Grease, Tell Me More, Tell Me More: Stories from the Broadway Phenomenon That Started It All

Prologue

One summer night in the middle of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the original Broadway Grease company gathered on a Zoom call. Telling stories becomes central to every alumni reunion, and Grease was no exception. We never tire of sharing stories, as the memories are fiercely treasured. Even when stories are repeated over and over, we laugh at all the same things as if for the first time.

One thing that unexpectedly came out of that reunion was the wish to commemorate the show for its fiftieth anniversary on February 14, 2022. We realized one way to do that would be to put our memories into book form.

The genesis of Grease is a quixotic one, and its improbable success is a legendary tale. We wanted to share what it was like to create and be part of this showbiz phenomenon.

Most Broadway shows produce some enduring friendships, but Grease was unique in that for almost everyone involved, it was our first big break at the beginning of our professional careers, and we were all approximately the same age.

The word Rydell High alumni use most often when referring to their fellow Grease actors, musicians, crew, and staff is family. Before these hundreds of artists became one big Broadway family, however, they were each part of a unique Grease company, or family—and that is how we tell our story.

One Broadway show, eight national tours, from February 14, 1972, until it closed on April 13, 1980, after a record-breaking 3,388 performances.

TOM MOORE, ADRIENNE BARBEAU, KEN WAISSMAN

1

In the Beginning . . .

JIM JACOBS (Author/Composer): In 1969 I was having a cast party in my apartment and practically everybody had left, but Warren Casey was still there, along with some deadbeats lying around listening to Led Zeppelin, smoking weed and drunk, of course, and I go to this closet where I had a shopping bag full of my old 45s from the ’50s and came out and said, I’m putting on Dion and the Belmonts. I go over, sit next to Warren, and say, How come there’s never been a Broadway show, man, with rock and roll music? Those exact words.

Warren looked at me like I was nutty and said, Yeah, well, that’s a fun idea, but what the hell would it be about? I said, "I have no idea. Maybe it should be about the people I went to high school with. And because everything in those days was greasy, because the hair was greasy and the food was greasy, and there were all these guys who had cars and they were always under the hood, man, and they’d come out all greasy . . . it could be called Grease."

Warren looked at me and said, Yeah, yeah. OK, you’re drunk, it’s three o’clock in the morning, let’s all go get a tattoo of an executioner with an axe. I’m goin’ home.

Warren was a very close-lipped guy. But I found him the funniest person I had ever known. A latter-day Oscar Wilde of the welfare state. An American Joe Orton. We could have each other in hysterics for hours on end. There were never two more different kind of guys, but we made a great team.

I was part of Chicago’s community theater scene while working a day job in advertising. Warren, at that time, was working for Mary Cell Corsetry—a women’s underwear store. When people asked Warren, What do you do? he’d say, Oh, I’m in bras and panties. . . .

Jim Jacobs at Foster Beach on Lake Michigan.

A few weeks after that party where I replaced Led Zeppelin with ’50s rock ’n’ roll, Warren calls me up and says, I started working on a scene and a song for that show you were talking about the other night. I said, What show? I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. "You remember . . . Grease. You said we would call it Grease. I said, You’re writing a scene? He said, Yeah, it’s a girls’ pajama party. And I’m writin’ it now. It’s called ‘Freddy, My Love.’ I knew right away he was spoofing Eddie My Love" by the Teen Queens. So that was it. I went down to my office and instead of writing direct mail and ads and shit for Advertising Age, I just started writing names of characters and making up songs. I started thinking of the drive-in movie, hamburger joints, a rumble, pajama parties, tattoos . . . scenes like that.

Around the same time, this actress-teacher friend of mine calls me up one day and says, Do you think you could teach my drama class for me? I said, I don’t know anything about teaching. She said, Well, just fake it for one week. You’ll think of something. Oh, and you get thirty dollars!

