RSS Feed. Submit Search. Navigate Left. Navigate Right. The Comenian. Home Staff About. Share on Facebook. The original finale was "Loopin' the Loop", a doubles act with Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera; however, "the scene seemed too much like an amateur act so Fosse asked for something more 'glamorous in pretty gowns'".
The piece was cut and replaced with "Nowadays". Sections of "Loopin' the Loop" can still be heard in the Overture. Another principal character, a theatrical agent named Harry Glassman, was played by David Rounds, whose role was to exploit the notoriety of the prisoners for his own gain. He also served as the evening's M. This character's role and the song "Ten Percent" was cut, [12] with the character folded into that of Matron Mama Morton, and various members of the chorus shared his M.
In a reversal of roles, Fosse decided the lyrics to the number "Class" were too offensive and censored Kander and Ebb's original version of the song. Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville opened on June 3, at the 46th Street Theatre , and ran for a total of performances, closing on August 27, Velma Kelly had been a comparatively minor character in all versions of Chicago prior to the musical rendering. The musical received mixed reviews.
The Brechtian style of the show, which frequently dropped the fourth wall , made audiences uncomfortable. According to James Leve, "'Chicago' is cynical and subversive, exploiting American cultural mythologies in order to attack American celebrity culture. The show opened the same year as Michael Bennett 's highly successful A Chorus Line , which beat out Chicago in both ticket sales and at the Tony Awards.
Her run lasted a month, boosting the show's popularity, and Gwen Verdon recuperated and returned to the show. Ann Reinking , who would go on to star in the highly successful revival [19] and choreograph that production in the style of Bob Fosse, was also a cast replacement for Roxie Hart during the show's original run.
The first West End , London production opened at the Cambridge Theatre in April and ran for around performances. Template:Refimprove section City Center Encores! That's exactly what Ms. Reinking and her ensemble do. But these performers know just how to take off the chill. Barry and Fran Weissler brought the concert version of Chicago retitled Chicago: The Musical to Broadway, after some revision and expansion, but retaining the spare and minimalist style in costumes and set.
There are also chairs along the sides of this central piece, in which the actors at times sit or lounge, when not directly involved in the action. The show opened on November 14, , at the Richard Rodgers Theatre [29] with a script adapted by David Thompson , [30] eventually setting a record for recovering its initial costs faster than any other musical in history, likely due in part to the stripped down design elements.
The CurtainUp reviewer noted "The show garnered ecstatic reviews, enviable box office sales and enough awards to warrant a special Chicago trophy room. Simpson murder case , and audiences were more receptive to the criminal-as-celebrity theme of the show. During its run, the show has played in three Broadway theatres — the Richard Rodgers Theatre the same theatre where the original production played, at the time called the 46th Street Theatre , the Shubert Theatre and the Ambassador Theatre.
Among the many other performers and celebrities who have appeared in the show during its long run are Usher , Christopher Sieber , Charlotte d'Amboise , Michael C. Both Lemper and Henshall have played the role of Velma on Broadway.
The London revival, like its Broadway counterpart, featured many celebrities in the starring roles. James Doherty was a replacement as Amos.
The production moved out of the Cambridge Theatre on August 27, [47] and transferred to the Garrick Theatre on November 7, , starring America Ferrera as Roxie. The show closed on September 1, after a total run of nearly 15 years in London. There have been ten North American national tours of Chicago.
A second company started in December in Tampa , Florida. Chita Rivera joined the tour for several weeks. There has been an official production in Brazil. The promotional photos show a blonde Velma Kelly and a brunette Roxie Hart. This puzzled movie fans when they went to see the show. But it was praised by audience. Template:Citation needed. Although the touring production of Chicago was first presented in Japan in — it has since toured the country three times — this will mark the first production of the hit musical to be heard in Japanese.
There have been several cast recordings of Chicago :. The others either have one track or the other. Template:Authority control.
Pop Culture Wiki Explore. Wiki Content. Recent blog posts Forum. Search all monologues from plays. Search all monologues. Scenes from Plays. Search all scenes from plays. By Of Characters. Two Person Three Person. Two Women Three Women. Two Men Three Men. Theatre Characters. Search all theatre characters. Audition Songs. Search all audition songs. Musical Theatre. Here are some of our favorite resources to help maximize theatre e-learning and enjoyment. At the end of Chicago, the two murderesses thank the American people — the audience — for our belief in their innocence as they throw flowers to us.
We know they're not innocent, but by enjoying their performances, we acquit them. Fosse goes for the jugular. But we are living examples of what a wonderful country this is. Beulah was a jazz singer, whose husband Albert worked in a garage. She was having an affair and when her lover threatened to leave her, she shot him dead. She then played some jazz on her victrola before phoning her husband to tell him.
