The Columbia College Chicago School of Theatre and Dance‘s 2025-26 Mainstage Season continues with the rollicking rock ‘n’ roll musical Grease, running 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.

The show is directed by School of Theatre and Dance faculty member Daryl Brooks, winner of the Black Arts & Culture Alliance of Chicago‘s 2025 Black Excellence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theater for his direction of the musical That’s What Friends Are For: Gladys, Dionne, and Patti at the Black Ensemble Theater, where he is producing managing director.

Grease has 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.

 

Performed by an all-student cast, Grease is set in 1950s Chicago. The song-packed show follows the students of Rydell High School as they navigate love, friendship, and identity—complete with electrifying dance numbers and the unforgettable sound of rock ’n’ roll.

As previously reported in this blog, Grease was co-written by Columbia College Chicago Honorary Doctorate of Arts recipient Jim Jacobs HDR ’14, benefactor of the Jim Jacobs Musical Theatre Scholarship at Columbia College. Jacobs was recently inducted into the Illinois Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on September 14, 2025, in an event 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 Grease in Jacobs’ honor at the event.

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, 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.”