Poor Bob Fosse. His ultimate masterpiece, "Chicago," ran only a respectable two years and never got its due, for a reason I can sum up in three words: "A Chorus Line," which opened just ahead of "Chicago" and suddenly made everyone feel ooey-gooey about themselves and humanity, just as "Chicago" was about to celebrate a decade of cynicism and venal hypocrisy.

Poor Bob Fosse -- he didn't live to see "Chicago" finally get the spectacular success it deserved, in the form of the Encores "staged reading" that transferred to Broadway and theatres around the world. I can sum up the first reason for its success in three words: "O. J. Simpson." What seemed like savage sociopathology in the original show had just played out on live TV; many "Chicago" audience members felt the script had been doctored to capitalize on the mess of murder and celebrity they had just witnessed in real life (actually, the script had been doctored, but not to capitalize on its timeliness -- more on that below). The "Chicago" revival also marked the first sign of the greatest unloading of British goods since the Boston Tea Party, as the pendulum finally swung away from the Leaden London approach to musical theatre, back to good old American Fast, Loud, and Funny, a trend that has reached its zenith in "The Producers."

But Bob Fosse, wherever he is, has one priceless advantage just now over the rest of us Broadway mavens. He can't see how far his masterpiece has fallen.

I was as electrified as everyone else when I saw the reading at the City Center, but for a slightly different reason: it was as if I walked down Broadway and bumped into my dearest friend who had been dead for over twenty years. You see, much as I loved and admired "A Chorus Line," "Chicago" was the real deal for me, and I saw the original twelve times (no easy feat for a sixteen-year-old who didn't live in New York). And there it was, my oldest and best Broadway friend, alive again and setting the audience on fire as it had always done me. OK, so it was a blurry approximation of the original -- squint a little and I could almost imagine the real thing come back to life. It was, after all, only a reading. And when it transferred to Broadway -- well, needless to say I was first in line to see it brought back in all its full glory.


The Forty-Sixth Street Theatre (now the Richard Rodgers Theatre) on July 26th, 1975; the Helen Hayes Theatre in the foreground was destroyed to make way for the Marriott Marquis Hotel.

You get the picture. Let's cut to the chase. For the Broadway revival, as everyone now knows, they decided to mount the bare-bones staged reading almost intact. As electrified as I was to see the shadow of the original in the revival, I am constantly reminded what today's audience is missing -- starting with one of the most ravishingly beautiful physical productions in Broadway history. The smugness of the revival's custodians concerning their version's lack of eye-appeal (merely an accident of its genesis as a reading) overlooks the fact that not one sequin or neon in the original was unrelated to the show's theme and concept. This was no gratuitous overlay of Broadway glitz -- here was a show about audience manipulation, about seducing the public with shazzam, seducing them into applauding the cold-blooded killers at its core, then accusing them of that very complicity in the last line of the play (ROXIE: "It was your support that saw us through our terrible ordeal; we couldn't have done it without you!") From the uncomfortable, shuffling laughter that rippled through the house, I sensed that even those matinée ladies of 1975 knew something wasn't right, that they'd been had (and what a way to go)!

I have always felt that if the 1975 original were magically substituted for the revival at a given performance, I doubt the audience would run screaming into the night at the intrusion of the brilliant original set, costumes, and choreography. 1975 was a beaut -- with Tony Walton's and Jules Fisher's endlessly brilliant neon fantasy seeping through every nook and cranny. It was a simple but spectacular unit set, suggesting a neon-and-sequinned Cotton Club, glowing red and green from underneath and behind the black plexiglass deco bandstand; the costumes were likewise fragmented pieces of the period, a glove here, a half-tux there, much as Fosse's choreography contained isolated fragments of the Charleston and the period styles, fleetingly thrown in the middle of a slow-motion rag ("All That Jazz").

In the revival, aside from the downright talentlessness of the black schmatte-wear (astoundingly credited to William Ivey Long, one of my favorite designers), the clumsiness of the set and its disastrous effect on the onstage band, and the remarkably ho-hum lighting, there's an even more crucial baby that's been thrown out with what these people erroneously thought was bathwater. It's called the concept of the show.