So I came up with auditioning for a play. I brought in the pajama party scene and picked out five girls and said, OK, you’ll play Marty, you’re gonna be Jan, etc. They start reading the thing—it was the first time I had ever heard it read—and all the people in the class start laughing their asses off. I mean, really howling at the lines; I got goose bumps. Holy shit, what the fuck! I called up Warren and said, Warren, we have a play! We really have a fuckin’ play!

Jim Jacobs.

Warren Casey.

An early version of Grease was first performed on weekends by an amateur cast at the Kingston Mines Community Theatre, in a converted trolley barn in Chicago, February 1971 to November 1971.

—TOM MOORE

Could This Be Magic?

KEN WAISSMAN (Producer): In August 1971 a Baltimore high school friend and college roommate, Phillip Markin, called me from Chicago. He and his wife Suzy had happened upon a small, ninety-seat community theater that was presenting a show about high school kids in the 1950s. Phil knew I was looking for a new show to produce.

It’s about the kids with the ducktail haircuts and black leather jackets who hung out in the back of our high school, my Baltimore friend reported. "It’s called Grease."

In high school and college, Phil was known as the ultimate pessimist. He never had a positive word to say about anything. I figured if he, the champion glass-half-empty guy, is showing enthusiasm for this, I better fly out and see it.

Off to Chicago I went. The theater was in the basement of what had once been a trolley barn. There were no seats, just the cement floor. An usher handed us some newspapers to sit on. I looked at the stage (which was level with the floor) and saw homemade brown paper scenery depicting a mythical Rydell High. I could see the drip marks left by the poster paint.

However, once the show began, I saw my own high school yearbook coming to life. I knew every one of the characters onstage. They each mirrored people I remembered from my high school in Baltimore. I felt their fears, their bravado, and their need to fit in.

Danny and Sandy existed as part of the ensemble but weren’t fully developed as central characters. At this stage, the book was way overwritten: 70 percent book, 30 percent music.

The band was basically winging it, slamming through lyrics and often drowning out voices. However, the wit of Beauty School Dropout and It’s Raining on Prom Night and the joy of songs like We Go Together and Greased Lightnin’ came through, sounding original but at the same time like songs I remembered from the ’50s.

As rough as the show was at this point, I believed from what I saw that the authors, with the right guidance, had the talent to expand the score and do the rewrites necessary to transform this pint-size show into a Broadway-size musical.

After the performance, I met with Jacobs and Casey and expressed my enthusiasm. I told them if they were willing to move to New York to rework the show, focus the book, and flesh out the musical score, my partner and I would produce it. (My producing partner, Maxine Fox, flew out to Chicago the next day and saw the final performance of the run.)

I told the authors that the authenticity they managed to create in the characters, the feeling that when the show is over the actors, still in their costumes, would jump into an old jalopy and go out for hamburgers, made the Grease experience indelible. I told them if we produced it, we would keep that in mind with every single choice we made for the New York production.

2

Move It

KEN WAISSMAN (Producer): Once back in New York, the next step was for Maxine and me to meet with Jacobs and Casey’s agents at International Creative Management—ICM: Steve Sultan, a buttoned-up attorney, and Bridget Aschenberg, a matronly middle-aged woman whose hair always looked like it just came in from a windstorm. Although Jim and Warren became ICM clients because of the Kingston Mines production, Bridget had never seen it and hadn’t heard the music. Nonetheless, she decided that the director and choreographer should be Michael Bennett, then a young, up-and-coming Broadway choreographer who would later go on to direct and choreograph the groundbreaking musical A Chorus Line. He just happened to be an ICM client. She indicated that if we had Michael Bennett on board, it would be easier for them to recommend that Jim and Warren give us the producing rights.

Maxine and I admired Michael Bennett, but his kind of choreography depended on trained dancers and wouldn’t be right for Grease. Come on, Bridget, this isn’t our first rodeo, I told her. We may look like kids, but you know very well we’ve already produced two hit productions (Fortune and Men’s Eyes and And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little).

