| Behind the dazzle, 'Chicago' has a knife (pub. date: January 20, 2000, The Tennessean) By Kevin Nance staff, The Tennessean Chicago, the Bob Fosse/John Kander/Fred Ebb musical now making its second visit to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, is always slipping a stiletto between our ribs - but with such style and finesse that it gives new meaning to the word "rib-tickling." The ironic thing is that the show, about two murderesses who parlay their notoriety into show-business careers in the 1920s, does something very close to what it accuses the courts of: disguising the truth (or at least making it so seductive that it's all but unrecognizable) by cloaking it in razzle-dazzle. You walk out of the theater so thoroughly entertained by the fabulous dancing and terrific music that you could almost be forgiven for having missed Fosse's point: that virtually every cherished ideal and institution of American public life - truth, justice, ethics, marriage, the law, the media, "America" itself - is a sham. In the world of Chicago, the only real thing is hunger: for sex and money, naturally, but mostly for celebrity. Deep down, Fosse suggests, we all know that everything is show biz, and that the only way to succeed is to be a star. The real American Dream, he says, isn't a house with a picket fence; it's standing alone in a spotlight on a darkened stage, an audience hanging on your every word. If there's anything to that, Tracy Shayne must be in heaven. As Roxie Hart, the "killer chorine" whose shyster lawyer (Alan Thicke) turns her into a celebrity by manipulating a gullible news media, Shayne is all appetite. She isn't as strong a singer or dancer as Karen Ziemba (who played the part in the tour's first Nashville visit and later on Broadway), but she's a better actress, and we hang on her every word. With her compact body, curly red hair and ravenous eyes - she suggests Little Orphan Annie having grown up to become the female half of Bonnie and Clyde - Shayne does what Ziemba did not: make us identify with her. Her Roxie is a monster, but of a sort we recognize in ourselves. When she speaks the show's most revealing home truth - that to be star is to find the love we didn't get enough of as children - it lands with surprising force. Thicke is also remarkable, bringing an interesting world-weariness to the role of Billy Flynn, Roxie's spin-doctor attorney. When he rehearses his speech to the jury ("justice, America, blah blah blah"), it's hard to imagine those lines being played better. As Velma Kelly, Roxie's rival for the limelight, Roxane Carrasco doesn't make quite as strong a dramatic impression, despite the fact that she's a dead ringer for this revival's gifted choreographer and original co-star, Ann Reinking. But her feet do fly. |