Patty Simcox

Grease
Original Broadway Cast Recording
Music	Jim Jacobs Warren Casey
Lyrics	Jim Jacobs Warren Casey
Book	Jim Jacobs Warren Casey
Productions	1971 Chicago 1972 Broadway 1973 West End 1978 Film 1979 West End revival 1993 West End revival 1994 Broadway revival 1994 US Tour 1996 Düsseldorf 1999 Madrid 2001 West End revival 2002 Toronto 2006 Barcelona 2007 West End revival 2007 Broadway revival 2008 Second US Tour 2011 Barcelona 2011 Chicago 2011 Gdynia 2012 Copenhagen 2012 Madrid 2012 Spain Tour 2013 Philadelphia 2013 Hong Kong 2013-14 Australian Tour 2014 Karachi 2015 Sutton Coldfield 2016 Québec 2016 Royal Caribbean 2016 FOX Television Special 2017 UK Tour 2017 Paris 2017 Toronto

Grease is a 1971 musical 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 William Howard Taft School in Chicago, Illinois) and follows ten working-class teenagers as they navigate the complexities of peer pressure, politics, personal core values, and love. The score borrows heavily from the sounds of early rock and roll. In its original production in Chicago, Grease was a raunchy, raw, aggressive, vulgar show. Subsequent productions sanitized it and tamed it down. The show mentions social issues such as teenage pregnancy, peer pressure and gang violence; its themes include love, friendship, teenage rebellion, sexual exploration during adolescence, and, to some extent, class consciousness/class conflict. Jacobs described the show's basic plot as a subversion of common tropes of 1950s cinema, since the female lead, who in many 1950s films transformed the alpha male into a more sensitive and sympathetic character, is instead drawn into the man's influence and transforms into his fantasy.

Grease was first performed in 1971 in the original Kingston Mines nightclub in Chicago (since demolished). From there, it has been successful on both stage and screen, but the content has been diluted and its teenage characters have become less Chicago habitués (the characters' Polish-American backgrounds in particular are ignored with last names often changed, although two Italian-American characters are left identifiably ethnic) and more generic. At the time that it closed in 1980, Grease's 3,388-performance run was the longest yet in Broadway history, although it was surpassed by A Chorus Line on September 29, 1983. It went on to become a West End hit, a successful feature film, two popular Broadway revivals in 1994 and 2007, and a staple of regional theatre, , community theatre, and high school and middle school drama groups. It remains Broadway's 15th longest-running show.