'Grease' is musical by the numbers

RALEIGH -- 'Grease," as incarnated by N.C. Theatre, has all the requisite elements: flashy dancing, drill-team timing, excellent singing and songs that are, for the most part, faithful to the 1950s.

All in all, the elements make for an entertaining two hours, diverting attention from the lack of story, character or any particular reason for the interludes between production numbers. Hey -- "Grease" is a thoroughly modern musical.

Music it has.

A paean to high-school lowlife circa 1959, "Grease" includes a couple of tunes in the oldie-goldie canon, "Summer Nights" and "You're the One That I Want." It has a couple of clever novelties, "Mooning" and "Beauty School Dropout"; a nod to the Everly Brothers, "Rock 'n' Roll Party Queen"; and one to Jan and Dean, "Greased Lightnin'."

Director Matt Lenz and choreographer Michele Lynch stage all these with acrobatic verve. As sound and spectacle, their "Grease" is great fun to hear and see. So are some of the un-musical bits, especially Lynda Clark's opening-night intermission routine in character as the old-maid English teacher Miss Lynch -- even if Clark's accent doesn't quite mesh with the implied geography of Rydell High School, somewhere close to Newark and a little below Mad magazine.

That is to say, "Grease" has a feint at a plot and a cast of cliches. The show is a revue, the spaces between songs stuffed with an implausible parody of boy-has-loses-gets-girl formula, or vice versa, and stick-figure characters who, if they are in high school, must have repeated every grade since kindergarten.

The Hot Rodder, the Short Guy in Sloppy Hat, the Tough Broad and the Valedictorian Dork celebrate the sock hop, the burger joint, high-top black Keds, making out at the drive-in and stealing hubcaps -- the gang's all here, framed by Elvis, James Dean, Ike & Dick, TV dinners and everything else the '50s mean to those who weren't around yet.

Given all that, this "Grease" has some real high points. There is Clark's Miss Lynch, leading off with a hoot of a conducting job on the Rydell alma mater; Terrence McKinnley Clowe, an "American Idol" voice and a divine Teen Angel; Jason Wooten as Doody, an aspiring rock star; and Caroline Kaiser as the Pink Ladies' comic relief.

The show is amusing and high-spirited, full of energy and good spirits. But "Grease" begs comparison with other treatments of the same material, and "American Graffiti" it's not, much less "West Side Story" or even "Bye Bye Birdie."

Theatrical, yes. Nostalgic, no. Fun -- not bad at all.