GREASE: STILL THE WORD IN 1980

When the musical hit Grease closed on Broadway in 1980, it had been playing for a recordbreaking 3,388 performances. What had begun in a funky nightclub in Chicago in 1971 as a raunchy musical with an amateur cast had been radically transformed.

Stage actors Jim Jacobs and pal Warren Casey based their original tale on Jacobs’ experiences at Chicago’s

Taft High School. The story—first conceived as a book, then as a musical play—followed the adventures of delinquent bluecollar teenagers in 1959. “It was about having rock ’n’ roll bands and leather jackets and beehive hairdos, about doing a lot of smoking and spitting on the sidewalk,” Jacobs says.

The original Grease production grew in popularity. Eventually it moved from Chicago to off Broadway, then to the Great White Way itself. On its journey, much of its original crude content was diluted in order to appeal to a mainstream audience. Today when someone mentions Grease, people think only of the 1978 smash film version starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. That doesn’t sit well with Jacobs. “We had written the show as the real nitty-gritty story of the kids I went to school with,” he says. “It went from an in-your-face show about delinquents to a colorized gang of lovable people singing rock ’n’ roll.”

Jim Jacobs also created the pilot for the TV megahit Happy Days.