I went on to tell her and Sultan that we weren’t going to have a singing and dancing chorus. The principals would be cast mainly for their acting and singing abilities and would move well enough to do the dance numbers. In fact, Bridget, we’ve already decided that Pat Birch should be the choreographer. (I had thought about Pat while sitting in the Kingston Mines Theatre in Chicago watching the show.

LEFT: Ken Waissman and Maxine Fox. RIGHT: Pat Birch.

Pat had choreographed the off-Broadway hit You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which Maxine cast, as well as The Me Nobody Knows, a hit off-Broadway musical about inner-city kids, cast with kids who acted, sang, and danced like real kids, not trained professionals. She’d be just the right choice for the authenticity the authors were going for.)

Dick Clark had also made an offer to produce Grease, as did the rock ’n’ roll concert promoter Sid Bernstein. However, in the end, Jim and Warren awarded Maxine and me the rights. Thus began Grease’s journey to worldwide fame.

JIM JACOBS (Author/Composer): Pat Birch was an easy yes as choreographer. I knew Pat could do Grease ’cause I saw what she did with the kids in The Me Nobody Knows. I figured if she could get these inner-city kids to do those routines, she could definitely do our show. If she wasn’t familiar with the Swim, the Snake, the Grind, the Fish, the Madison, or the Continental, she would find out. Warren and I were at ease with her.

Good Timin’: Hiring the Team

KEN WAISSMAN: With everyone agreeing to our choice of choreographer, we focused on finding the right director.

JIM JACOBS: Even before we made a decision on producers, we were searching for directors. Warren and I were never happy with the director at the Kingston Mines in Chicago. In fact, when we didn’t hire him for New York, we ended up in a lawsuit.

We wanted someone—a guy with more of a street kind of thing, you know? We were meeting a lot of directors, and when we tried to talk to them about the ’50s, they’d say things like "Oh, like Blackboard Jungle?—stuff like that. And we’d say, No, man, this is more like Rebel Without a Cause." These guys didn’t know anything about the real ’50s rock ’n’ roll scene. Jeez, isn’t there anyone out there who can recreate our specific ’50s world?

KEN WAISSMAN: After meetings with a number of potential directors, I suddenly remembered a young director named Tom Moore. Two years before, Maxine and I had attended a performance of Welcome to Andromeda that he directed at the American Place Theatre. We were knocked out by how totally real the characters were. I had to pinch myself to remember they were actors. This is what we wanted for Grease.

TOM MOORE (Director): Not long out of the Yale School of Drama, I was supporting myself with temp work as a typist at Sloan Kettering Hospital, basically telling people they should pay their bills before they died.

However, a talented young Yale playwright named Ron Whyte, with whom I had earlier collaborated, had written a new play called Welcome to Andromeda, and Wynn Handman, the artistic director of the American Place Theatre, offered us their theater for two showcase performances.

KEN WAISSMAN: When Maxine and I decided to form our producing partnership, we took a full-page ad in Variety. The headline read, CAN YOU USE TWO PRODUCERS WITH THE FOLLOWING EXPERIENCE? We proceeded to list the logos of the various shows we had worked on. The ad appeared in the April 16, 1969, edition of Variety. Immediately, the phone started ringing.

TOM MOORE: Bob Satuloff, a close friend of the playwright, saw an ad in Variety placed by producers seeking new material and immediately called Ron’s agent, who quickly called the young producers.

KEN WAISSMAN: One call was from a legitimate New York agent, Ellen Neuwald. She represented a playwright named Ron Whyte. His play Welcome to Andromeda was being performed as a weekend showcase at the American Place Theatre.

TOM MOORE: Welcome to Andromeda is a two-character play about a quadriplegic who wants to kill himself and the nurse who spends the entire ninety minutes of the play trying to convince him to go on living. Throughout the play, taking place in one small room, only one of the characters moved.

