A sassy classic struts onto the Orpheum stage
The music starts its urgent, thumping beat, the horns go waa-waa, a dozen leggy gals and buff guys edge onstage as if they’ve crept out of cracks in the night, and one of the great musicals has begun. “Come on babe, why don’t we paint the town, and all that jazz?” they wail suggestively, and who can resist? The town is Chicago, and so is the musical, Kander and Ebb’s sly, brash Chicago. The show has been talking dirty to audiences all over the world ever since, fueled by Ann Reinking’s’s sizzlingly lowdown Bob Fosse-style choreography, it blew onto Broadway nearly forty years ago to become one of the longest running musicals ever.
Now it’s back under SHN auspices.
The Sound of Music it ain’t, so if you long for cheerily sanitized uplift, skip it. But if you want a frank good time, with no punches pulled, it’s made for you. Its era is the 1920s, when bootleg gin and the shimmy were all the rage. Yellow journalism was in its unashamed heyday, and the rubes and the boobs hung on every lurid headline. The headlines in this case are all about young, curvy Roxie Hart, who blew her lover away with three neatly aimed shots. Her sap of a hubby confessed to the crime, but nobody believed him. Now Roxie is awaiting trial in the slammer.
Chicago has a great antecedent: the 1942 William Wellman film, Roxie Hart, starring Ginger Rogers. Fast-talking and fun, it’s one of the great American comedies, and its satire of the legal system and of the yen for fame is wickedly funny. Chicago sets the movie’s plot to nearly nonstop music and dance, and one of its triumphs is that doing so doesn’t mute the satire. In fact the show’s syncopated razzle-dazzle somehow makes every conniving trick and cynical lie more deliciously wicked. Wiggling and warbling about sin make for great theater.
The current roadshow production is a fine recreation of the original (why mess with perfection?), helmed by Billy Hyslop, and David Bushman. The orchestra sits on a sloping grandstand facing the audience, while the slam-bang action takes place in front of it or in its midst or on tall ladders stage right and stage left.
That action is crisp and angular, marked by long strides and jutting hips and a close-to-the core, contained-energy style. Its practitioners are as limber as bacon and as edgy as a switchblade, headed by Bianca Marroquin as Roxie, Terra C. McLeod as her sister jailbird, Velma Kelly, and John O’Hurley as smarmy Billy Flynn, the slick mouthpiece who aims by any means to manipulate the guilty pair to not guilty verdicts. The trio are aided by Roz Ryan as the raw and ready prison matron, Mama Morton, and by C. Newcomer as newspaper sob sister, Mary Sunshine, who may not be what she seems. As Roxie’s dim but loyal hubby, Amos Hart, Jacob Keith Watson gets to sing one of the show’s highlights, “Mr. Cellophane.”
A jolt of fun, Chicago is now at the Orpheum Theater. Upcoming SHN shows include Kinky Boots, Newsies, Matilda and The Book of Mormon. Angela Lansbury arrives in January in Blithe Spirit, and Dame Edna shows up, with purple hair and wild eyewear, in her farewell tour in March. For tickets/information call 888-746-1799 or visit www.shnsf.com.
–ROBERT HALL