Jim Jacobs

Jim Jacobs, born on October 7, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois, is an American actor, composer, lyricist, and theatre writer whose Broadway career spanned from 1971 to 2008. The son of Harold, a factory foreman, and Norma (Mathison) Jacobs, he grew up in Chicago and attended Taft High School, where he played guitar and sang with a band called DDT & the Dynamiters. His early musical influences included Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. As a teenager, Jacobs taught himself guitar after quitting formal lessons after four sessions, discovering a chord progression of C, A minor, F, and G7 that he would later incorporate into "Those Magic Changes" in Grease. During his teenage years he also played in a band alongside guitarist Terry Kath. At nineteen, at his parents' urging, he bypassed college and spent a year working at a factory packing ink before leaving that job.

In 1963, Jacobs joined a local theatre group that included Warren Casey, the Chicago Playwrights Center — then known as the Hull House Playwrights Center — run by artistic director Robert Sickinger. Over the following five years, he appeared in more than fifty theatrical productions in the Chicago area, working with figures including Second City founder Paul Sills, while supporting himself as an advertising copywriter. He also appeared in a small role in the 1969 film Medium Cool and received a Joseph Jefferson Award nomination for best actor that same year for his work in Jimmy Shine. His Broadway acting debut came with a 1970 revival of No Place to Be Somebody, which he followed with the national tour of the same production.

Jacobs is best known for co-creating Grease with Warren Casey. The musical grew out of Jacobs's dissatisfaction with the rock music of the late 1960s and his nostalgia for 1950s rock and roll, and was drawn largely from his own high school experiences. Several characters were named after real acquaintances, and Jacobs inserted himself into the show through two characters, the innocent Doody and the more confident Roger. Tom Meyer, the inspiration for the character Danny Zuko, noted that Jacobs was not personally involved in most of the illegal activity committed by the Polish-American and Italian-American gangs that surrounded him as a teenager. The musical premiered in 1971 at the Kingston Mines Theater in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood, in a version that featured more Chicago-specific material and extensive profanity than the production that later became widely known. Producers Ken Waissman and Maxine Fox saw the show and encouraged Jacobs and Casey to rework it for an off-Broadway production. The revised version opened at the Eden Theatre in lower Manhattan under first-class Broadway contracts, making it eligible for the 1972 Tony Awards, where it received seven nominations. Jacobs received a Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical, as well as a Grammy Award nomination for Best Score from an Original Cast Show Album. In June 1972, the production transferred to the Broadhurst Theatre, then moved six months later to the Royale Theatre, where it ran until January 1980, before concluding its run with five final weeks at the Majestic Theatre. The show earned an ASCAP award in 1979 for being the longest-running show in Broadway history at that time. Grease subsequently became a West End hit and was adapted into the 1978 film of the same name.

Jacobs and Casey collaborated on one additional show, Island of Lost Coeds, a spoof of 1940s and 1950s B movies, though it did not reach Broadway. In 1980, Jacobs appeared in the film Love in a Taxi, directed by Robert Sickinger. In 2006, he served as a judge on the NBC reality series Grease: You're the One that I Want!, which used viewer votes to cast the lead roles in an August 2007 Broadway revival of Grease. Jacobs stated he agreed to participate only after NBC offered him compensation he found impossible to decline. In 2011, he received a Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production — Musical — Midsize for The Original Grease. As of May 2022, Jacobs resides in Los Angeles.