of narrative thrust. Since everything is being chewed over in retrospect, we don’t get a sense of a personal journey unfolding. Torkia’s Berlusconi only really has two registers: the arrogant bluster that is his default mode (“I am the Jesus Christ of politics!”), and occasional moments of fretful self-doubt. After the first hour, these registers start to wear thin.With lyrics featuring pointed allusions to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, “Berlusconi: A New Musical” is clearly trying to speak to the moment, channeling a long and distinguished tradition of lampooning demagogues that dates back to Charlie Chaplin. But the discourse on populism is saturated, to put it mildly, and this production would probably have felt more urgent about seven years ago: Its core insights, about the symbiosis between personal immorality and the corruption of the body politic, are almost self-evident by now.Either way, the point is labored. By the closing number, which urged theatergoers to “Be careful who you vote for,” the message was pretty clear. Insufficiently trenchant as satire, and not quite hilarious enough as entertainment, “Berlusconi: A New Musical” is caught between two stools. It’s a moderately enjoyable romp, but not much more. More

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    In This ‘Grease’ Prequel Series, Pink Is the Word

    “Rise of the Pink Ladies” describes the origins of the title 1950s girl gang before Rizzo and Frenchy took over, as viewed through a 2020s lens.If you’re into musicals, you may often find yourself wondering: Why should sci-fi fans be the only ones to enjoy ever-expanding franchises?“I know a lot of people who get so much joy from Marvel and ‘Star Wars’ and all the iterations of those universes,” the television writer and producer Annabel Oakes (“Atypical,” “Minx”) said. “I have always been a little jealous of that.“So when ‘Grease’ came as an opportunity to me, I realized that Rydell High is a universe I wanted to spend a long time living in and exploring.”What resulted was the 10-episode prequel series “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies,” premiering Thursday on Paramount+. (Oakes is the creator and showrunner.) Set in 1954, four years before the events of the hit 1978 film starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John — itself an adaptation of the 1971 stage musical — “Pink Ladies” explores how a group of four Rydell outcasts forged a friendship, then became the title girl gang, forebears to Rizzo, Frenchy and the other beloved Pink Ladies from the movie.Both the stage musical and the film filtered the 1950s through the prism of the 1970s, offering an often frank, funny and unsentimental view of sex, class and gender at an American high school. The movie’s sequel, “Grease 2” (1982), viewed the early ’60s through the early ’80s.“Pink Ladies” is similarly reflective of its time, offering a more diverse, more self-aware take on the ’50s. Like its predecessors, the series embraces candy-colored exuberance, but it also looks more overtly — and at times, more seriously — at coming-of-age concerns like race and sexual orientation.“We want to talk to 2023 and we want to talk to 1954 and we want to talk to 1978,” Oakes said in a video call. “And we want to do all that in the music, in the scripts, with the characters. We’re in conversation with all three of those time periods.”Oakes grew up a fan of “Grease” — when she was a child, she once dressed up as the cheerleader Patty Simcox — so when, in February 2020, Paramount solicited pitches for a show set in the world of the movie, she started reflecting on what she had loved about it.The series tells the origin story of the Pink Ladies, whose members are predecessors to the ones in the movie. Eduardo Araquel/Paramount+Counterclockwise, from top, Stockard Channing, Jamie Donnelly, Didi Conn and Dinah Manoff played the Pink Ladies in the original film “Grease.”Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection“I thought about that sleepover scene with the girls, singing ‘Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,’ and I just really wanted to be at that sleepover,” she said. “That was what I wanted out of my life as a 10-year-old girl.”Crucially, that scene centers not on the movie’s leads but on the Pink Ladies, a group of independent-minded girls who stand apart from the cheerleaders and the jocks, the greasers and the nerds, and are led by Stockard Channing’s charismatic, swaggering Rizzo. The answer to that character in the series is Olivia (Cheyenne Isabel Wells), a confident Mexican American student who struts down the Rydell hallways in pencil skirts.“Once I put on that outfit and the hair and the makeup, I was ready to bring on that Olivia walk,” Wells said in a video chat. “It was like, ‘All right, time to be cool.’ ”The Pink Ladies were memorably distinct — so much so that they became the focus of “Grease 2,” starring a gum-snapping Michelle Pfeiffer. Oakes decided their origin story was worth investigating.