When the revival opened, some young people plastered the Internet bulletin boards with questions about the original versus the revival, and as a "Chicago"-meister from way back, I tried to answer as many as I could. I have culled that correspondence for some examples to cite here, to illustrate the dangers of mounting a concept show while dispensing with its concept.

Was there a fan dance originally, they asked? What did the writers have in mind with the song styles? What did the show look like and why? Why are the numbers announced -- is it a show-within-a-show, or what? What glued it all together? All right -- very quickly, here's a "Chicago" Primer for understandably mystified audience members (as well as either mystified or unconcerned directors).

The full title of the original show was "Chicago -- A Musical Vaudeville." The original was an encyclopedia of 1920's entertainment traditions and turns, all reinterpreted and put through the Fosse blender. He had explored the metaphor of show business commenting on a real life story, in the film "Cabaret" (an idea only sporadically exploited in the stage version). But in "Chicago," he went the extra mile: since the play was a sociological satire depicting crazed, monomaniacal performers, the characters themselves told their own story in their own vaudeville routines. "It's all show business, kid -- the whole world" states Billy Flynn at the show's climax.

Do we need this conceit to mount "Chicago," you might ask? To answer that, look at the writing, even before the staging. Kander & Ebb wrote a song called "Funny Honey" for Roxie, in which she claims to love her man despite the fact that "he's no great physique" and "Lord knows he ain't got the smarts;" Helen Morgan sitting on a piano singing "Bill," anyone? -- only one of the most famous song performances of the Twenties ("you'd see him on the street and never notice him"). And whaddayaknow, there was Gwen Verdon singing "Funny Honey," sitting on a piano, singing a paean to her man -- the Fosse twist being that she swigged from a flask throughout, carelessly dousing the pianist with the dregs (to great audience amusement), thus explaining her drunken confession to the cop in the following scene. A great deal was accomplished in this first number -- the establishment of Roxie Hart as a Brechtian performer "in her first number," the unmistakable style reference in the song's writing, and the specific ironic reference to the (alcoholic) Helen Morgan in the staging analogy. They were all on the same page -- writers, director, performer.

Now let's go to the videotape -- in the revival, it's no longer "A Musical Vaudeville," so Roxie is announced without context, then sings the song hanging from a ladder swung out from the proscenium -- for no apparent reason other than that Fosse used ladders in "Pippin," in another context entirely. No piano, no flask, no Helen Morgan, no Twenties, no drunken confession; just a confession -- after a random song on a ladder. That's a lot of conceptual loss for no apparent gain. (I should further add that Roxie hoisting herself up and down on the ladder on the lyric "Sometimes I'm down, sometimes I'm up" has been met with not a titter for the entire run of the revival, and in my book, gags that don't get titters should get the axe).

And so it goes. Without the image of the Last of the Red Hot Mamas (Sophie Tucker), what are you to make of the portly, middle-aged, tough chick singing a song called "When You're Good To Mama?" Without Sally Rand and her fan, what are we to make of Billy Flynn's fan-dance strip tease in "All I Care About Is Love?" Simple -- they've cut the strip tease reference (in the original, Jerry Orbach disrobed during the number, finishing in his underwear -- in order to play the next scene while being fitted for a new suit). How do we now account for the Jerome Kern (or Kalmar/Ruby) parody "A Little Bit Of Good In Everyone," trilled by an ingenuous soprano in the style of Marilyn Miller (the biggest Broadway star of the 1920's)? Every Twenties vaudeville show had a ventriloquist act -- but why does this Broadway revival have one, in the "Press Conference Rag?" Every Twenties vaudeville show had a sister-act -- in this production, now "I Can't Do It Alone" is merely an amusing plot number without the conceptual double-entendre. In the original "Mister Cellophane," cuckolded, deserted Amos assumed the costume of cuckolded, deserted Emil Jannings in the final scene of "The Blue Angel" -- now he wears white gloves like Bert Wheeler singing "Nobody," which is at least some kind of reference, albeit the wrong period and situation. And gone are the collegiate chorus boys with Rudy Vallee's megaphones, cheering "When Velma Takes The Stand." Rope tricks? Female impersonators? All the stuff of vaudeville; the list goes on and on. They've traded a brilliantly integrated concept show for a bunch of random people singing random song styles in random stagings (in very random black schmattes).