KEN WAISSMAN: Watching the play, I had to keep reminding myself that these were actors. They seemed so real it was eerie. With one character confined to a hospital bed and the other the only character who could move, Moore created an energy level that kept it from being a static portrayal. I was also impressed by the amount of humor he was able to realize from the depressing premise. We met Ron and Tom after the performance and congratulated them.

TOM MOORE: We hit it off instantly and talked for quite some time, but that was that. Our two performances ended and I searched for a job, eventually ending up working with Gordon Davidson at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A.

KEN WAISSMAN: When I spoke to Ellen Neuwald the next day, I told her we enjoyed the play but didn’t think we could make it work commercially; I also told her how impressed we were with Tom’s work and that we looked forward to seeing him again. A few months later when I was in California, Tom and I met for lunch at the Music Center in downtown L.A. Three hours passed and we were still talking. I told Maxine later that day that I knew at some point we would work with Tom.

TOM MOORE: After my stint at the Mark Taper I went back to New York, but less than six months later, feeling discouraged with the theater and wanting to explore film, I was offered a spot in the recently established American Film Institute.

Several months later, however, as I was preparing to direct an AFI film project, I received a call from New York. The call came in to the dean’s office, as there were no cell phones in those days and I had no permanent home. The young producers, who I now knew as Ken and Maxine, said they had a new project and wanted me to fly in and meet the writers, Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey.

I remember being shocked and telling my fellow students that I had just received a call out of the blue asking me if I would be interested in this very oddly named musical, Grease. A script was overnighted.

Based on the one-act, two-character play they had seen at American Place, with no music and a character who couldn’t move, and one three-hour lunch in Los Angeles, these intrepid producers were considering me for a big, splashy, first-of-its-kind ’50s rock ’n’ roll musical. I was in a state of disbelief as I boarded the plane.

MAXINE FOX (Producer): Tom flew in from Los Angeles. First, we had him meet Jim and Warren and hear the score.

TOM MOORE: Sung mostly by Jim on his guitar, the score was kind of irresistible.

JIM JACOBS: So Ken and Maxine bring in Tom Moore—young, collegiate, very white bread, not long out of Yale—and he already rates four aces in that he was at least the right age compared to everyone else we had seen. And Tom knew the difference between Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. Being from the Midwest was another ace. We instinctively thought he would be really good at helping us to rewrite and shape the script, which we knew was important. He also rated an A+ in my eyes when he said, These are the people that used to scare the crap outta me in high school.

MAXINE FOX: The next morning we arranged for Tom to meet Pat Birch. His taxi got caught in traffic coming across town from the West Side. Pat became antsy waiting. She had a meeting scheduled at the Juilliard School with John Houseman, founding director of Juilliard’s drama division. You didn’t keep John Houseman waiting.

Finally, Tom arrived.

TOM MOORE: I apologized to everyone for being late and said the taxi was stuck in traffic, but what really happened was that I took the bus to try to save money. In those days, I was eating on a few dollars a day.

KEN WAISSMAN: Tom and Pat sat next to each other on a couch in her living room and began talking. Maxine and I sat silently across the room. Within moments, the two hit it off and were animatedly talking about the show’s possibilities. Somehow, Pat’s urgency about leaving to meet Houseman vanished. It was as if they had known each other for years.

TOM MOORE: Within minutes Pat and I made an extraordinary connection. A perfect match.

KEN WAISSMAN: Next we took Tom to Joe Allen Restaurant in the theater district to have lunch with Jim and Warren.

TOM MOORE: We talked for some time and I liked them both, but I had no idea how they felt about me. I complimented them greatly on the music and gave my honest critique on the script, which I thought needed a lot of work and restructuring.

KEN WAISSMAN: After the meeting, Maxine and I drove Tom to the airport for his flight back to Los Angeles. In the car, Tom expressed very positive, enthusiastic feelings about Pat Birch, saying he’d love to work with her. However, he had big doubts that he was the right director for Grease. He wasn’t attracted to the 1950s and hadn’t connected with the greaser kids when he was in high school. He found the characters in Grease unlikable. I told him he’d make them appealing through his work with the authors on the book, his casting, and his direction. I asked him to reread the script draft on the plane.

