“Let’s Swing Big”: ‘THR Presents’ Q&A With the Creative Team Behind ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’

Cori Murray
·3 min read
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Singing and dancing auditions over Zoom, shoots in the rain in Vancouver and filming during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic — none of that stopped the cast and creators from bringing “big Grease energy” to the set of the Paramount+ series, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies.

“Annabel [Oakes, showrunner] was the first to say, we should use Rizzo, we should use Stockard Channing as our North Star because she existed in that universe, it was big, but it was so grounded in truth,” says Conrad Woolfe, one half of the casting directing team behind Pink Ladies. “Rizzo was so grounded in something real.”

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He, along with the creative team behind the new series, director and executive producer Alethea Jones, choreographer Jamal Sims, costume designer Samantha Hawkins and co-casting director Leigh Ann Smith gathered for a THR Presents panel, powered by Vision Media.

Set four years before Rizzo becomes the ring leader of Rydell High’s all-girl clique, the series is a love letter to the real-life Pink Ladies discovered by Oakes. According to Jones, Oakes was skeptical of expanding the story from the 1978 film. “But then a couple of days later, and Annabel tells this story a lot, she started to wonder if there were Pink Ladies,” says Jones. “She did some research and it turns out the Pink Lady existed in the 1950s and they were an actual girl gang. It reached like numbers of 50 at one high school. That interested Annabel and that’s the story she wanted to tell.” (Note: Oakes did not participate in the conversation due to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike.)

Showcasing the diversity of the new characters was just as crucial because research proved demographics were very diverse in southern California high schools during the 1950s. In fact, greasers started in the Latinx community. The series’ leading ladies reflect the times: two of the characters are Latin, one is Japanese and one is a tomboy exploring her sexuality.

“Conrad and I feel really strongly about equity and inclusion,” says Leigh Ann Smith, who along with Woolfe were directed by Oakes to find fresh faces for the show, which premiered April 6. “It was important to us that there was that context [after] Annabel had done the research to be able to back why these characters were written the way that they were.”

For costume designer Samantha Hawkins, ensuring the actors saw themselves represented fully in the character creation of the costumes was key. “It was important for me that the look books for each character [showed] their diversity,” she says. “I didn’t just want a bunch of photos of white people.”

As choreographer Jamal Sims approached shaping the musical numbers that anchor the Pink Ladies, he too wanted to honor the reality of the past with a nod towards today. “The choreography in the original Grease is just iconic, and I had to release the pressure off myself,” says Sims, who found a way to add some “Grease swag” along with the freedom to do something new. “One of the things that Alethea and Annabel really supported was [saying]: let’s swing big.”

For more from the creative team behind Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies watch the full video at the top of the page.

This edition of THR Presents is sponsored by Paramount+.

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