Columbia College Chicago Theatre alums are in the cast and creative team of a new production of the hit musical Grease, running September 17 through October 19 at Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. Student discounts are available. For tickets, click here.
DIna DiCostanzo (Photo: Brandon Dahlquist)
This new production of the born-in-Chicago musical spoof of 1950s teen culture is directed by Columbia College alum Dina DiCostanzo ’02, a graduate of the Theatre Program’s Musical Theatre Program.
Justin Grey McPike
The role of Teen Angel is played by Columbia alum Justin Grey McPike ’22, a graduate of the Theatre Department’s BFA Program in Musical Theatre Performance. McPike also understudies the role of Johnny Casino.
Jim Jacobs
As previously reported in this blog, Grease was co-written in 1971 by former Chicago actor-playwright-songwriter Jim Jacobs HDR ’14, recipient of an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Jacobs, who launched his theatrical career in Chicago in the 1960s, is the benefactor of the Jim Jacobs Musical Theatre Scholarship at Columbia College, established in 2013. Over the past decade the scholarship fund has distributed more than $100,000 in financial aid to students in the Theatre Department’s Musical Theatre BA/BFA Program.
Jim Jacobs speaks at Columbia College Chicago’s 2014 commencement ceremony.
Jacobs received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Columbia College when he addressed graduating Theatre students at the 2014 Columbia College Commencement at the historic Chicago Theatre in Chicago’s Loop.
Poster for the original 1971 production of “Grease” at Kingston Mines Theatre.
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. Grease had its world premiere 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 Ken Waissman and Maxine Fox, who optioned the work for Broadway. In a new production with a revised script, Grease opened off-Broadway at the 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.
