The musical 'Grease' gets an Indigenous upgrade

Aug. 16—It started as an amusing thought experiment for wife-and-husband creative team Crystle Lightning and RedCloud: Wouldn't it be great if there was an Indigenous version of the 1978 film classic Grease?

The Edmonton, Alberta, pair traded riffs on the lyrics to the Grease classic song Summer Nights, with RedCloud offering, "Summer snagging, had me a blast" and Lighting retorting, "Summer snagging, happened so fast." They followed with: "I met a girl, sweet as can be. I met a boy; he's not related to me."

"We were like, 'This would be really cool, wouldn't it?'" Lightning says. "Because we didn't have that kind of representation when I was a kid; I never saw anybody who looked like me on the TV, especially in anything humorous. It was always period pieces and always on a horse, the stereotypical stuff. The pandemic hit, and we started writing it in our basement."

The result of that collaboration is Bear Grease, a takeoff on the film that includes 14 traveling cast and crew members. Seven showings last summer at the Santa Fe Playhouse proved popular, so the Playhouse invited the group back and booked a larger venue: the Santa Fe Scottish Rite Center. The shows this weekend coincide with Santa Fe Indian Market.

"The theater we were at was 100 seats," Lightning says of last year's Santa Fe performances. "We sold it out to capacity every night. We even added two shows."

details

Bear Grease

* 1, 4, and 7 p.m. Saturday, August 17, and 1 and 4 p.m. Sunday, August 18

* Alhambra Theater, Santa Fe Scottish Rite Center, 463 Paseo de Peralta

* $30-$50, santafeplayhouse.org/events/bear-grease

Many of the melodies — but not the lyrics — will be familiar to those who've watched Grease. Lightning and RedCloud have recorded multiple albums as a hip-hop duo called LightningCloud, and some of their music also is featured in Bear Grease.

The show made its debut at the Edmonton International Fringe Festival in 2021. Organizers had approached Lightning and RedCloud about performing their music there.

"We said, 'You know what? We actually have something in our back pocket,'" Lightning says of Bear Grease. "[One of the organizers] listened to our pitch and said, 'Absolutely.' So we had a month and a half to cast it and choreograph it. By this time, it was only a 30-minute show."

In an early barometer of Bear Grease's appeal, it sold out in less than 15 minutes.

"Then we were like, 'OK, how is the audience going to take the show?'" Lightning says. "This is the real test. Our audience was predominantly Caucasian, and they were eating it up. They were laughing at every single joke. That's when we knew we had something special."

Three years later, the show has evolved in many ways, including in length — to 75 minutes. That's a heavy lift when cast members perform three times in a day, as they will do at Scottish Rite, after spending many hours on the road.

Bear Grease, like Grease, is set in the 1950s. While it plays for laughs, it delivers some deeper messages.

ON THE SCREEN

Crystle Lightning has connections to two films airing in Santa Fe in August. She's an actor in Mary Margaret Road Grader, a short film directed by Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa/Choctaw) and produced by George R.R. Martin that will be shown at 7 p.m. Friday, August 16, at the New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Avenue. Admission is free. It also screens for free multiple times from Friday, August 16, through Wednesday, August 21, at Jean Cocteau Cinema, 418 Montezuma Avenue.

The 1998 film Smoke Signals highlights the lack of Indigenous representation in American popular culture. Lightning's brother plays young Victor Joseph in the film. Smoke Signals screens at 4 and 7 p.m. Friday, August 16; 7 p.m. Saturday, August 17; and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, August 18, at Jean Cocteau Cinema. Admission is $10.

"If colonization had never happened, we would be the cool guys at this school — getting the girl or getting the guy, dancing in the streets like Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta," Lightning says. "We do weave in a couple of Easter eggs about residential schools through the songs, but we don't bang it on your head. It's going to give you something to talk about on the way home. We want people to be entertained, but we also want to give little hints about, What if we hadn't been colonized? This is what it would look like, in a parallel universe."

Lightning grew up in California and says Canada and the American Southwest have divergent attitudes toward Indigenous people.

"It is very different in those parts — Arizona, New Mexico — where Indigenous people have a presence," she says. "There's a lot more racism in Canada; I find there's a lot more outward prejudice. In California, there's a lot of Mexican culture, Hispanic culture. But as far as Native American/Indigenous/First Nations, the presence just was very, very small. So I was considered exotic. When you come to Edmonton and Alberta, it's such a different scene, such a different feeling."

As in the U.S., young Indigenous people were taken from their families and forced into residential schools during white colonization, an atrocity the Canadian government has been slow to acknowledge or apologize for. The goal in both nations was indoctrinating the young people into the newcomers' imported-from-Europe culture, whitewashing millennia of Indigenous traditions in the process.

The production obviously goes beyond the Great White North and is racking up miles on its touring schedule. Sixteen people are involved in making Bear Grease happen, and 14 of them travel to shows. That involves logging long distances on the highway and on occasional flights. Edmonton is not a convenient hub; it's about 200 miles north of Calgary and nearly 900 miles from the next-closest major city, Seattle. Edmonton to Miami would be a 3,000-mile drive, about 300 miles more than a road trip from Los Angeles to New York.

"If we have two shows in Florida, they'll fly us out," Lightning says. "But for the most part, when we go on our tours, we use the two Bear Grease vans."

Not everyone involved is based in Edmonton. In fact, Raven Bright (Diné) of Albuquerque plays Roger in the show, and Justin Geihm (Diné), who grew up on San Felipe Pueblo midway between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, plays Sonny.

The traveling party includes 10 performers.

"People don't understand the patience [the travel] takes; it's tough being on the road at times," Lightning says. "You're in the car for eight hours at a time. Sometimes, if we want to make it home before the morning comes, we'll do a 12-, 13-hour drive. We take turns lying down, and we stay in hotels.

"But most of it is travel, and then you get to the venue, you do tech, you do a show for an hour and a half, and then you're back on the road. That's why we love residencies, where we can stay in one place more than a couple of days so we can actually chill and have to go somewhere to go 'home' to at night."

Lightning portrayed Sandy in early versions of Bear Grease but now is focusing on directing. Serving in that role, she's intimately familiar with every character's dialogue and is every performer's stand-in. In Santa Fe, she'll be on stage as Frenchie, filling in for the performer who normally plays the role.

Lightning predicts that Bear Grease will have plenty of staying power. It recently was booked for an off-Broadway run in summer 2025.

"That's been a goal and a dream of ours since we started this show," she says. "So we finally got recognized by New York. But the thing is, we also have a tour booked during that time, so we have to find a whole other cast. It will be the road warriors and the New York cast. We're already booked into 2026."

In the meantime, Lightning and RedCloud are working on Bear Spray and Rez Side Story — which, like Bear Grease, will use familiar tales as a template to deliver both laughs and truths — as well as a takeoff on the children's television series Yo Gabba Gabba!. Between managing the current production and writing new ones, the couple is staying busy.

"The payoff is being on that stage in front of hundreds of people and entertaining them and making them laugh," Lightning says. "There's nothing like it. The exchange in theater, what you get from the audience and what you can give them, is just ... you can't buy it."