American Idol's Season 5 champ Taylor Hicks has found a novel way to slide his new single into the public ear without help from radio, and he's applying a little
Grease magic to do it.
Hicks, who plays Teen Angel in a road production of the
Grease musical that opens Wednesday at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, will sing his current pop single,
Seven Mile Breakdown, at the end of the production.
It's one thing for producers to tinker with
Grease by adding songs like
Hopelessly Devoted to You, the title tune, and
You're the One That I Want from the popular film adaptation that featured John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
But the addition of a new song at this stage is something else, indeed.
``It's an interesting and cutting-edge way for an artist to release his or her music,'' Hicks says from Philadelphia. ``I'm the Teen Angel, but then I can incorporate the single into
Grease. Very effective way for fans new and old to experience me.''
Of course, Hicks' big number,
Beauty School Dropout, sung to the lovably loopy Frenchie character, remains the focus of the Teen Angel role he has been playing for 358 (and counting) performances since he debuted on Broadway in June 2008. It's the part played by Frankie Avalon in the 1978 movie version. But producers, perhaps recognizing the name value of a former American Idol, upped Hicks' part so that Teen Angel gets a little more face time on stage.
Hicks couldn't have a better showcase.
In
Grease, set in fictional Rydell High, boys and girls make out, race cars and shimmy to exuberant pop morsels like the slightly naughty
Greased Lightning and
Born to Hand Jive. The musical, which began life on a Chicago stage in 1971 and lasted for 3,388 performances on Broadway, is a generational rite of passage like algebra, biology and -- egad -- showering with your classmates after P.E. class.
NO. 1 HIT
The original soundtrack first hit No. 1 in the summer of 1978, playing tag at the top of the charts with the Rolling Stones' raunchy
Some Girls and Boston's arena rock
Don't Look Back and has periodically enjoyed resurgences in popularity.
Grease, which has been certified for eight million sales domestically, spent practically the entire 1990s riding high on Billboard's Catalog Album chart. The CD still sells thousands of copies yearly according to Soundscan, and a remastered version of the movie is on DVD. The recent Broadway production found its leads via an
American Idol-styled reality TV show,
Grease: You're the One That I Want, on NBC in 2007.
``Grease is the word . . .'' goes the song's hook, and
Grease will be the word for decades to come. It's human nature.
``There have been studies done, and marketers know this when they pull out vintage ads. People think the good old days were happier. Things were better in the past, so you want to cling to those good old days, and that's why nostalgia works,'' says Barbara Kahn, dean of the business school at the University of Miami.
Kahn says that is how memory works: ``You tend to remember the peaks; if something was positive, that's the net memory of it.''
And that's why
Grease keeps coming around again. This is the musical's third appearance at the Broward Center.
Grease uncannily hits every happy button. It's a show
about nostalgia. The action is set in the 1950s, but the project was created and released in the 1970s, and it seems boomers and their children have been nostalgic for the '70s for twice as long as the decade lasted.
Don't believe that? Listen to what your kids are playing on their
Guitar Hero and
Rock Band video games.
SIMPLER TIME
``
Grease, in particular, is about the '50s, and there's this notion that that was a simpler time, a
Leave It to Beaver time, more traditional homes,'' Kahn says. ``You see it now with the economic crisis. People want to think back to . . . when life was happier.''
Hicks, born in Birmingham, Ala., in the American Bicentennial year, agrees.
``Every American sees it along the way. I think the storyline is appealing still to this day,'' he says. ``It's about the trials and tribulations that you go through in high school and first love and all of that. It leads to a timeless show.''
In addition to his set-piece number, Hicks, 32, performs in a ``megamix'' of the
Grease song and then his shuffling
Seven Mile Breakdown from his second post-
American Idol CD,
The Distance, during encores.
Given that radio support for the independently released
The Distance was meager, and the album hasn't exactly demolished the Billboard charts like previous releases from
Idol winners such as Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, the exposure can't hurt.
Hicks, who sounds lively and engaged, jokes, ``this is the longest set-up for a tour of my own record!''
The new song is shoehorned into the conclusion, long after Danny and Sandy and Rizzo and Kenickie cavort at the fair to the original
Grease staple
We Go Together, so the storyline remains familiar and intact.
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