The Columbia College Chicago School of Theatre and Dance was proud to help celebrate Columbia College Chicago Honorary Doctorate of Arts recipient Jim Jacobs HDR ’14 on the occasion of his induction into the Illinois Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on September 14, 2025.

Jacobs, who received his Honorary Doctorate when he was the commencement speaker at the 2014 Columbia College graduation ceremony, is the co-author of the hit stage and screen musical Grease and benefactor of the Jim Jacobs Musical Theatre Scholarship at Columbia College.

At the Illinois Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction event, which was hosted by the Illinois Rock & Roll Museum on Route 66 at the historic Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Illinois, Columbia College School of Theatre and Dance students performed musical numbers from the college’s upcoming 2025-26 Mainstage Season production of Grease, including “Summer Nights,” “Beauty School Drop Out,” and “We Go Together.”

“Having Columbia students perform this tribute at such a major event connected our program directly to Chicago’s cultural heritage,” said Dr. Jimmy Noriega, director of the School of Theatre and Dance. “It celebrated the city’s influence on music and theatre while spotlighting the next generation of artists learning their craft at Columbia.” 

Columbia College’s mainstage production of Grease features an all-student cast under the direction of faculty member Daryl Brooks, with music direction by Columbia College alum Kailey Rockwell ’13, a graduate of the Columbia College Chicago Music Program‘s Bachelor of Music Program with a Concentration in Contemporary, Urban, and Popular Music and choreography by Columbia College Musical Theatre Program alum Jonny Martinez. Grease runs November 13 through 22 in the Courtyard Theatre of the Getz Theatre Center of Columbia College, located at 72 E. 11th St. in Chicago’s South Loop. Student discount tickets are available. For tickets, click here.

As previously reported in this blog, Jacobs co-wrote Grease with 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.

Grease had its world premiere in February 1971 at Chicago’s Kingston Mines Theatre, one of the seminal companies in Chicago’s grassroots “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!

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.

Jacobs, who launched his theatrical career in Chicago in the 1960s, established the Jim Jacobs Musical Theatre Scholarship at Columbia in 2013. Over the past decade the scholarship fund has distributed more than $120,000 in financial aid to students in the school’s Musical Theatre BA/BFA Program.

Though Jacobs now resides in Southern California, his ties to Chicago and to Columbia College remain deep and strong. “Every child, growing up, has a dream of what they’re going to be someday,” Jacobs said when the Musical Theatre Scholarship was annouunced in 2013. “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.”

Other inducteees into the Illinois Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at the September 14 event included rock artist Richard Marx, record labels Vee-Jay Records and Delmark Records, the bands Enuff Z’Nuff, Head East, and The Smashing Pumpkins, and Chicago blues icons Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Bo Diddley. The event was hosted by veteran Chicago radio broadcaster and Columbia College alum Bob Sirott ’71.