Jim Jacobs (born October 7, 1942) is an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

actor An actor or actress is a person who portrays a character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek term is (), lit ...

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Def ...

lyricist A lyricist is a songwriter who writes lyrics (the spoken words), as opposed to a composer, who writes the song's music which may include but not limited to the melody, harmony, arrangement and accompaniment. Royalties A lyricist's incom ...

, and

writer A writer is a person who uses written words in different writing styles and techniques to communicate ideas. Writers produce different forms of literary art and creative writing such as novels, short stories, books, poetry, travelogues, ...

for the

theatre Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perfor ...

, long associated with the Chicago theater scene. Jacobs is best known for creating the book, storyline, characters, lyrics for the 1971 musical '' Grease'' with

Warren Casey Warren Casey (April 20, 1935 – November 8, 1988) was an American theater composer, lyricist, writer, and actor. He was the writer and composer, with Jim Jacobs, of the stage musical '' Grease''. Career Warren Casey was born on April 20, 1935, ...

. ''Grease'' would later be adapted into the film ''Grease'' in 1978, which would become one of the most successful film adaptations of a musical in history in terms of gross revenue adjusted for inflation.

Biography

Career

Jacobs was born on October 7, 1942 in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolitan areas include, Peoria and Rock ...

to Harold, a factory foreman, and Norma (Mathison) Jacobs. Jacobs attended Taft High School, during which time he played guitar and sang with a band called DDT & the Dynamiters. When he was 11, his idol was Bill Haley, but when he was fourteen it was

Elvis Presley Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977), or simply Elvis, was an American singer and actor. Dubbed the " King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. His ener ...

. He also cites

Buddy Holly Charles Hardin Holley (September 7, 1936 – February 3, 1959), known as Buddy Holly, was an American singer and songwriter who was a central and pioneering figure of mid-1950s rock and roll. He was born to a musical family in Lubbock, Texas ...

Little Richard Richard Wayne Penniman (December 5, 1932 – May 9, 2020), known professionally as Little Richard, was an American musician, singer, and songwriter. He was an influential figure in popular music and culture for seven decades. Described as the " ...

, and

Jerry Lee Lewis Jerry Lee Lewis (September 29, 1935October 28, 2022) was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Nicknamed "The Killer", he was described as " rock & roll's first great wild man". A pioneer of rock and roll and rockabilly music, Lewis mad ...

as influences. When he was a teenager, he would imitate playing a guitar with a broomstick. He eventually convinced his parents to pay for guitar lessons. After four lessons, he quit and decided to buy a guitar book and teach himself. From this, he found a simple chord structure: C, A minor, F, G7—this would later be ''

Those Magic Changes ''Grease'' is a musical with music, lyrics, and a book by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. Named after the 1950s United States working-class youth subculture known as greasers, the musical is set in 1959 at fictional Rydell High School (based on ...

'' featured in Grease. While continuing to learn guitar he also was in a band, with guitarist

Terry Kath Terry Alan Kath (January 31, 1946 – January 23, 1978) was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, best known as a founding member of the rock band Chicago. He played guitar and sang lead vocals on many of the band's early hit singl ...

in his late teenage years. When he was 19, his parents convinced him that he shouldn't go to college, and instead ended up working at a factory packing ink. After a year working at the factory, he decided to quit. In 1963, he became involved with a local theatre group that included

, The Chicago Playwrights Center (at that time it was called Hull House Playwrights Center) run by artistic director Robert Sickinger. For the next five years he appeared in more than fifty theatrical productions in the Chicago area, working with such people as

The Second City The Second City is an improvisational comedy enterprise and is the oldest ongoing improvisational theater troupe to be continually based in Chicago, with training programs and live theatres in Toronto and Los Angeles. The Second City Theatre o ...

founder

Paul Sills Paul Sills (born Paul Silverberg; November 18, 1927 – June 2, 2008) was an American director and improvisation teacher, and the original director of Chicago's The Second City. Life and career Sills was born Paul Silverberg in Chicago, Illinoi ...

, while earning a living as an

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. He also landed a small role in the 1969 film '' Medium Cool''. Jacobs'

Broadway Broadway may refer to: Theatre * Broadway Theatre (disambiguation) * Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S. ** Broadway (Manhattan), the street **Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...

acting debut was in a 1970 revival of the play '' No Place to be Somebody'', followed by the national tour.

