Vanessa Hudgens reveals her dad has died hours before live TV performance

Of course, Vanessa Hudgens will have time to grieve her dad once tonight is over, but everyone is rooting for her and hoping that she gets through tonight in honor of her father.

The musical opened with an elaborate, continuous shot of Jessie J singing the title song Grease as she roamed the vast soundstage before stepping into the drizzle. Aaron Tveit’s Danny Zuko was appealing in a hyper-earnest, first day of school sort of way, but he didn’t really ignite until the very end, when it was too late for him to do anything other than celebrate the fact that he’d made it to the last few minutes of the show.

The revamped-for-live-TV event, a Paramount Television production, features well-known names among the millennial set. Can Danny maintain his bad-boy image as the coolest member of the T-Birds, once he and Sandy start going together, and can Sandy remain a good girl after she joins the Pink Ladies?

Viewers flooded to social media to praise Hudgens’ strength as she took the stage, particularly following her emotional solo of the track There Are Worse Things I Could Do.

During a recent rehearsal for Fox’s live USA broadcast of the musical Grease, Aaron Tveit and Julianne Hough waited for their musical cue to jump into the fray and gambol alongside a troupe of frenetic dancers. (At one point, a potential conquest declares Lopez’s character “so old”, and the look on the former Slater’s face was positively poignant.) When Boyz II Men showed up as a tripartite Teen Angel, the moment worked doubly well: As nostalgia spectacle, and as genuine whoa-they-can-still-sing thrill.

“It’s sort of surreal to be a part of introducing this iconic musical to a new generation”. I don’t think it was easy, by any means, to do what the production did on the carbon copy numbers, but there were several places where I wished there had been more confidence in Kail and less certainty that the one that the audience wanted was a movie they’d seen before dozens of times. ~Sandy Our little Star of the Dancing floor has come a long way from Utah…

‘Let me tell you, I hate cancer. Also adding punchlines were Ana Gasteyer as Principal McGee and Haneefah Wood as Blanche, plus Wendell Piece just happy to be invited to the party as Coach Calhoun.

PG / Splash News/PG / Splash News Carly Rae Jepsen, Vanessa Hudgens, Kether Donohue and Keke Palmer in “Grease: Live”.

As Hudgens takes the stage tonight to portray Rizzo in Grease (airing on FOX), her father will be in her heart. This is what watching a live musical should always be like.

When did you realize Grease: Live was killing it? Fox also managed to raise the bar for future live televised musicals, including its own upcoming religious production The Passion.

There were even cameos from original Grease stars Didi Conn and Barry Pearl.

At any rate, if you’re into this kind of musical stuff (and we are), tune into Fox at 7 p.m. Sunday night.