Vape! The Grease Parody

Vape! The Grease Parody takes the high-school romance almost everyone can already sing and drags it into an age of phone filters, wellness advice and nicotine that comes in mango flavour, keeping the letter jackets, the drag race and the melodrama entirely intact.

The plot beats are the ones you remember: the summer fling, the transfer student, the gang that will not admit it cares, the makeover nobody asked for. What changes is everything around them. The songs are rewritten, the anxieties are current, and the show is openly affectionate toward the thing it is dismantling. It works because the writers clearly know the original by heart.

Catie Hogan wrote the show with a team of collaborators, with additional lyrics and book material by Billy Recce and Danny Salles, direction by Jack Plotnick and choreography by Ashley Marinelli. First staged in 2018, it was blocked by a copyright claim before a planned transfer; a court later ruled it protected parody, and it opened commercially in 2025.

The comedy is broad, fast and knowing, built for an audience that will spot every substitution a beat before it lands. Half the pleasure is anticipation, waiting to hear what a familiar chorus has become. Underneath the jokes sits a real point about how a story written for one generation reads to the next.

It is made for people who know the source well enough to enjoy watching it taken apart, and for anyone who likes a parody with actual craft behind it. Sung live by a company committing completely, the silliness gets a great deal funnier.