The Columbia College Chicago School of Theatre and Dance wishes a happy birthday to actor-playwright-songwriter Jim Jacobs HDR ’14, co-author of the hit musical Grease and benefactor of the Jim Jacobs Musical Theatre Scholarship at Columbia College, who turns 82 on October 7, 2024. Jacobs, who launched his theatrical career in Chicago in the 1960s, established the Jim Jacobs Musical Theatre Scholarship in 2013. Over the past decade the scholarship fund has distributed more than $110,000 in financial aid to students in the school’s Musical Theatre BA/BFA Program.

Jacobs co-wrote Grease with and his writing partner, the late Warren Casey, in 1970. A native of Chicago, Jacobs based Grease on his experiences as a teenage “greaser” in the late 1950s at Taft High School on the city’s Northwest Side, where he played guitar and sang with such groups as DDT & The Dynamiters and Lefty & The El-Rays.

The show premiered in February 1971 at Chicago’s Kingston Mines Theatre, one of the seminal companies in Chicago’s avant-garde Off-Loop Theatre movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Grease‘s runaway success in Chicago attracted the attention of New York producers, who optioned the work for Broadway. In a new production with a revised script, Grease opened at the off-Broadway Eden Theatre on February 14, 1972, then transferred to the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway, where it opened on June 7, 1972. By the time the original production closed in 1980, it had became the longest-running show in Broadway history to that time, surpassing the original run of Fiddler on the Roof.

Grease has been revived on Broadway twice — in 1994 and 2007 — and is also popular in regional, community, and academic theatre. Its 1978 movie version was a hit, as was the 2016 Fox TV special Grease LIVE! The song “Summer Nights,” written by Jacobs and Casey, was a hit single for the 1978 movie’s stars John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. When Jacobs turned 75, Olivia Newton-John serenaded him with “Happy Birthday” from the stage:

Jacobs and Casey followed Grease with Island of Lost Co-eds, a musical spoof of Hollywood “South Sea Island” epics. The 1981 world premiere of Island of Lost Co-eds was the first mainstage production at the Getz Theatre Center of Columbia College after Columbia College acquired the historic building, located at 72 E. 11th St. in Chicago’s South Loop.

The production was directed by the Theatre Department’s then-chairperson Sheldon Patinkin and Theatre faculty member June Pyskacek — who, as co-founder and artistic director of Kingston Mines Theatre, had produced Grease’s world premiere in 1971.

In 2011, Jacobs was a guest speaker at “Chicago, Theatre Capital of America: Past. Present. Future,” an international symposium on Chicago theatre history and practice organized by the Columbia College theatre program. In 2014, Jacobs received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Columbia College and addressed graduating Theatre students at the 2014 Columbia College Commencement at the historic Chicago Theatre in Chicago’s Loop. And in 2018, Jacobs was a special guest at the first-ever Columbia College Chicago Theatre Reunion.

Though Jim Jacobs now resides in Southern California, his ties to his hometown of Chicago and to Columbia College remain deep and strong. “Every child, growing up, has a dream of what they’re going to be someday,” said Jacobs when he established the Jim Jacobs Musical Theatre Scholarship at Columbia College. “I dreamed of being an actor, a singer, a dancer — a performer. I kept thinking and saying to myself, ‘Give me a chance, I know I can do it. I really can.’ And so, here I am, many years later and extremely happy to be able to give some young person the chance he or she needs. This is for those students who once thought that what they were thinking about, most of the time, was an impossible dream. It is with great pleasure that I can establish a musical theatre scholarship at Columbia College Chicago.”

Happy birthday, Jim Jacobs!