Grease

NBC announced Tuesday that it is partnering with BBC Worldwide Productions to air a midseason reality series in which Broadway hopefuls compete for the two lead roles in a new production of Grease that’s headed for the Great White Way next June.

You’re the One That We Want will follow the model of the British show How Do I Solve a Problem Like Maria?, which is currently searching for a bright-eyed newbie to slip into Maria von Trapp’s shoes for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s West End revival of The Sound of Music (now that
Scarlett Johansson has exited stage left).

Grease debuted on Broadway in 1972 and was nominated for seven Tonys, but it’s the 1978 film starring a super-skinny
John Travolta as bad boy Danny and
Olivia Newton-John as Sandy, the goody two-shoes who loves him, that really made Grease the word.

“Americans have grown up with these catchy tunes and appealing characters, and we think they’ll love the chance to select the next dynamic duo to play Sandy and Danny,” Craig Plestis, senior VP of alternative programs and development at NBC Universal, said in a statement.

Jim Jacobs, Grease’s co-creator, will perform judging duties along with director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall, who just scored a Tony for her work on The Pajama Game and will helm the Grease revival, and How Do you Solve a Problem Like Maria? producer David Ian, who was recently named the “most powerful person in British theatre” by the newspaper The Stage.

Summer of ‘69

The nostalgic Bryan Adams track Summer of ‘69 is the top driving song among Canadians who sing in their cars, according to a poll released Tuesday.

The Canadian tune emerged victorious over such rock classics Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild in a poll conducted by Decima Research.

The poll asked 1,000 adult Canadians across the country to choose their favourite driving song out of a list of seven tunes chosen by a panel of music journalists.

The song placed first among both English- and French-speaking Canadians, and both men and women, Decima said Tuesday.

“There are loads of great car songs, but to be a driving classic, the song needs to stand the test of time,” said Aaron Brophy, managing editor of Chart Magazine.

“The universal quality of Canada’s top driving songs is the feeling you get when you’re alone in the car and one of them comes on — you can’t help but get swept up in the moment.”

Adams, the raspy-voiced pop-rocker who was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in April, released Summer of ‘69 on his 1984 album Reckless.

According to the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Reckless made Adams the first Canadian artist to sell a million copies of an album.

The poll ranked the Canada’s seven favourite driving songs in the following order:

1. Summer of ‘69, Bryan Adams
2. Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen
3. Born to be Wild, Steppenwolf
4. It’s Only Rock and Roll, The Rolling Stones
5. Drive My Car, The Beatles
6. Free Falling, Tom Petty
7. Radar Love, Golden Earring

The poll also reported that 66 per cent of the respondents sing in the car and, of those, 73 per cent are women.

More than half of the respondents said they sing along to the radio and a similar number reported having been “caught” by other drivers while belting out a tune.

Decima conducted the poll via telephone over one week in mid-July and the results are considered accurate within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.