TOM MOORE: I got on the plane and the doors closed. I looked at the script and started to read it again, this time clearly realizing its possibilities. And I began to panic. What have I done? I’ve turned down my chance at a New York production. This could be one of the greatest mistakes of my life. Mildly hyperbolic, as I was only twenty-seven. My mind churned for the whole six and a half hours of the flight. When the doors opened and we finally disembarked, I ran to the nearest pay phone, reached Ken, and said, I’ve reread the script, already have ideas, and if you and the guys are still interested, I would very much like to be considered as your director.

KEN WAISSMAN: I hope I didn’t talk you out of hiring me, he said.

MAXINE FOX: Unfortunately, we had another hurdle to overcome.

JIM JACOBS: Warren had some concerns about Tom after our first meeting. He joked, Maybe Tom should play Eugene.

KEN WAISSMAN: We brought Tom back to New York for another meeting with Jim and Warren, and asked him to focus on Warren.

JIM JACOBS: At the second meeting, our confidence in Tom grew. He definitely wasn’t a street director, but those guys that were really into guerrilla street theater in Chicago, they weren’t right either; and they were usually fucked up on drugs and yuppie bullshit. And I reminded Warren that taking on two wealthy Jewish kids from suburban Baltimore to be our producers hadn’t hit us as exactly quite the right thing either, you know.

Well, Warren, do you want to keep looking or should we say yes and just get the fuckin’ show on? The positives definitely seemed to outweigh the negatives, and we had been fartin’ around with it for a long time. So we said yes, and it turned out great. A really good collaboration.

KEN WAISSMAN: We had our director.

TOM MOORE: Extraordinary luck and serendipity. Grease would change my life forever.

Tom Moore.

Be-Bop-a-Lula

KEN WAISSMAN: To complete the creative team, we needed to find a music director. The first candidate was well known for accompanying Bette Midler at the Continental Baths. A very talented, nice enough guy, but my gut feeling told me he wasn’t right for us. His name was Barry Manilow.

Next a larger-than-life guy burst into our office with a huge laugh that bounced off the walls. His name was Louis St. Louis. After fifteen minutes of knowledgeable talk about ’50s rock ’n’ roll and greasers, Maxine and I knew he was the right one.

We took him over to meet Tom Moore and Pat Birch, who were preparing for another round of auditions at the old Helen Hayes Theatre. The three hit it off immediately.

JIM JACOBS: In walks Louis St. Louis. Came from Detroit. A gay Italian guy who thinks he’s Black and knows everything there is about pop music. You couldn’t get anything past him—one reference from the ghetto and he knew what it was immediately. How could anyone have been any more perfect than Louis St. Louis? He was tops.

3

Finding a Theater

KEN WAISSMAN (Producer): My producing partner Maxine Fox and I believed the initial New York audience for Grease would be people in their late twenties and early thirties who would have been in high school in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, in 1971 Broadway catered to a much older generation. Opening directly on Broadway felt too risky.

With a cast of sixteen, Grease was too big to work economically in any of the off-Broadway 199-, 299-, or 499-seat theaters. We were in a bind. Then I remembered the Eden Theatre on the corner of East Twelfth Street and Second Avenue, where Once Upon a Mattress, starring Carol Burnett, and Man of La Mancha played before they moved uptown to Broadway proper. Maxine and I met with the owner, pitched Grease, and handed him a check for the theater deposit.

Even though the Eden was a Broadway-size theater, it was classified as off-Broadway. Using off-Broadway rates, we put together a production budget of $110,000, about 20 percent of the cost of an uptown musical back then. We raised the capitalization in two months.

