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Chicago fictionalizes the real-life 1924 murder trial of Beulah Annan, who murdered her husband and tried to pass off her lover as the killer. The 20's were a fine time for making murder big business: gangsters, murderers and attention seekers were everywhere, and the press was right behind them. Al Capone sold papers in Chicago, with stiff competition from the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb; while millionaire New Yorker Harry Thaw, the killer of the architect Stanford White, resonated not only during his lifetime but afterward, achieving posthumous celebrity when E.L. Doctorow plucked him out of the footnotes of crime to fictionalize in his 1975 novel Ragtime. Wealth, coupled with Prohibition, the Jazz Age, the rise of Bolshevism, Hollywood, and even Lindbergh's flight, electrified the era. It is only natural that we should gaze back in wonder and envy: they did it all first.

The original Fred Ebb-John Kander production with Bob Fosse's signature direction and choreography was a deconstruction of the times, when (as in their other historical collaboration Cabaret) good and bad were mostly shades of grey. The show premièred in 1975 on the cusp of several revolutions, from the medium of the musical and the acceleration of celebrity to the media in general; it was a time when fame was beginning to shape the country--People magazine started in 1974, with articles on both Mia Farrow and Alexander Solzhenitsyn--so Kander-Ebb and Fosse's musical, with its edginess and sexiness, was in line with the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Bad was good.

If it is too much to suggest that Seventies musicals such as Chicago and Michael Bennett's star-struck A Chorus Line were prescient in presenting the old / new view that there is no bad publicity, one need only turn on CNN and other cable shows where killers are courted between commercial breaks, or switch to reality TV series in which fame is just another word for desperation, to see how these shows understood that all the world's a stage. And unlike traditional musicals (The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady) in which the dancing is negligible, these Seventies musicals were more all-encompassing; just as the movies of the time undertook the risk of announcing themselves as event films (the first Star Wars was released in 1977), Fosse and Bennett's influence meant theatre was coming closer to the spectacle of film.

Starlight Theatre's production of Chicago, which opened Tuesday night for a week's run, looks all the sharper, given all we have witnessed in the rise of celebrity journalism and the cutting of corners in matters of truth and justice. Those who have seen only the movie version might be surprised: this version (itself a 1996 revival) moves to a tighter tempo. The close-ups for the Hollywood cast are cast off, with the story told along the lines of the songs and the dancing. It creates a true theatrical experience (the finalé, with Velma and Roxie, "the killer dillers," is done in relief in front of a shiny curtain; they sing together and tap dance: it is the soul of the show).

 The original cynicism has been restored; the musical is now less of a "star vehicle" and more of a writer's vehicle to analyze stardom. Roxie Hart's (Bianca Marroquín) murder of her lover, threaded into the first two numbers, immediately casts off her innocence. Later, when her busy lawyer Billy Flynn (resonantly sung by Brent Barrett) calls Roxie a dumb common criminal, the epithet sticks: she is common, which is not a vice but a virtue in Twenties Chicago, though it does not make her any more sympathetic. (Nor should it; think of the queasy quality of the film adaptation of the novel The Reader, which because of the main character played by the luminous Kate Winslett made it morally acceptable to think she might have been a good Nazi.) Roxie is part of the system, composed of the prison matron "Mama" (Carol Woods), journalists like Mary Sunshine (D. Micciche), and the legal circus led by Billy Flynn. The songs "When You're Good to Mama" and Billy's trio "All I Care About," "We Both Reached for the Gun," and "Razzle Dazzle" signal the writers-songwriters' intentions about Heavenly Hell. (Remember Fosse worked on the 1957 musical "Damn Yankees," so he was already a well-worn show biz cynic.)

This production's pleasure arrives in its streamlined poise. Many of the leads have been in various versions of the musical on Broadway and elsewhere; Brent Barrett, for example, has played Billy before and also sung both live opera and recorded albums of Broadway tunes. Terra Macleod's Velma Kelly, the other murderer vying for press attention and Billy's legal counsel, comes at the role like a tigress. She has the Fosse look down: it is immediately identifiable, in its catlike shimmy and strut. The songs, coming one after another, hammer at the audience; while the sensuous choreography soothes. Watching Fosse full-out is another way the musical here reaches out to the audience in a way that the movie with its cuts (always a sign of concern: did Fred Astaire cut away from himself?) missed the integrity of the theatricality. This is a show trial in the fullest sense of the phrase.

Restoring a few songs that the movie omitted, particularly the comic duet "Nowadays" sung by Mama and a disappointed Velma toward the end helps tip the musical toward the present. They wonder aloud whatever happened to politeness and class; it is impossible to listen to their complaints supposedly set in the nineteen-twenties without considering etiquette, morals, and mores today. Indeed, we do live in a musical, without the tap dancing talent to get away with our crimes.

REVIEW
Starlight Theatre
Chicago the Musical
Through August 16
Starlight Theatre, 4600 Starlight Road, KCMO.
For tickets call 816-363-7827 or online at  www.kcstarlight.com.

Cover photo:
A scene from CHICAGO on Broadway at the Ambassador Theatre.
Photo by Paul Kolnik

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups. 

Comments(1):

1. Chicago then and now

   I enjoyed reading this article and thought the parallels between this play and our over-sensationalized public media very interesting.

   Tuesday, August 25, 2009 Marcy