''Grease''

In the second half of the 1960's, he and Casey were collaborating on a play about high school life during the golden age of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s. Entitled ''Grease'', it was based largely on Jacobs's high school experiences and even used the names of some of Jacobs's acquaintances. In its original form, it premiered in 1971 at the Kingston Mines Theater in the Old Town section of Chicago. Compared to the version that later became famous, many of the songs were more Chicago-centred, and there was extensive use of profanity. Jacobs remembered: "When we went to New York... we were told it was necessary to make the characters lovable, instead of scaring everybody. The show went from about three-quarters book and one-quarter music to one-quarter book and three-quarters music." Producers

Ken Waissman Kenneth Waissman (born January 1940) is an American theatre producer. Waissman's first Broadway credit was the 1971 Paul Zindel play '' And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little'' with Estelle Parsons and Julie Harris. The following year, while he and ...

and

Maxine Fox Maxine may refer to: People Maxine is a feminine given name. * Maxine Andrews (1916–1995), member of The Andrews Sisters singing trio * Maxine Audley (1923–1992), English actress * Maxine Brown (country singer) (1932-2019), American country ...

saw the show and suggested to the playwrights that it might work better as a

musical Musical is the adjective of music. Musical may also refer to: * Musical theatre, a performance art that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance * Musical film Musical film is a film genre in which songs by the characters are interwo ...

, and told them if the creative partners were willing to rework it and they liked the end result, they would produce it

off-Broadway An off-Broadway theatre is any professional theatre venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, inclusive. These theatres are smaller than Broadway theatres, but larger than off-off-Broadway theatres, which seat fewer th ...

. The team headed to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

to collaborate on what would become '' Grease'', which opened at the

Eden Theatre Village East by Angelika (originally the Louis N. Jaffe Art Theatre, also Village East, and formerly known by several other names) is a movie theater at 189 Second Avenue, on the corner with 12th Street, in the East Village of Manhattan in N ...

lower Manhattan Lower Manhattan (also known as Downtown Manhattan or Downtown New York) is the southernmost part of Manhattan, the central borough for business, culture, and government in New York City, which is the most populated city in the United States with ...

. The Best Plays of 1971-72 notes that "Though '' Grease'' opened geographically off Broadway, it did so under first class Broadway contracts." The show was deemed eligible for the 1972 Tony Awards, receiving seven

Tony Award The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Broadway Theatre, more commonly known as the Tony Award, recognizes excellence in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual c ...

nominations. In June 1972 the production moved to the Broadhurst Theatre in the heart of Manhattan's Broadway Theater District. Six months later it moved to the Royale Theatre where it played until January 1980. For fine final weeks of the run the show moved to the much larger

Majestic Theatre (Broadway) The Majestic Theatre is a Broadway theater at 245 West 44th Street in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Opened in 1927, the theater was designed by Herbert J. Krapp in a Spanish style and was built for real-estate ...

. Casey earned a

nomination for Best Book of a Musical. The show went on to become a West End hit and a hugely successful film.

Later career

''Grease'' would be the only musical from Jacobs and Casey to make it to Broadway or achieve widespread success. The two would collaborate on one other show: ''Island of Lost Coeds'' was a spoof on 1940s and 1950s B movies: a captain and crew crash on a deserted island inhabited by beautiful women with ratted hair, tiger-skin swimsuits and rubber spears. In 1980, he appeared in the film '' Love in a Taxi'', directed by Robert Sickinger. Jacobs served as a judge on the NBC

reality series Reality television is a genre of television programming that documents purportedly unscripted real-life situations, often starring unfamiliar people rather than professional actors. Reality television emerged as a distinct genre in the early ...

'' Grease: You're the One that I Want!'' in 2006, designed to cast the lead roles in an August 2007 Broadway revival of ''Grease'' via viewer votes. Jacobs stated that he agreed to take part in the show only after NBC offered him too much money for him to refuse.

Awards

*1969 - Joseph Jefferson Award nomination for best actor in '' Jimmy Shine'' *1972 -

nomination for best book of a musical '' Grease'' *1972 -

Grammy Award The Grammy Awards (stylized as GRAMMY), or simply known as the Grammys, are awards presented by the Recording Academy of the United States to recognize "outstanding" achievements in the music industry. They are regarded by many as the most pr ...

nomination for best score from an original cast show album '' Grease'' *1973 - Cue Magazine Award *1979 -

ASCAP The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) () is an American not-for-profit performance-rights organization (PRO) that collectively licenses the public performance rights of its members' musical works to venues, broadca ...

award for longest-running show in Broadway history *2011 - Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production - Musical - Midsize for '' The Original Grease''

References

External links

*
'Grease' background at imagi-nation.com
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jacobs, Jim American male composers 21st-century American composers American lyricists American male stage actors American male film actors Musicians from Chicago 1942 births Living people Writers from Chicago Male actors from Chicago 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights Songwriters from Illinois 21st-century American male musicians American male songwriters