Grease Live hit the stage, Sunday, January 31st, with the star studded cast.  It was a vamped up live rendition of the 1971 Grease Musical.  The cast included Dancing with Stars Judge Julianne Hough, the singer of Call Me Maybe Carly Rae Jepsen, former Big Time Rush superstar Carlos PenaVega, High School Musical sweetheart Vanessa Hudgens, and  True Jackson VP star Keke Palmer.  The musical had 12.2 million viewers while it was airing, which was more than any of the previous NBC live musicals.

As any live show faces there were some bumps and award transitions.  The cast used golf carts to travel around and many times the cameras followed them back stage to capture the shift.  This experience was very awkward and felt a little bit out of place.  It felt like it did not belong in the sequences of events.  But, as always the best part of Grease was the performance of Grease lightening.  Quite a few people were upset with the extreme censorship the song had to go through to be television acceptable, but the performance was out of this world.  The dancing and the singing were both spot on and very entertaining.

The stand out performance of the night… Vanessa Hudgens as Rizzo.  The night prior to her big performance she received news of her father, Greg Hudgens,  passing away from his battle with stage 4 cancer.  Around the same time last year, Vanessa says that her boyfriend, Austin Butler’s mother passed away from cancer as well.  The devastated actress chose to perform anyway saying that it is what her father would have wanted.