“This aligned with what Paramount was really looking for, which was: How can we tell the stories that you couldn’t have told in 1978 and that you definitely couldn’t have told in 1958?’” Oakes said.The show applies a more modern sensibility to coed relationships than films like “Gidget” (1959), in which a teen played by Sandra Dee somehow clings to her innocence while surrounded by hunky surfers. Now, it’s not just acceptable but recommended to portray girls as embracing their sexuality and also having a degree of agency. In the second episode, boys spike the punch and the future Pink Ladies retaliate by putting castor oil in the booze.“You’re right,” Olivia tells them, “it’s not funny to put something in somebody’s drink that makes them feel out of control of their body.”Naturally, the score plays an important role in helping viewers navigate eras. Aside from an updated version of the movie’s title track — a recurring musical motif throughout — the songs mostly navigate a fluid zone that is not entirely vintage, not entirely modern. For that, Oakes worked closely with the show’s executive music producer, Justin Tranter, who grew up loving musicals and is a regular presence on the upper rungs of the Billboard Hot 100, with writing credits on hits by Justin Bieber, DNCE and Selena Gomez.Michelle Pfeiffer, center, starred in “Grease 2,” which also focused heavily on the Pink Ladies. Paramount PicturesTranter, who oversaw and co-wrote the series’s 30 original numbers and uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them, drew inspiration from the movies, which, as they noted in a video call, had a relaxed attitude toward period authenticity: Some songs that were added for the 1978 movie, they said, didn’t bother to sound like the 1950s.“‘Grease is the word,’ that is just a disco song, there is no nostalgia,” Tranter said. (The song, whose proper title is “Grease,” was performed by Frankie Valli but written by Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees.) “In our arrangement, we actually used more ’50s instrumentation than the ’70s movie did, on purpose,” Tranter continued, but the songs also included contemporary flourishes, like “the vocal being a little more modern,” or the inclusion of “sub bass, or 808s,” a type of drum machine.“So there is that modern element,” they added, “just like the original ‘Grease’ had.”Like Oakes, the young actors who portray the Pinks, as they all referred to their characters in separate video conversations, grew up with “Grease,” so they were familiar with the premise and tone. “It’s been in and out of my life since childhood,” said Tricia Fukuhara, whose character, Nancy, is a Japanese American student who wants to become a fashion designer. Wells said she had waited until after she landed the role to rewatch the movie. But she and “Grease” were hardly strangers.“I’d seen it before,” she clarified. “I mean, who hasn’t?”What was less familiar at first was the 1950s setting. But the creative team and the cast quickly realized it was not quite as foreign as they expected. Oakes looked up and interviewed some of the students in the 1950s yearbook of a Southern California high school where parts of “Grease” were shot, now in their 80s; she grilled her own mother about her experience. She read up and discovered that interracial and mixed-ethnicity relationships were not unheard-of in that time and place.The young cast members were all familiar with the premise and tone of “Grease” going in. “I’d seen it before,” said Wells, far right. “I mean, who hasn’t?”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesFollowing the showrunner’s example, the actors portraying the Pink Ladies researched what it was like growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, especially as a girl. They were all struck by how much they could relate.“I talked to a woman who was not out in the 1950s but was aware of her sexuality in high school, which was truly a huge benefit to me, being able to sort of communicate and authentically connect with someone who had that lived experience,” said Ari Notartomaso, who plays the gender-nonconforming goofball Cynthia. “There’s a lot more of a connection between generations than we may be told.”Marisa Davila, whose character, Jane, stirs up Rydell by running for president of the student council against a popular boy, also found resonance close to home.“My father is a first generation Mexican American, so I grew up hearing stories and being influenced by his background,” she said. “I used my dad as a big inspiration for the role: He was the first and only in his immediate family to get a college degree, and that’s all Jane wants — to learn more and go really far.”That drive to follow one’s heart and brain wherever they might lead made the original Pink Ladies feel iconoclastic even in the 1970s, Tranter, the music producer, said — a timeless idea that carries over into this newer iteration. “So many people watched ‘Grease’ so young that I think they don’t realize how progressive and edgy it was for the time,” they said.“What’s so great about Annabel’s story is that these Pink Ladies are radical and subversive and rebellious,” Tranter added. “They’re causing a moral panic in their town just because they want something.” More