Woke Grease prequel series features 'marginalized' lead characters, focuses on sexuality, gender expression, racial identity

On Thursday, a prequel series to the 1978 musical Grease hit streaming service Paramount+ called Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, which promised fans of the fun, snappy original a tale about racial identity, sexual orientation, and gender expression.

According to the Daily Mail, the new show is a "woke TV re-boot that will see the classic musical center itself around a multicultural, all-female lineup" of "marginalized identities" set in 1954, 4 years before the events of Grease, and tell the tale of how the Pink Ladies got their start at fictional Rydell High School.

The series has a mix of familiar songs being sung with new renditions alongside all new tunes. Like Grease, the new show features a song-and-dance number in the school's auto body shop. Instead of Danny Zuko leading his T-Birds in the song the tune will be headed by a "gender nonconforming nonbinary trans" character named Cynthia performed by Ari Notartomaso.

Notartomaso said, "Queerness, gender nonconformity and transness throughout time hasn't always been exactly the same. All of us are a product of the culture that we live in, but it is really special to be able to tell that story of what it may have been like in the 1950s."

Notartomaso's Cynthia apparently is a 1950's non-binary tomboy who was rejected by the T-Birds for membership.

Notartomaso is joined by Marisa Davila playing half-Italian, half-Puerto Rican Jane, the older sister to the familiar character Frenchy. Davila is joined by a Japanese American character played Tricia Fukuhara and a Mexican American character played by Cheyenne Wells.

In one episode titled "In The Club" the gang sings a song about white supremacy which feature the lyrics, "When you're in the club, we've got each other's backs. As long as you're not Jewish, Asian, brown or Black, single woman or gay, on the wrong side of they."

According to the USA Today review of the show, "Pink Ladies is such a mighty morass of bad ideas that it's hard to keep it all straight" and "In spite of each episode being overpacked with characters, bad musical numbers and prosaic dialogue, the series is entirely lacking in substance behind all the over-exaggerated style."

The Guardian said it was "The prequel nobody asked for."