E-Mail This Article to a Friend Razzle-dazzle ’em The satiric magic of Chicago BY STEVE VINEBERG

Chicago has a long history. The story of Roxie Hart, the Chicago jazz baby who plugs her lover when he tries to walk out on her and then goes free, was originally dramatized in 1926 by Maurine Watkins, a journalist turned playwright. The play is largely forgotten now, but it’s one of the great hard-boiled comedies of its era, like The Front Page and Once in a Lifetime. There was a silent movie with Phyllis Haver in the role Francine Larrimore had created on stage; then William Wellman filmed it again in 1942 under the title Roxie Hart, with Ginger Rogers as Roxie and Adolphe Menjou as the foxy lawyer who gets her off. You’d think that Wellman’s terrifically funny picture would have served as a reminder of this wonderful play that had slipped out of the repertory, but there were no further productions for nearly half a century, and you couldn’t even obtain an acting edition of the script. Apparently Watkins had undergone a religious conversion and this remnant of her earthbound youth made her uncomfortable, so she wouldn’t permit it to be revived while she was alive.

The version everyone knows, of course, is the musical comedy, though it too fell largely out of the public consciousness in the years between its original production in 1975 and the phenomenally successful revival, which is currently completing the seventh year of its Broadway run. The musical was the brainchild of Bob Fosse, who not only directed and choreographed but also did the book with the lyric writer Fred Ebb. Fosse’s name was already closely linked with Ebb’s and composer John Kander’s because Fosse had filmed their Cabaret three years earlier. Fosse was the monarch of the musical in those days. In a single year he walked away with the triple crown — an Oscar for best director (a memorable upset in the year of The Godfather), a Tony for Pippin, and an Emmy for Liza with a Z, Cabaret star Liza Minnelli’s exuberant variety special. But though Chicago was enthusiastically received, its original production — featuring Gwen Verdon as Roxie, Chita Rivera in the considerably built-up role of her fellow Cook County Jail inmate Velma Kelly, and Jerry Orbach as the dapper shyster Billy Flynn — never caught fire, despite the cast, the magnificent score, and the brilliance of Fosse’s staging. Like Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, which also premiered that season, Chicago was eclipsed by A Chorus Line, an ingeniously conceived banality that became an instant classic. Chicago had a respectable run, but no one thought to revive it for many years, and intermittent attempts to film it fizzled. It wasn’t until Encores! — the City Center concert series that produces musicals long-unseen in theaters — brought it back for five triumphant performances in the mid ’90s that New York audiences had a second chance to see it. That concert version was the genesis of the buoyant, hugely entertaining Broadway revival directed by Walter Bobbie and choreographed by Ann Reinking. Reinking also played Roxie, with Bebe Neuwirth as Velma, James Naughton as Billy, and Joel Grey in the role of Roxie’s sad-sack dupe of a husband, Amos.

The program for the revival specifies that Reinking’s choreography is " in the style of Bob Fosse, " but there’s a crucial difference in tone between the two productions. And I suspect it was the tone of the Fosse Chicago that limited its appeal for audiences coming out of the Vietnam era. Fosse, who died in 1987, was famously cynical about his own gifts. " Razzle Dazzle, " Billy Flynn’s big second-act number, could have been Fosse’s anthem. " Show ’em the first-rate sorcerer you are, " Billy sings, preparing Roxie for the smoke-and-mirrors act he plans to stage in the courtroom, and " Long as you keep ’em way off balance/How can they spot/You got/No talents? " The spellbinding spectacle that just barely concealed the seediness beneath was the message of all Fosse’s movies from Cabaret on (Lenny, All That Jazz, Star 80) and almost all of his shows. (Pippin, which began with a song called " Magic To Do, " embodied it: the original Broadway production was a visually inventive whirl rigged to distract audiences from the crappy score and even crappier script.) His Chicago took Watkins’s breezy burlesque of the Chicago justice system — institutional satire being a mainstay of the hard-boiled comedy — and broadened it into a comment on the corruption of America. It was a familiar stance in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But unlike some other movies and plays from those years — Fosse’s own Cabaret, to pick a glittering example — the book Chicago, revisited now, seems a little worked up, its acrid tone somewhat forbidding. I’ve never forgotten it, though — especially the moment when Jerry Orbach (in those pre–Law and Order years the best song-and-dance man in the musical theater) turned himself into a physical replica of Clarence Darrow as he sang " Razzle Dazzle. "

