4 Nonsensical Movie Musicals That Originally Made Sense

4 Those Elderly ‘Grease’ Teens Were By Design in the Play

Fans of Grease it for many things, but if we go off how often it’s brought up on the internet today, Grease is known for one thing above all else: The actors playing the teen characters were super old. The movie came nearly 50 years ago, and people still cite it as the prime example of how Hollywood gets teenagers wrong. 

In general, people’s outrage is misplaced when they complain about adult actors playing teens. Leaving actual teens out of the movie often improves the movie and is surely a mercy for the teens themselves. But even aside from that, Grease is a special case. The teen characters were played by adults in the original play, not just because teens often are but because these actors played adults as well. 

The movie Grease takes place in 1958 and 1959. The play mostly does as well, but the opening scene instead takes place in the present day — the present day being 1971, when the play was written. The opening scene is a high school reunion, and the actors play alumni who graduated more than a decade ago. 

This transitions into these same actors now playing the teen versions of the characters, and all along, you’re supposed to be aware that this is adults recalling what it’s like to be a kid. When the play came to Broadway in 1972, they cast actors mostly well into their 20s, with the exception of Sandy, played by Carole Demas, who was 31. 

The idea that Grease was nostalgic for 1959 in 1971 usually prompts us to joke about how crazy it would be to try the same trick today, since culture doesn’t move as fast now as it did during the revolutionary 1960s. Sadly, we instead now have to concede that setting a nostalgic movie in 2013 feels like it makes perfect sense. 

3 The Strange Cell Phones of ‘Dear Evan Hansen’

Speaking about elderly actors playing teens, let’s talk about 2021’s Dear Evan Hansen. Lead actor Ben Platt looks strange in the part, not because 28-year-olds should never play high schoolers but because he looks so much older than the other actors playing teens alongside him. 

Platt got the part because he originated the role on Broadway years before. He also got it because his father produced the movie. In 2015, the first time he was Evan Hansen, he was slightly closer to being a teenager than he’d be in 2021. Even so, he was an adult, and he’d played the lead role of an adult in The Book of Mormon in 2012, nearly a decade before playing a boy in the Evan Hansen movie. 

The plot of the movie offers quite a few strange elements, which we’re not going to recount here, because they’re just as strange in the play. But we will highlight one especially odd scene. Late in the movie, Evan forwards an incriminating email to a friend because he needs to prove something privately. She will go on to publicize this email, and it’s baffling why he sends it to her. The two of them are sitting next to each other. The more natural move would be to show her the email, on the very screen that he’s holding.

In the play, Evan forwards it to her because they aren’t sitting next to each other but are each in their separate homes, texting. 

On stage, two people texting plays out much the same as two people talking because you place them next to each other (even if the characters aren’t really together), and they narrate their texts out loud. In a movie, such a scene would have to put the characters in different houses and cut between them, and their messages would likely appear as text that you read, which isn’t terribly engaging for the audience.

You might have heard about filmmakers complaining about having to write around cell phones and how some do so by deliberately setting their stories in the past. This is not, as you might think, because cell phones resolve plots too easily, rendering many classic tropes unusable. It’s because people staring at their screens is ruinously uncinematic. 

2 Benny in ‘Rent’ Is Kind of Reasonable

Rent opens with the characters saying they can’t pay rent, which sounds relatable today, until you learn the reason they can’t pay rent is that all of them refuse to get jobs. These characters hate their landlord Benny, who’s also an old friend of theirs. But Benny extends to them an offer to let them go on living rent-free moving forward. In exchange, he just asks them not to get in the way of his plan to open an art studio, which is both a project none of them have the right to prevent and a pretty cool endeavor that shouldn’t raise objections from them. 

We’ve written before about how Benny really comes off as the more reasonable person in this fight, and that becomes more true with each ing year. His plan to turn a vacant lot into a mixed-use building containing a bunch of apartments is today known to be the solution to the problem of escalating rents. And his offer to his friends now comes off as absurdly generous. That giant East Village loft where he’ll let them stay for free would otherwise, in the years to come, either be converted into a bunch of one-bedroom apartments that you can’t lease for less than $5,000 a month or will be a penthouse that’s sold intact for millions.

But if we look to the play rather than the 2005 movie, it seems Benny was never supposed to be a villain. He represents what it’s like to get a real job, which bohemians see as selling out, but later in the show, he hangs around with the other characters as their friend again. When everyone attends a funeral, he comes as well, he pays for the whole thing and then he takes everyone out for drinks. For the movie, they actually did film this scene, but then director Christopher Columbus cut it, calling it an emotional overload. 

That deleted scene also shows Benny willing to pay for the medical treatment of Mimi, who’s dating him at the time but is otherwise the love interest to main character Roger. The movie makes Benny seem like the evil suitor who stole the princess away, but this scene reveals him to be a valid enough choice, whom Mimi picks because of Roger’s failings. Then, in this same scene, Roger calls out Mark, the story’s narrator, saying the movies he shoots are garbage that he uses to escape, not art. 

Basically every criticism people have of these characters turns out to be intentional and is voiced in this one scene, which ended up on the cutting room floor. 

1 ‘In the Heights’ Really Was Counting Down to Something

In the Heights is another New York musical. During the first half of the movie, characters keep dropping references to the possibility of the electricity going out, saying that this would be pretty bad. You don’t need a degree in foreshadowing to understand that a blackout surely will later arrive, and it will be bad. Sure enough, the apparent climax of the movie is a blackout, and everyone acts scared when the lights turn off. But nothing bad really happens during this time, and the story moves on, leaving all those earlier hints a little perplexing. 

Well, one bad thing happens during the blackout. Someone dies, and we it that sounds bad. But she’s old and dies peacefully in her sleep, and everyone has to die sometime. If all those hints foreshadowed just this, that doesn’t quite feel right. We didn’t even give you a spoiler alert before telling you about the death — that’s how not-shocking it is. 

The main character, Usnavi (played by Lin-Manuel Miranda in the original play), runs a store, and the play is more clear about what everyone fears from the blackout. They fear looters. Then, when the blackout comes, the crew at the store get ready to protect the place from a siege.

They set off fireworks to scare looters away. They set off fireworks in the movie, too, but in the movie, it’s just to provide light and keep people happy. That makes limited sense because like we just said, everyone already has their own light source in their pocket.

Despite the precautions, looters do hit the store in the play, and it’s a big part of the story. One character wins some money from the lottery, and she gives a chunk to Usnavi to fix up his store following the looting, and he now has to wonder whether to use it to change his whole life. 

It’s possible that by the time the movie came out, “fear of looters” was seen as a right-wing position, which conflicted with the rest of the show’s politics. If the movie cut the plot they’d earlier written just because of this, that sounds a bit cowardly of them.

On the other hand, maybe all the talk in the news about looters got the writers to look into the subject and realize that fears of looting are exaggerated and don’t deserve to be vindicated by the movie. Organized retail theft is a thing and is bad but is different from opportunistic looting during riots or disasters. Though the New York City blackout of 1977 was famous for looting, blackouts both before and after that resulted in surprisingly little looting, and even the 1977 one might be a little different from how people picture it. 

The bodega getting looted made for a more exciting climax, but when the lights go out, your random little store is probably going to be safe. 

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