New audio!

Liz & Jean's song from the GREASE 2 movie

Some movie dialog overlaps the song, but you'll get the idea. CLICK HERE to download it!

Cleveland Plain Dealer

April 13-19, 1984

NOTE: This article is incomplete; if anyone has the second page of this article, I would sincerely appreciate receiving a copy of the text.

It's tough to tell the Sagal sisters apart, although they are different. Jean is older, by 3½ minutes. She is also taller at 5-foot-3. Baby sister Liz is not quite 5-foot-3. For all practical purposes, they are identical twins. This has been a source of irritation through most of their 22 years, but now it is paying off. They share star billing on a new sitcom titled Double Trouble, on NBC Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m.

They play identical twins (odd casting for a business that is seemingly devoid of logic) in the series, that is scheduled for eight episodes. Kate and Allison play 17-year-old high school students who live with their widower father in Des Moines, Iowa. He operates Art's Gym and rents space to his girlfriend who runs a dance studio. The girls work for her part time as instructors.

Apart from a certain family resemblance, the Foster twins, as they are called in Double Trouble, are anything but identical. Kate is cool, smart, aggressive and a sharp dresser, and popular with the boys. Allison is subdued, sensitive, neurotic and sloppy, preferring sweat shirts and blue jeans.

"In real life, it's sort of the same with us," said Liz, "and we were originally cast backwards. But after a week of rehearsals, we were told to switch roles because it plays much better on the screen."

The Sagal girls were born in Santa Monica to show business parents. Their mother, Sara, who died when they were 13, was a pioneer female producer and director in Hollywood. Boris Sagal, their late father, was a television director with distinguished credits in Masada, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Rich Man, Poor Man. He was killed two years ago in a helicopter accident while directing the tele-film World War III.

"Our parents were real hip and never crammed the twin stuff down our throats," Jean said. "Liz and I have always loved each other, but we also decided to cultivate our own identities from the time we were able to think for ourselves. We didn't get fed up with each other because we maintained a certain distance from the start," she said. "We didn't dress alike, we seldom socialized outside of home, and we had different friends. Our friends seldom overlapped. It didn't happen very often, but it always hurt when someone would say 'Hi, twins!' "

They solved many potential problems by attending separate schools from junior high on. Jean went to the Ojai Valley (Calif.) Boarding School before returning to Los Angeles to go to Pacific Palisades High School. She took outside classes at the Dupree Dance Academy in lieu of physical education and later joined a dance troupe called A Sleight Touch. Before going to New York, she spent a year and a half touring with the group as the opening act for Peaches and Herb in California, the Philippines, Japan and Mexico.

Liz attended Bishop's Boarding School in La Jolla, Calif., before finishing up at University High School in West Los Angeles where she got a scholarship at the Du- pree Dance Academy during her senior year. Combining dance with innate skills as a choreographer, she stayed on for two more years, financed in part by three scholarships. The sisters maintained their distance at the dance academy by attending classes at different times.

A national Dr. Pepper commercial marked Liz' professional debut at 19. Within weeks, she tested her wings as an actress by auditioning for a small part as a cheerleader in the movie Grease II. She got it.

At the same time, some 3,000 miles away, Jean was auditioning in New York for a small part as a cheerleader in the movie Grease II. She got it. "I was going to call Liz and tell her the news, thinking she would be green with envy. Then I found out that she had got an identical role in the movie," she said. "Somebody told me that a girl who looked a lot like me and had the same last name was cast at the last minute. They didn't know that we were twins."

The scriptwriter assured them exposure as twin cheerleaders if they would make a serious attempt to look alike for the film. "I had short, black hair and Liz had longer brown hair at the time," Jean said, "plus I was 10 pounds heavier from eating lots of good pizza in New York. We decided to look like twins because we wanted the job, and it turned out to be the weirdest experience in our lives."

Three weeks later, after Jean shed the ten pounds, they were dressed identically and wore the same hair color and style for the first time since they were 3. "Suddenly we were looking at mirror images again and remembering all the pain associated with it," Liz said. "It was a traumatic, just awful, experience."

They settled down long enough to camp it up as the stereotypical twin cheerleaders and found that they could actually have fun working together for short periods of time. Though pursuing separate careers, they decided to combine forces whenever twins were called for. It has been a lucrative partnership, including work on a McDonald's commercial and two Wrigley's Doublemint Gum commercials.

They had twin trouble again. "It was quite often painful as we tried to get our separate careers off the ground after Grease II," said Liz. She settled in L.A. after completing the movie. "One of us would go on an audition only to be told by the casting director 'Oh, your sister was just here--you look just like her.'

TV Guide

March 16, 1985

By Robert MacKenzie

Situation comedy is Yuppie territory. Except for a few outposts like Taxi, sitcoms are about middle-class, upwardly mobile, urban people who live in spiffy clean apartments, wear cool clothes, are hip to Greek salads and Prince, and whose big problems revolve around dating. Everybody is good-looking and healthy, and nobody is sweating the rent. It's nice territory, unless you're a crank who wants to see real life.

NBC's Double Trouble (currently shown Saturdays at 8:30 P.M. [ET]), is about twin girls, I mean young women, who live with their Aunt Margo (Barbara Barrie), a professional writer Kate and Allison (Jean and Liz Sagal) are preparing for glamorous careers as actress and fashion designer, respectively. They have a pair of boy pals (James Vallely and Jonathan Schmock) who also live in the house, and a low-stress class of worries. Like, how to find a date for Margo.

They set up a series of men for Margo, beginning with a jerk in a loud jacket who drops cigar ashes in her soup and haggles with Margo over her share of the restaurant bill. "Do you think you'll see him again?" asks Allison. "Not unless I have to pick him out of a police lineup," Margo answers.

Kate's scheme was to get a guy from her acting class to take Margo out and plump up her ego. When Margo appeared to be falling for the actor, the twins decided they had erred, and that the actor should now behave like an obnoxious lout to "let her down easy." This story was as uncomfortable as it sounds.

The Sagal twins are vivacious and pretty. In a flashback scene, Allison at 16 was infatuated with a boy and thinking of doing "it" with him. Kate was aghast. "Have you ever seen a boy naked?" Allison: "Do I have to?" Kate showed up the boy as a rat by making a play for him while Allison hid and watched. The boy went for it, and Allison's virginity was saved for the moment.

The dialogue with Billy and Charles, the live-in friends, gets racy at times. In one story the boys were playing with a video camera. "Allison, could you take off all your clothes and lie down on the rug?" "No." "You're right. Forget about the rug."

Allison's design class is presided over by Mr. Arrechia (Michael D. Roberts), a pompous pedant of the sartorial arts who makes withering replies to Allison's questions. When Margo helped her write a successful article for a fashion magazine, Allison took it into her head to become a writer instead of a designer. But when she attempted to interview her formidable teacher, Arrechia found her questions stupid and terminated the interview. "But I'm not done!" she cried. "Done, no. Finished, yes," snapped he. Mr. Arrechia doesn't seem much fun to me.

In fact, the fun in this series is intermittent. There's an occasional bright line, as when the teen-age twins were contemplating their messy rooms: "We're beyond vacuum cleaners, we're into wrecking balls." But Yuppieland is a pretty narrow slice of the human condition. I start longing to see some salty, earthy, wild and crazy characters, or at least a few grittier representatives of that diverse and colorful species, the human race. Putting it more concretely, I start looking around for a rerun of Sgt. Bilko.

Webmaster's note: Let me get this straight...the all-white, male-dominated Sgt. Bilko represents the diversity of the human race? LOL!