10 things to know about 'Grease: Live!

GREASE: LIVE!
7 p.m. Sunday, Fox29

"Live" is the word.

Fox jumps into the TV live-musical game Sunday with Grease: Live!, starring dancer-singer Julianne Hough (Dancing with the Stars) as Sandy, Aaron Tveit (Graceland, Les Miserables) as Danny, Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical) as Rizzo, pop star (and Broadway's Cinderella) Carly Rae Jepsen as Frenchy, and Keke Palmer (who has also played Cinderella on Broadway) as Marty.

Will it be "electrifyin' "? We won't know until we see it, but here are 10 things we do know:

1. Jepsen was Sandy in her high school's production. "I could not walk in heels the way you do. No," she told Hough at a Fox news conference this month during the Television Critics Association winter meetings.

2. This is, startlingly, Tveit's first production of Grease, even though he did go to high school. Still, he has an extensive list of Broadway and national touring company musical credits, including Rent and Wicked, so he'll probably be fine.

3. Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning writers of the Broadway musical Next to Normal - another of Tveit's credits - have written a song for the live show that Jepsen will sing.

4. John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, Danny and Sandy in the 1978 movie Grease, won't be dropping by. "They've both been enormously supportive and send a lot of love," executive producer Marc Platt told reporters. "I know they'll also be watching on the evening of."

5. Didi Conn, who was Frenchy in the movie, and Barry Pearl, who played Doody, will be there, said director Thomas Kail (who also directed Hamilton, the current toast of Broadway). Look for Conn as a waitress named Vi "who has a little scene with Frenchy," he said, calling it "a moment where we have the generations staring at each other."

6. There's a Ferris wheel. Top that, Peter Pan.

7. The action's spread out in three locations on the Warner Bros. lot, with the actors speeding from one to the other in golf carts. "At the very end of the show, the entire cast, all of the ensemble, all of the dancers, we all get on these golf carts and go to the back lot, and we have this huge carnival scene, and it's crazy," said Carlos PenaVega (Big Time Rush), who plays Kenickie.

"We are singing. We are dancing. We are traveling. I mean . . . there's a lot going on."

8. Philly's own Boyz II Men will play Teen Angel(s), stepping, harmoniously, into the part that another Philly boy, Frankie Avalon, played in the movie, to sing "Beauty School Dropout." "It was very easy" to get them aboard, Platt said. "It was 'How about doing 'Teen Angel'?' And they didn't think for a second. They jumped in. They just thought it was such a great, fun idea."

(The 1978 movie also had a local tie in director Randal Kleiser, who went to Radnor High and has said it influenced his depiction of Grease's Rydell High.)

9. The cast has been rehearsing since November for this one night, moving onto the Warner lot at the beginning of this month, Platt said, where they were preparing to work with the 44 cameras that will capture everything.

10. A live audience will be worked into the show, "so, if you are in a gymnasium and there are bleachers in a gym, if you look, you will see audience members in those bleachers," Platt said. "It's just one of the ideas we are doing to sort of burst open the genre of a live television musical."

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