Forget “Grease is the word!”—the message of this new prequel series is “Think Pink!” Yes, gang, we’re going back to Rydell High for the ‘50s-set Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, which hits Paramount+ on April 7.
Set four years before the events of Grease, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies tells the tale of how the too-cool-for-school girl gang later populated by the likes of Rizzo, Frenchy, Jan, and Marty came to be.
Plot details are a tad sketchy at the moment, but according to the official synopsis, Rise of the Pink Ladies “follows four fed-up and misfit students who band together to bring out the moral panic that will change Rydell High forever and become the founding mothers of the first high school clique known as the Pink Ladies.”
Sieving through the trailer for clues, it looks like we’ll be delving into how marginalised people fared in the strait-laced 1950s and fought to carve out space for themselves in the buttoned-down cultural milieu they found themselves in, which is fitting—it might be a nostalgia piece now, but the OG Grease tackled some thorny issues, too. Rizzo’s pregnancy scare was a hell of a thing to include in a high school musical back in 1978.
A cast of relative unknowns have been assembled to play the nascent Pink Ladies, including Tricia Fukuhara as Nancy Nakagawa, Marisa Davila as Jane Facciano, Cheyenne Wells as Olivia Valdovinos, and Ari Notartomaso as Cynthia Zdunowski. And while Olivia Newton-John has sadly passed, there’s still an Australian connection, with television veteran Alethea Jones (Fun Mom Dinner) directing the pilot.
There’s no word yet on how this all ties in with the criminally underrated Grease 2, which starred a pre-fame Michelle Pfeiffer, but nonetheless we’re keen to return to Rydell for another dose of Summer Lovin’.
