It’s easy to start taking Riverside Theatre for granted after a steady diet, season after season, of perfectly prepared musical theater. So when I took my seat for opening night of “Chicago” last week, I expected it to be good. I didn’t expect to be in thrall, start to spectacular finish.
Turns out, with all the times I’d seen the show (and film) I hadn’t seen it enough. Riverside’s was “Chicago” defined: a glittering, explosively energetic satire of how show business creates an appetite for crime.
With direction and choreography by director Richard Stafford, the cast is as good as it gets.
Stiletto sharp, drenched with bitterness and dripping with irony, “Chicago” exposes both the charade of show business and the gullibility of its audience – and ultimately that includes us. “Chicago” tells the story of a couple of dancing, singing, outrageously sexy man-slayers charming their way out of the noose. With enough heat to make those Viagra warnings feel like a foot massage, the Bertolt Brechtian recklessness of the theme follows one skinny elastic of a plot line, snapping its way through scene after seductive scene of vaudevillian tableaux.
Girls! Girls! Girls! And all of them gone bad. Just what the crowds go wild for – with a little push from above-the-fold headlines and the photos of omnipresent paparazzi. Exoneration by popular demand was an actual jazz-era phenomenon that had its roots in the anything-goes ethos of the day: real-world, break-the-mold women criminals (imagine!) perversely turned celebrities by their sensational trials.
The conceit still works. Today, TV binge-watchers find themselves suckered by other criminals: the amoral CIA agents protecting the world in “Homeland”; the meth lab entrepreneur in “Breaking Bad”; the endearing, good guy-slaughtering Soviet agents embedded in the D.C. suburbs in “The Americans” (my current addiction).
The violence in those shows makes offing a two-timing boyfriend pale by comparison, just as today’s music videos make the numbers in “Chicago” look like pajama parties – well, OK, pajama parties at the Mustang Ranch.
In its day, though, the show was shocking, its dismissiveness of the criminal code disturbing to say the least. Even a quarter-century later, in the 2002 film, the characters Roxie and Velma as played by Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones retain a dark core that borders on macabre. It’s hard to say much of that remains in Riverside’s production, but that’s more a statement of inured society than a shortfall of the show. When Velma appears at the start of the second act with a hearty “Hello, suckers!” it takes a moment to realize she means us.
The genius of 1975’s “Chicago” was in setting such horror to such irrepressibly snazzy song and dance. Bob Fosse co-wrote the book with Fred Ebb; Ebb wrote the lyrics to John Kader’s music. Throughout, the trashiness of the jailhouse, courthouse and media circus is pinned to a theatrical style Fosse thought a perfect pairing: vaudeville, which Fosse long disdained for its exploitative ways.
Kaitlyn Davidson’s Roxie Hart and Heather Parcells’ Velma Kelley are both distinctive and finely polished, the actresses veterans of Broadway and multiple national tours. The impeccable dancing skills of each led to roles in “A Chorus Line”; Davidson as Val on the national tour and Parcells as Judy Turner in the original revival. Parcells also played Velma in the national tour of “Chicago,” a proud testament to the Florida State University musical theater department from which she earned a degree.
Dane Agostinis, who plays Roxie’s sad-sack husband Amos, is a graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and is originally from Tampa. Meghan Colleen Moroney, an Orlando actress who got her start in Vero at Jon Putzke’s Encore Alley dinner theater, makes her Riverside debut as Matron Mama Morton. Both have stand-out solos: Agostinis’ “Mister Cellophane” and Moroney’s “When You’re Good to Mama.”
Stafford, who directed Riverside’s “Sister Act” last year and “Memphis” the year before that, nails it this time, leaving his audience with pangs of guilt for being so entertained.
The feathers, the flesh, the fringe skittering over legs to Pluto – all are mitigated by enough sarcasm to stir a feminist’s soul. “He tried to walk out on me,” whines Roxie the showgirl as the cops cuff her for the capital crime of murder, after her attempt fails to pin the murder on Amos, the only moral person in the show.
Roxie, with her Shirley Temple curls, is the softie, as least as compared with Velma. Strong as the steel bars she’d held behind, Velma has hatched a plan with lawyer Billy Flynn (the charismatic Kevin Pariseau, who in his solo “Razzle Dazzle” gives one note a life sentence). They plan to sway the public with her cockamamie story. When Roxie shows up on the cellblock and starts stealing Velma’s gory-story glory, Velma hatches her own plan: a sister act with Roxie, which she lays out in head-spinning triple-time in “I Can’t Do It Alone.”
That vaudeville trope, delivered in soon-removed matching white robes, is the glamorous finale, “Nowadays.” Of all the tropes – each number is its own – my favorite is the dummy act, where Roxie is manipulated on the lap of Flynn, as they sing her alibi, “We Both Reached for the Gun.” The courthouse crowd including the nobly operatic reporter-in-drag Mary Sunshine (played by G. Kidwell) buy it hook, line and sinker. Davidson’s and Pariseau’s synchronization is masterful, to hilarious effect.
“Chicago” was originally a play based loosely on truth. In the 1920s, Chicago was a hotbed of killer dames and much was made of two suspects in particular: Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner. The Chicago Tribune assigned a woman crime reporter when both Gaertner and Annan had their day in court. Both were acquitted by all-male juries, and Maureen Dallas Watkins’ coverage turned the women into national celebrities. Watkins later turned her trial notes into a play, which ended up on Broadway before being turned into a silent movie, directed by Cecile B. DeMille, then the comedy “Roxie Hart” starring Ginger Rogers, Phil Silvers and George Montgomery in 1942. That version, though, was tampered with by the Hollywood morality police. Roxie was not only innocent but took the rap for her husband. Now there’s a lady for you.
Enter actress Gwen Verdon, who in the 1960s read the play and urged her husband Bob Fosse to turn it into a musical. Only one problem: Watkins the reporter/playwright had had a change of heart; now a born-again Christian, she thought the show was too pro-sin. When the Lord took her to heaven in 1969, the estate sold Verdon and Fosse the rights anyway.
Scott Miller, artistic director of New Line Theatre of St. Louis, Mo., which prides itself in staging thought-provoking, socially relevant works of musical theater, wrote an extensive analysis of “Chicago” on the theater’s website which I highly recommend to anyone seeing the Riverside production.
The theater staged “Chicago” the same year the movie came out – 2002. Miller wraps up his essay musing over the changes that came over America post-Sept. 11. He asks whether the collective bloodlust of the American audience is part of our nature, or whether viewing violence – be it as news coverage or entertainment – propels us to rise above it?
“You know, a lot of people have lost faith in America,” says Velma at the show’s close, after she and Roxie have been found innocent. “But we are living examples of what a wonderful country this is.” Miller, citing this line, adds, “Ouch.”
“Chicago” runs at Riverside Theatre through Jan. 22.