As in the show, her story of the shooting kept changing. She had three stories at various times: that her lover was dumping her and she killed him out of anger; that she dumped him, he tried to rape her and she had to defend herself; and that they quarreled, things got out of control, and they both reached for the gun laying inexplicably on the bed. At one point early on, Albert claimed to have killed him upon discovering him attacking Beulah, but that story was soon forgotten.
After she was set free, she left her husband, married a garage owner, and moved to Indiana. There she found her new husband was already married, so she divorced him, had a nervous breakdown, and died a year later. Belva killed her lover while he sat in her car, down the street from her apartment.
Belva was a cabaret singer rather than a vaudeville performer like Velma, though her fellow inmates said she was a great dancer. There is a foreigner, Sabella Nitti who Belva paid to make her bed and do her laundry , who is hanged for chopping up her husband, and a woman who had poisoned her husband.
Both of them loved the play and were delighted to see themselves onstage. Sometime in the s, actress and dancer Gwen Verdon saw the movie on television and thought it would make a great musical. But Watkins would not release the rights to the play. It wasn't until Watkins died in , that Verdon finally got the rights from the playwright's estate. Verdon convinced Fosse to do the show, and they brought it to the song writing team of Fred Ebb and John Kander, who Fosse had worked with on the film version of Cabaret.
It was Ebb's idea to tell the story in the language of vaudeville, not only to establish period but also create the metaphor of show business as life, a metaphor Fosse had become obsessed with. In fact the show's title has a double meaning because there was an actual vaudeville theatre called The Chicago.
Though Fosse had always had a very dark side that expressed itself in his work see the movie of Cabaret or a good production of Pippin , that dark side was now getting significantly darker because of his operation. Eventually, Fosse was convinced by Kander and Ebb that that was too dark and he re-staged the song.
Despite some minor out-of-town troubles the show came to New York in good shape, and it opened in The show garnered eleven Tony nominations but lost all of them to A Chorus Line.
Fosse's dancer girlfriend and sometime muse, Ann Reinking, stepped into Chicago late in its Broadway run, before going on in to wow Broadway in Fosse's anti-musical Dancin'. She also appeared, pretty much playing herself in Fosse's All That Jazz in which you can see a fictionalized account of all the events surrounding Chicago and the bypass operation.
A few years later, the Encores! It was so well received that it was transferred in , with virtually no changes, into a Broadway house for a regular run. Reinking used Fosse's dance vocabulary for the choreography but took a different, much lighter approach to the material. But in this newer version, the show was taken out of its period context and much of Fosse's nastiness and brutal but legitimate cynicism was rejected in favor of a more light-hearted feel. The show suffered for it.
It has as many definitions as there are people using it. Shows as diverse as Company, Hair, and Pacific Overtures have all been called concept musicals. Most shows people call concept musicals are either musicals built on a central concept or issue instead of a linear story, musicals that have a story but whose central concept is more important than the story, musical character studies with no linear plot like A Chorus Line , or musicals that just don't fit into any other category.
The concept musical's development, from Love Life in to Wise Guys in , has been a complicated one, and its evolution has taken a very meandering route. Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner on the shoulders of Bertolt Brecht took a giant step in by discarding every device of linear storytelling with Love Life, and provided the model for the commentary songs to come in Cabaret, Company, Pippin, and Assassins.
Two years later, Hair set the precedent for the mostly plotless musicals like A Chorus Line and Working. Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince's Company did not follow Hair but instead followed closely the model created by Love Life and greatly refined it, solving many of its problems, and becoming a commercial and critical success. The next year, Follies , with Michael Bennett joining the Sondheim-Prince team, followed Company's lead but focused on deeper character development and provided a genuine resolution at the end of the show.
In , A Chorus Line added a unifying dramatic situation an audition , while Chicago continued Fosse's experiments with plot-driven concept musicals. As he had done with Pippin and the film of Cabaret, Fosse escaped the problem of balancing form and content; with Pippin, Cabaret, and Chicago, form became content. Show business was a metaphor for life, and so the show as a whole, the very fact that an audience was in a theatre watching a performance, became a self-referential metaphor in and of itself.
After Chicago, Sondheim and Prince continued the form's evolution with the Kabuki-inspired Pacific Overtures in , this time with book writer John Weidman.
In , Sondheim and Weidman without Prince created the ultimate concept musical Assassins. Prohibition Chicago is set in the middle s, a time of public rebellion mostly against prohibition, but against other legislated morality as well and tremendous lawlessness. The Broadway revival of Chicago jettisoned the period setting, but when it did, it lost the irony of how much America today is like America in the 20s, and it lost the show's central metaphor of the story being told through the language of vaudeville, which was at its peak at that time.
In , the U. Constitution was amended to make alcohol illegal. Throughout the s a significant portion of the public defied the law at every opportunity.
In , it was estimated that there were between 35, and , speakeasies in New York City alone.
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