The book scenes have taken a hit, too, although only the purists like me might miss the excisions. One of my favorite lines was Roxie's, fawning at her first meeting with the legendary killer Velma Kelly: "I read about you in the papers all the time! I love to follow the murders...." It didn't bring down the house in 1975 -- it was just a mild, character-establishing witticism in the hands of the masterful Verdon, and directly inspired Mama Morton's following line, crucial to the play's theme: "In Chicago, murder is a form of entertainment!" Velma has also lost a quip or two:

ROXIE (terrified): Life? In jail?
VELMA (breezily): Where else, Marshall Field's?

OK, not the end of the world, but why cut laughs in a comedy? Shortly after came this exchange, demonstrating the attention Fosse and Ebb gave to character detail, even while maintaining their arch tone, as well as giving the two stars something to work with:

ROXIE: Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
VELMA: Boy, you know everybody!... (to MAMA) Enough of these trashy religious fanatics; I think I shall retire to my cell and take a wee nap and answer some fan mail.

Gone from Act Two, Velma's period witticism:

BILLY: Where is Roxie, anyway?
VELMA (seething): Looking at her presents. Layettes pouring in from all over. Can you imagine Roxie Hart a mother? That's like making Leopold and Loeb scoutmasters.

Gone are the passing bits of humor that gave the jail setting its sordidly funny atmosphere:

JUNE (to MAMA): Mrs. Morton, if my husband Wilbur comes to visit me, you tell him I do NOT want to see him!
MAMA: June, your husband is dead -- you killed him.
JUNE: Oh -- well forget it then (exit).

That was a major laugh. Gone are Mama's surreptitious sales of liquor to the girls, and I even miss the minor poker game scene; and most of all I miss the bandleader merrily announcing a lurid Ellington pastiche called "Chicago After Midnight," which accompanies the Go-To-Hell-Kitty shooting -- with the abrupt "Good night folks!" as the bodies writhe and die. Fosse, Kander and Ebb weren't kidding around.

The climax of the original script, both in 1928 and in 1975, was the trial scene. Here, the cutting of costumes and dialogue has eviscerated the very "razzle-dazzle" circus the writers had prepared with a formerly exquisite production number. In the new production, Billy Flynn occupies himself during "Razzle Dazzle" by juggling a few balls in the air. I see. But in 1975, Jerry Orbach transformed himself from a slick lawyer into a down-home, countrified Clarence Darrow, complete with suspenders and ruffled hair and granny-glasses -- and it was as Clarence Darrow that he won Roxie's case. Clarence Darrow was another famous Twenties legendary performer -- but of course we're not doing Twenties or legends or analogies anymore, so what do we have left? Billy Flynn, rattling along through the script exactly as he has all through the previous hour and a half. He spends quite some time in Act One establishing that Roxie will appear at her trial in a homey, blue-fringe dress -- knitting garments for her "baby." But these folks have decided that their black rehearsal-wear is more important than, say, the script. Gone too is the formerly riotous moment in the trial when Flynn abruptly stops Roxie's retelling of the murder by calling for a "DIAGRAM!" -- followed by the unrolling of a police sketch of the murder scene, as Verdon seduces various jury members with her description of where she and the victim stood in relation to "the Victrola" -- pronounced in eight syllables as only Verdon could do.

The trial scene brings me indirectly to the current state of this production, presumably near the end of its astounding Broadway run. Despite its disappointing conceptual and budgetary stinginess, I have loved seeing it occasionally, for the reasons stated at the top of this article. But nothing could have prepared me for misshapen, haphazard mess that is currently representing Bob Fosse on Broadway in January, 2002.

First and foremost, there's the band. Even when the revival opened, it was instantly obvious that the new band, led at low-voltage, couldn't hold a candle to the original fleet of brilliant players under Bob Fosse's own Stanley Lebowsky (the new recording, Grammy notwithstanding, was a muffled, poorly-mixed shadow of the red-hot Phil Ramone album of 1975). Part of the problem is the new set, which disperses the band around the stage, replacing the tight nucleus of the original bandstand, high above the dance floor; what the set doesn't diffuse in the band, the under-qualified drummer does. Bob Fosse was fanatical about his music departments, and I wonder what he'd have done with this situation.

