By Harry Haun
20 Aug 2007

Erin Dilly, grounded by motherhood since Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, was present for her hubby, Stephen R. Buntrock, a "Teen Angel" if ever there was one. "I've been making commercials, but this spring I'm working on a new show that's coming to Broadway next year called The Gershwins' American in Paris." The script the late Wendy Wasserstein was working on won't be used. "There's a new script by Ken [Moon Over Buffalo, Lend Me a Tenor] Ludwig, and it's really sensational — very, very funny."

Buntrock makes his angelic appearance to "Beauty School Dropout" Frenchy (Kirsten Wyatt) out of a gigantic ice cream cone resting atop an "American Graffiti"-like diner. "I love looking up and seeing Stephen Buntrock just come out of the cone every night," his wife admitted. "It's my favorite part of the show. It makes me so happy."

Although he followed Patrick Wilson into Oklahoma! without any trepidation, Buntrock knows only too well who his "Teen Angel" predecessors are: "Well, first of all, it ain't no Billy Porter. He did an incredible job, and I'm as white as can be, and I ain't going to do that. This is Tab Hunter Meets the Ice Cream Cone. Coming out of an ice cream cone every single night is the kick of it all. They load me into the cone, and I have to wait [in] there about ten minutes, then I come down and do a three-and-a-half minute number. I get to go back up, and I get to go off-stage and then I go home and have a beer."

The true kick, he contended, lies in the young company he's keeping: "I'm watching 14 kids make their Broadway debuts. I'm saying kids because I seem to be the grandpa of this production. I seem to be transferring over into the 'old.' I can see how hard they work. They're doing a fantastic job. They really are. And they know that's what they have to do."

Another "senior" player feeling his age is Jeb Brown, who plays the lecherous deejay "Vince Fontaine." "On the first day of rehearsal, the question was asked of the whole company, 'Who here saw the original production?' I was the only person. At 12 years old, I'd seen the original so it is always, to me, a stage property. I saw the movie in 1978, and it's iconic, but Grease was built for the stage, and it's just great to be on stage in it."

Seconding that was the show's "Betty Rizzo," Jenny Powers: "It is such a wonderful Auditorium — theatre — for this piece because it's so intimate. It's like you really get to meet these characters. You really get to almost sit down with us at the lunch table at the beginning and share our pudding."

"Rizzo," whose false pregnancy hangs heavily over a portion of the show, is all brass and sass and threatening "knuckle sandwiches," but the actress insisted, "I'm not really a bitch, I swear. I've done this character before, in high school, so I'm used to playing the bitch, the vamp, the woman who's not afraid to be a man's equal. This role, for me, was really comfortable. What's really hard for me to play is what I played a couple of years ago on Broadway — 'Meg' in Little Women, the ingenue — the opposite end of that spectrum. When I played Meg, all my sorority sisters came from Northwestern to see show, and they were, like, 'Who is that on stage?'"

Grease was presented first on Broadway (1972-1980) by The Waissmans (Kenneth Waissman and Maxine Fox) and again for four years (1994-1998) by The Weisslers (Barry and Fran) and now by Paul Nicholas, David Ian, Terry Allen Kramer and the Nederlander Presentations Inc., all by special arrangement with the movie's producer, Robert Stigwood.

If the music sounds more vivid than what Jim Jacobs and the late Warren Casey originally turned in, that's because the score has been sweetened with songs written for the movie ("You're the One I Want" and the Oscar-nominated "Hopelessly Devoted to You" by Olivia Newton John's personal writer-in-residence, John Farrar, also of "Xanadu"; Barry Gibbs' title tune, and "Sandy" by Scott Simon and Louis St. Louis).

Waissman spent the evening grinning ear to ear like the proud parent of a 37-year-old wunderkind, which indeed he is. And he's a single parent now. "Maxine remarried years ago and hasn't been involved in the business. She lives in Virginia, a lady of leisure."

He was there for the Grease genesis and made it happen. "It started, really, when my roommate from college called me from Chicago. He described Grease as a pint-sized gem of a show that I had to come see, about the kids that used to hang out behind our high-school — the greasers [because of the overly lubed locks of hair and ducktails].

"Well, I flew out to see it. We sat on a cement floor, on newspapers, and we watched these kids in this community theatre — and, suddenly, I saw my high school. By the time it was over, I had envisioned this pint-sized show as a Broadway-sized musical."

Not all the songs were in place then, but "a lot of them were. 'Beauty School Dropout' was not only in the original Chicago community theatre production that I went to see, it was the first song they wrote. They sang it at a party as a spoof, and some friends at the party said, 'Jim and Warren, why don't you write this idea into a musical?' A lot of new songs were written because Jim and Warren moved to New York once we agreed to go forward and started developing it more as a full Broadway musical. The Danny and Sandy characters were not as concrete as they became and we worked on making that stronger."

Waissman is currently developing a musical about Josephine Baker. It takes place from 1939 to 1945, when she's in the French Underground, having a secret liaison with Crown Prince Gustav of Sweden and being courted by the conductor who eventually became her husband. "It's an exciting time. Steve Dorff is doing the music, and John Bettis is doing the lyrics. They're basically from the pop world. They did 'One Moment in Time.'"

Jacobs is on a high cloud. "I feel like the guy who invented the Energizer Battery — it just keeps going and going," he said. "Years ago, I ask Betty Lee [Hunt, his publicist] if 'there's a chance a chance we'd ever pass Fiddler on the Roof. She said, 'Naw, I don't think so, but I think we'll have a good run.' Then, of course came the day in '79 when we passed Fiddler and became the longest-running show in Broadway history, then in a couple of years A Chorus Line passed us. We had run 3,388 performances. The second time Grease was on Broadway it set the longest-record for a Broadway revival at that time — 1,505 performances. And this thing looks like it's going to run a while. It's got a great box-office advance — as they do in London, I might add.

"My lawyer said, 'Resign yourself to the fact that Grease is going to outlive you.'"