“Chicago”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - July 2010

“But I wish I could remember just what happened. We got drunk and he got killed with my gun in my car. But gin and guns – either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don’t they…of course its too bad for [his] wife, but husbands always cause women trouble.”

- Murderess Belvah Gaertner quoted by Maurine Dallas Watkins in the Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1924

“I’ve been a sucker, that’s all! Simply a meal ticket! I’ve worked, ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day and took home every cent of my money. We bought our furniture for the little apartment on time and it was all paid off but a hundred dollars. I thought she was happy. I didn’t know – ”

- Albert Annan, cuckolded husband of murderess Beaulah Annan, quoted by Maurine Dallas Watkins in the Chicago Tribune, April 5, 1924

Not surprisingly, when you go to see Chicago at the Mac-Haydn, you get a Mac-Haydn-style production of Chicago. Featuring a six-piece band this production under the direction of John Saunders is strong in the song, dance (choreography by Bryan R. Knowlton), and costume (Jimm Halliday, of course) departments, but completely misses the dark tone of this quirky show.

I was about to write that the only thing odder than a perky Chicago would be a bloodless Sweeney Todd but one of those is currently running at Barrington Stage. I understand the desire to not to offend the ticket-buyers, but the answer there is not to cutesify a tough show but to pick gentler ones. No matter how happy you make it, Chicago is still a down-and-dirty show about how, and who, crime pays. In the end of the day, Avarice and the American Cult of the Celebrity win the day.

In March of 1924 when Maurine Dallas Watkins was a fledging reporter for the Chicago Tribune, she was sent to cover the case of Mrs. Belva Gaertner, a twice-divorced cabaret singer who was accessed of murdering an automobile salesman. Less than a month later Mrs. Beulah Annan was arrested and charged with murdering her lover in the apartment she shared with her husband, a garage mechanic. Watkins came up with a smart, sassy style of writing about Belva, who she dubbed Chicago’s “most stylish murderess” and Beulah, “the prettiest murderess,” that sold newspapers like hotcakes.

What she learned about these women and the people, like herself, who made money off of their crimes, became a play that Watkins wanted to title Play Ball, but which opened on Broadway in 1926 as Chicago. It was a big hit. Central to the plot is Watkins fascination with the dichotomy between what women are – angry, strong, jealous, cruel – and what they had to pretend to be – weak, helpless, soft, nurturing – to gain sympathy and their freedom. The difference between the surface appearance, which was all the public seemed to care about, and the suppressed reality of the murderesses lives played happily as “fiction” when in truth many of the incidents and characters are taken directly from life – as is apparent from the quotations from her Tribune articles that open this review.

While Watkins allowed film versions to be made in 1928 and 1942, she refused to sell the rights to turn the play into a musical during her lifetime. She died in 1969 and by 1975 Bob Fosse, John Kander and Fred Ebb, the creative team behind the phenomenally successful Cabaret, brought their musical version to Broadway starring Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera. But it was not a big hit until twenty years later when the 1996 Broadway revival suddenly took off. It is still running in New York – the longest-running musical revival on Broadway – and touring companies have spanned the globe.

Back in 1975 the show was known as “Chicago, or Not So Good As ‘Cabaret’” Obviously the creative team thought that a show about two dirty cheap low-class dames would be twice as successful as a show about one, but without the gripping historical backdrop of 1930’s Berlin, sleazy gals in skimpy outfits are just not that interesting.

At the Mac-Haydn the skimpy outfits are there, and this year’s crop of chorus girls look just swell in them, but they are cute, pretty, clean young ladies clad in Jimm Halliday’s sparkling creations, not the sad dregs of humanity Watkins and Fosse intended. Emily Afton (who performed previously at the Mac under the name Emily Thompson) fares better as the more naïve Roxie Hart, than Kellyn Uhl does as the streetwise Velma Kelly. This is Uhl’s first starring role at the Mac, and she is not quite up to it, while Thompson has the star power, combined with top-notch song and dance skills, to sell herself as Roxie.

While the look of Chicago is very sexy, there is no sex or romance in the script. Velma has killed her husband and doesn’t seem to be looking to replace him, while Roxie has a pathetic drip of a spouse, Amos (Kevin Gardner), of whom she would gladly be rid. Their lawyer Billy Flynn (Ben Jacoby) and Prison Matron “Mama” Morton (Yvette Monique Clark) are interested in money, not love, and although one suspects that meaningless sexual encounters are par for the course for them, relationships, even friendships, are of no interest.

Jacoby gets that Billy doesn’t want anything but money from his clients, but he fails to plumb the depths of the character’s sleaziness. But Jacoby is a fine singer, who displays a handsome pair of legs while doing a pitch-perfect 1920’s crooner’s rendition of All I Care About Is Love. There are not many men who wear socks and garters with panache, but Jacoby is apparently one of them.

Clark is likewise a fabulous singer who manages to miss the low-class depths of the character she is portraying. I love the prison-striped three-piece ensemble with many “deep pockets” that Halliday has created for her.

Hannah Kiem has a nice moment as Go-to-Hell Kitty (great character name!), and Brittany Weir is heartbreaking as the Hungarian immigrant Hunyak, the first woman hanged in Cook County, Illinois.

Saunders has taken the “this court is like a three-ring circus” analogy a tad too far and dragged out every piece of circus paraphernalia the Mac owns. Ebb and Fosse, who wrote the book, subtitled Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville playing off of Velma’s past as a vaudeville performer, Roxie’s desire to get into the business, and their ultimate pairing on the circuit. Vaudeville is a very different art form than circus, but the big top theme does allow for Andy Geary to show off his impressive aerial acrobatic skills (yes, aerial stunts in the low-ceiled Mac-Haydn).

But it also hampers Kevin Gardner in his role as Amos Hart, Roxie’s pathetically naïve husband. Mister Cellophane is one of the best solo numbers in the show. Amos is traditionally made up as a clown for the number, but here there is more costume than make-up and the analogy falls flat, even as Gardner gives a sweet, if not quite sad enough, rendition of the song.

A further proof that Saunders doesn’t quite get the tone of this show is the casting and costuming of Kevin Kelly as do-good reporter Mary Sunshine. There is no doubt from the moment that he walks on stage that he is a man in drag, when the whole point is to fool the audience and prove that appearances can be completely deceiving. Kelly’s falsetto range is impressive, but the casting of a more feminine looking man or more effort to disguise Kelly are definitely what the creators had in mind.

One of the big draws of Chicago is, of course, the Bob Fosse choreography, which Knowlton recreates as well as possible within the Mac’s theatre-in-the-round constraints. Saunders and Knowlton keep everyone and everything spinning to afford the audience the best view from every angle. Ryan VanDenBoom, who showed off some very spiffy specialty dance skills earlier this season in Anything Goes is once again a dance stand out as Roxie’s victim, Fred Casely.

If Chicago were a bright and happy musical, this would be a great production of it. As it is, this is fine entertainment, but not the show Fosse, Kander, and Ebb had in mind.

Chicago runs July 8-18 at fully air conditioned Mac-Haydn Theatre on Rt. 203 in Chatham, NY. The show runs two and a half hours with one intermission and contains some adult themes. The company recommends that parents planning to bring younger children should consider what questions they might have to answer. Performance times and ticket prices vary: visit www.machaydntheatre.org or call 518-392-9292 for more information.

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