The main problem now is that over the run, the tempos have literally doubled, either by misguided design or carelessness. Some think tempo equals excitement in direct proportion; I have always felt that speed is the enemy of theatrical excitement, especially where dancers are involved. I don't know what the cast is making of these tempos, but the numbers are now half as exciting and almost incomprehensible in movement and lyrics, aside from making literally no sense musically, either in period style or even in the playability of the late Ralph Burns' brilliant orchestration. The reeds are flying so fast, you can hear the keys clicking all over the sound system -- and they can't be blamed for not playing together; no three reed players could play together that fast; nor could any wind player triple-tongue at these tempos, which could explain the hysterical sputtering all over the score. Less explainable are the number of missed or wrong notes in the two trumpets, or their tasteless excesses in Ralph Burns' exquisitely crafted mute solos. The trial scene is further mucked up by the witty incidentals being played four times faster than the original, causing the audience to miss both dialogue and the superimposition of lyrics. 1975 conductor Stanley Lebowsky's sardonic announcements at the microphone are greatly missed, replaced by a rather toneless void of style.

This bad news brings me to the good news. The performer principally affected by the insane tempos is the lead dance role in the show, Velma Kelly, who has always had the two show-stoppers, "I Can't Do It Alone" and "When Velma Takes The Stand." The bad news is that the poor girl can barely get a lyric in edgewise, much less knock us out with the moves as she would probably like to, and as the expert Velmas (Bebe Neuwirth and Chita Rivera) have done before. The good news is that the role is currently in the hands of one Roxanne Carrasco, and she is one stick of dynamite. She has exactly perfect pitch in attitude, delivery, irony, humor, timing, spontaneity, humanity, singing, red-hot dancing, and in short she is magnificent. I wouldn't have missed her for the world (and she deserves to have her tempos restored to the correct originals).


Chita Rivera, July 26, 1975
46th Street Theatre Stage Door


Seeing Ms. Carrasco, currently paired with long-run queen Belle Calaway as Roxie, only throws into relief the multiple casting catastrophes abounding as the production winds down. When you think Sophie Tucker, or Mary McCarty, or even mild-mannered Marcia Lewis, the first replacement to come to mind wouldn't be poor Michelle Pawk, a capable performer who's had her ups and downs (downs in her humorless portrayal of the devious prostitute in "Cabaret," ups in her witty Bird of Paradise in "The Seussical"). Now what a nice-looking young housewife-type would be doing as the lesbian Matron of a Murderesses' Cellblock is beyond me. Ms. Pawk is only guilty of giving it a whirl, but miscasting is the staff's fault (a performer can only be charged with poor judgment in taking an inappropriate role).

I understand George Hamilton is ailing and on leave, and understudies happen to even the most discriminating audiences -- but plucking a boy from the dancing chorus and throwing a tux on him does not a Billy Flynn make, and the audience was painfully aware of it from the minute he appeared until the minute he made his last exit to almost no applause. In 1975 I paid top dollar and got Jerry Orbach (who almost never missed a performance in two years). In 2002, if the audience doesn't get a star for $90, they should at least get the next best available performer, out of all the many thousands of dynamic musical theatre actors of a certain age with wit, flair, and style (the guy doesn't need to dance).

Once again, I'll brush on the racial-casting topic, if only to point out the old double-standard in effect. Consider the following exchange between Verdon and Orbach in 1975:

ROXIE: You treat me like some dumb, common criminal.
BILLY: (Pause) You are some dumb, common criminal!
ROXIE: Yeah? Well that's better than being a greasy Mick lawyer!

She's about to fire him and he's about to quit, at the moment of her trial, so they're going for the jugular, ethnic slur and all -- this is a no-holds-barred exchange. Now here are the lines as performed several nights ago with a black Billy Flynn.

ROXIE: You treat me like some dumb, common criminal.
BILLY: You are some dumb, common criminal.
ROXIE: Yeah? Well that's better than being a greasy lawyer!