The Eden

DOUG SCHMIDT (Set Designer): I had been sent to look at a future home for a raucous little new off-Broadway musical we were starting to work on called Grease, scheduled to open on Valentine’s Day a scant eight weeks hence. So on a sunny but stunningly bitter cold and windy day in mid-December 1971, my assistant Paul Zalon and I alighted a cab at Twelfth Street and Second Avenue in front of the raffish and decidedly shabby Eden Theatre near Union Square.

I knew that the theater had been the original home of the notorious nude revue Oh! Calcutta!, but other than that I knew nothing of the Eden’s storied past. Shivering as we pounded on the stage door, that ignorance was soon to be dramatically informed.

After what seemed like an eternity huddled in the blinding arctic wind, we heard a bolt being drawn. The heavy door slowly opened and we were met by Abe, the stage doorman and custodian. The wizened, stooped gentleman ushered us onto the stage, lit only by the ghost light that did nothing to illuminate anything beyond the footlights. Wordlessly, he disappeared for a moment. Suddenly the cold dark maw beyond the proscenium flickered to life as the houselights came on, revealing a vast auditorium and full balcony aglow with the warm reflection of faded gold leaf and painted woodwork. I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly was not to find a full Broadway-style theater with 1,100 seats, seemingly untouched by time.

My involuntary reaction was to gasp and ask, When was this place built?

Nineteen twenty-six, came an immediate response in a profoundly thick Middle European accent. Sensing eager ears, he launched into an oral history of the Yiddish Art Theatre movement in the early 1900s through its demise in the late ’40s. He said he had been the stage doorman since shortly after the theater opened in 1927 in what was then known as the Yiddish Rialto. The theater was purpose-built for Maurice Schwartz, a charismatic actor and manager who ran his own company, the Yiddish Art Theatre Company. Productions in this venue over the years and under different managements ranged from the sacred to the profane, from The Ten Commandments to This Was Burlesque. Grease fit neatly into that last category.

As the wind pummeled every door and window in the place, our interlocutor confided that, in fact, Maurice Schwartz’s spirit still roamed the old building, and he and others had felt his presence or actually encountered him on several occasions. But he only appears if the show is going to be a success. With that, a huge blast of wind caught a loose flap of one of the hinged smoke vents high above the stage, slamming it open as a shaft of blindingly bright sunlight stabbed through the fly loft’s dust-filled air, pinning the three of us in a pool of light something like a celestial super trooper. Ah! The ghost of Schwartz! he mused. Looks like you fellows are going to have a big hit. And though far from obvious at the time, the rest, as they say, is history.

TOM MOORE (Director): We were exceptionally fortunate in our designers: Doug Schmidt (set), Carrie Robbins (costumes), and Karl Eigsti (lighting). Ken and Maxine brought us all together, and it was the perfect combo, leading not only to a great collaboration on Grease but also to an extraordinary number of collaborations with each of us since. They never disappoint.

Doug Schmidt (set designer) and Carrie Robbins (costume designer).

4

Burger Palace Boys and Pink Ladies

JIM JACOBS (Author/Composer): As an actor, I had been in a lot of shows in Chicago over eight years, but none of my greaser friends ever came to see me in any of them. So I decided the best way to get them to see something of my new world was to write a show about them. And I was right: they came, they saw it, and they loved it. And of course their first question was, Which one am I?

The characters in Grease are based on real people and named after guys I knew, but they are never one and the same.

The Pink Ladies were another story. The real-life Pink Ladies were a genuine girl gang at my high school for about six or seven years (roughly 1954 to 1962). All their character names are totally our creation.

Don’t Be Cruel

TOM MOORE (Director): Any good director will tell you that casting is at least seventy to ninety percent of a director’s work. No matter how exceptional the material or exciting the concept, without a brilliant group of actors to present it, the effort will be mediocre at best. Even at twenty-seven, I knew that the success of this project would very much depend on those sixteen actors.

Maxine acted as the casting director and set up the auditions. I think we had one assistant, who would bring the actors into the room and read with them. The casting would be done by myself, the choreographer, the music director, the producers, and of course, the authors. I sought consensus, as everyone in that room wanted