Reinking and Bobbie liberated the show from all that political baggage when they restaged it, restoring Watkins’s original intentions. The revival is also about show biz, but the sleek, elegant style of the production (largely provided by the designers, John Lee Beatty, William Ivey Long, and Ken Billington) suggests an embrace of that tradition rather than a critique of it. And though Reinking pays tribute to her mentor, Fosse, her choreography is more supple and less mannerist than his. Compared to the first Broadway version, with its elaborate Tony Walton sets, the revival is gorgeous but almost minimalist, sticking to the spirit of the Encores! evenings, with their (necessarily) stripped-down approach. What’s ironic is that the style of Bobbie and Reinking owes almost as much to A Chorus Line (especially to its justly celebrated finale, " One " ) as it does to Fosse.

The success of the revival made a film version viable at last, despite the notorious lack of enthusiasm Hollywood has shown for musicals over the past three decades. The Oscar-winning movie of Chicago, directed and choreographed by newcomer Rob Marshall, is both faithful to the Bobbie-Reinking production and distinct from it, both in the tradition of Bob Fosse and decidedly its own creature. Marshall and the screenwriter, Bill Condon, retain the upbeat tone of the revival, though Condon intelligently appropriates more of Watkins’s raucous, witty dialogue. Marshall’s numbers, which display a remarkable range of styles, pay tribute to a variety of his movie-musical precursors, but the Brechtian editing by Martin Walsh, which cross-cuts between the songs and the plot they comment on, was developed for the movies by Fosse in Cabaret. Although critics were mostly as receptive to Marshall’s movie as audiences have been, the holdouts tended to find fault with his tendency to cut away from the dancing. But Fosse did the same thing in " Willkommen, " the opening number of Cabaret, when he intercut Joel Grey’s welcome to the Kit Kat Klub audience (and to us) with the British émigré Michael York’s initial glimpses of Berlin.

However, Marshall and Condon have their own take on the material. Their theme is the American mania for celebrity, and I’m not sure any movie has ever been more hilarious on the subject. (Chicago is the funniest movie musical since Singin’ in the Rain.) Watkins had celebrity among her satirical targets; in her version, the courtroom scene is a battle between Roxie and Billy for the limelight. But the movie is constructed around it. The night Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) makes her final club appearance before being shunted off to prison for murder, Roxie (Renée Zellweger) is there to see her perform, because Roxie’s date (Dominic West) vowed he’d fix her up with an audition. It’s bullshit, but that’s how he gets her in the sack; in this movie, fame — or just the promise of it — is the most powerful aphrodisiac. Roxie, who can’t afford to pay Billy (Richard Gere) his fee, offers him sex, but he isn’t interested, because he’s more of a star than she is. The cold reality that Roxie could hang for her crime (which is brought home to her when the only Cook County doll without a razzmatazz defense strategy, the probably innocent " Hunyak " played by Ekaterina Chtchelkanova, swings) takes up less space in her head than her ambitions for stardom. She gets what she wants, sharing the stage for the sensational finale with Velma. Their mutual hatred, born of rivalry, winds up being no obstacle at all, because two jazz babies who shot their men and went scot-free on the same bill are an unbeatable draw. The same could be said for the movie, which is the most deliriously enjoyable Chicago yet.

Chicago, starring Bianca Marroquin as Roxie Hart, Brenda Braxton as Velma Kelly, and Gregory Harrison as Billy Flynn, plays November 4 through 9 at the Wang Theatre, 270 Tremont Street in the Theater District; call 800-447-7400.