Hmm. Do you really think she would have held back the obvious slur? The Hungarian is referred to as a "Hunkie nut;" Mama Morton is referred to as "Butch" and "Diesel;" and at least in the 1975 version, after the Sally Rand striptease, Orbach referred to his tailor as "you dumb fruit!" This is Fosse, folks, not network TV. And yes, I know, a black sleazebag lawyer can sandbag a jury of half-wits in 1998 Los Angeles, but I doubt if a black sleazebag lawyer would have mustered much sympathy from a 1928 Chicago jury (especially if he eschewed a Clarence Darrow impression). And if he did -- he'd have to have star quality for the ages. (Again, it's not the actor's fault -- miscasting is producers' abuse of the performer and the trusting audience).

Mary Sunshine is currently being vivisected nightly by a performer who is convinced that he alone is finally making that song work. Who needs that charming and carefully crafted parody tune, anyway, when wild, campy, random giggles and improvisations all over two octaves throughout make it so much more fun -- to sing, anyway? If it were my score, I'd have the actor fined in full for every deviation from the written melody -- not out of ego, but to make the song work as it should and always did, as an accurate period pastiche. I thought I detected a distinct Australian accent in this Sunshine's final speech -- my, what a confusing production this is. To his credit, the current performer has a far better voice than the revival's original performer -- but neither could match the matchless 1975 skills of M. O'Haughey.

The all-important singing-dancing-acting ensemble has its ups and downs, with a very strange current mix of cute young whippersnappers side by side with two of the most senior, experienced Broadway dancers still on the boards. And speaking of star quality, where is Go-To-Hell-Kitty? Her arrival should effectively be the entrance of a Third Leading Lady, who, although she immediately disappears, shakes up the other two for their final duel at the Act One Finale. Sorely missed is the magnificent Leigh Zimmerman, whose entrance a few years ago made traffic stop for ten blocks around, and provoked the necessary terror in the two leading ladies for an effective act curtain.

Line-reading fix for the following exchange:

GO-TO-HELL-KITTY (aiming machine-gun): Oh Harry...
HARRY (extricating himself from orgy): OK. OK. Are you going to believe what you see -- or what I tell you?

The line is "Are you going to believe what you see -- or what I tell you?" Not: "Are you going to believe what you see -- or what I tell you?"

Line-reading fix for the following:

BILLY FLYNN (rehearsing jury summation): "Oh, yes, you may take her life... BUT IT WON'T BRING CASELY BACK!! " (long pause) That's always news to them.

The line is "That's always news to them." Not: "That's always news to them."

In the summer of 1977, I bid my favorite Broadway show farewell for the last time -- until I got to conduct it at Theatre-by-the-Sea, R.I. in 1979 with full costumes, scenery, and the original orchestration, script, tempos, and choreography. Well, it's 2002, and time to bid my dearest old Broadway friend "Chicago" adieu for the last time again -- at least until we do it someday at Austin Musical Theatre, with the full costumes, scenery, script, tempos, and original choreography (which can still be had, if you know the right people).


"I'm older than I ever intended to be," when I think back to July 26, 1975, sitting in balcony seat A-110 for $10.00 of the Forty-Sixth-Street Theatre, looking at a huge Tony Walton scrim of his painted show logo (remember painted artwork logos?), just making out the reflections of a brass band waiting in the dark. The shimmering overture started, and in exact synchronization to "Loopin' The Loop" (a song cut on the road) came the electrifying neon letters spelling "Chicago -- Late 1920's." Late 1920's. Two and a half hours later, Verdon and Rivera, dressed in white sequins reflecting every color of the rainbow, looked at each other, winking, and sang "In fifty years or so it's gonna change, you know." Fifty years from the late Twenties? I get it, late Seventies -- Fred Ebb's sly joke on all of us out there in 1975, thinking this story could never happen outside of Maurine Dallas Watkins' 1920's newspaper column. See above: O. J. Simpson. Fosse and Ebb were way ahead.

When "Chicago" lost every one of its twelve Tony nominations to "A Chorus Line," I wrote Bob Fosse a letter assuring him that some of us out there (even us precocious Broadway-crazed sixteen-year-olds) knew what a fluke of bad luck and timing it was. His warm reply hangs framed on my wall to this day. Once, Alyson Reed and I were driving back to D.C. for our pre-Broadway revival of "Cabaret" in 1987, and I told her that I could die happy if I got to work for Bob Fosse someday. "He'll love you," she replied, "because you've got great rhythm." He died that night.