Story by Robert Viagas

Logan Floyd as Velma Kelly and the Company of Chicago. Photo Credit: Jeremy Daniel, 2022

BEHIND CHICAGO’S LANDMARK RUN

STORY BY

Robert Viagas

When the new national touring company of the musical Chicago brings Roxie Hart and the Merry Murderesses to the Fabulous Fox Theatre this month, Atlanta audiences will become part of a fascinating story—both onstage and backstage.

Chicago isn’t Cats, but it has had almost as many lives as a cat, and its current life is the most successful by far. Not only is it now the longestrunning revival in Broadway history it is also the longest running musical (or play) written by an American in Broadway history.

HERE’S HOW IT GOT THERE.

Back in 1924 Maurine Dallas Watkins was a newspaper reporter assigned by the Chicago Tribune to cover a spectacular murder trial. A local woman was accused of murdering her boyfriend and then trying to pin the killing on her hapless husband. Watkins saw both the crime and the trial as a

reflection of Roaring Twenties Chicago society: a place where the legal system, the police, the media, the government, the entertainment world and even the people themselves were all, to varying degrees, corrupt and complicit.

Watkins adapted the story into a hit 1926 Broadway play, which was then made into a silent 1927 movie, and filmed again in 1942 with sound (under the title Roxie Hart, the name she gave the central character).

REDISCOVERY

The 1926 play version of Chicago was rediscovered in the late 1960s by Broadway darling and multiple Tony Award winning actress/dancer Gwen Verdon. She saw in it a great starring part for herself, if the story were adapted as a musical. She brought it to her husband, iconic director-choreographer Bob Fosse who had collaborated with her on

Christina Wells as Matron “Mama” Morton Sweet Charity, Damn Yankees, Redhead and Photo Credit: Jeremy Daniel, 2022 other musicals. Fosse had a full plate at the time. He won a Tony for his work on Pippin, an Emmy for his work on Liza With a Z and an Oscar for his work on the film version of Cabaret—and all in the same year, 1973. Teaming with the Cabaret songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb, he then went right into working on Chicago. They decided to tell Roxie’s story using the traditions of vaudeville, America’s dominant entertainment form in the 1920s. Each song would be in a different vaudeville style. The show would have vaudeville style dance numbers (“I Can’t Do It Alone”), baggy-pants comedians (“Cellophane”), a striptease (“All I Care About Is Love”), even a kind of mock ventriloquist act (“They Both Reached for the Gun”).

Subtitled “A Musical Vaudeville” the show was scheduled to open in 1974, but Fosse’s relentless work schedule finally drove him to a near-fatal heart attack. That pushed the opening of Chicago back to 1975, placing it squarely up against a new musical juggernaut, A Chorus Line. Chicago was considered dark and cynical, while A Chorus Line was bright and hopeful.

In 1976 Chicago was nominated for 11 Tony Awards but lost all of them to A Chorus Line despite having Verdon, Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach as its stars, plus the nominations for Best Book, Score, Directing, Actor, Actress, Choreography and Musical. The original production of Chicago ran 936 performances—respectable but not remarkable. By contrast, A Chorus Line

Jeff Brooks as Billy Flynn and the Company of Chicago Photo Credit: Jeremy Daniel, 2022

went on to play 6137 performances and became, for a time, the longest running show in Broadway history.

FORGOTTEN?

Chicago was so forgotten by 1996 that it was chosen by New York’s City Center for its acclaimed Encores! series, which puts on staged readings of old musicals considered unlikely to get full-scale revivals on their own. Ha!

As with other Encores! shows, the production was bare-bones: no sets, with the orchestra on the stage behind the actors. But the production had several things going for it. First of all, Fosse, who had died in 1987 (of a second heart attack) was in the process of becoming deified. He was increasingly recognized as one of Broadway’s greatest directors and choreographers of all time. His former mentee and lover Ann Reinking was brought on board the Encores! production to recreate Fosse’s dances. Second of all, while the show may have had no sets, it had distinctively slinky costumes by multiple Tony winner William Ivey Long. The revival started to look better than some fully-mounted shows on Broadway.

Also, the public’s cynicism had begun to catch up with Chicago’s. Audiences laughed along with its dark humor. Audiences and critics went wild, agreeing that Chicago’s time had come at last.

Producers Fran and Barry Weissler quickly transferred the production to Broadway, virtually intact, where it finally won Tony Awards—six of them, including Best Revival of a Musical. And the show began it’s long run. It sold out at first, but because it was produced so economically at Encores! it could play to some empty seats and still turn a profit. When the box office sales slowed down, the Weisslers began bringing in second- or third-string stars guaranteed to attract their small but devoted fan base for a few weeks at a time. They kept adding six or eight weeks to the run until it became apparent that the show’s real star was the show itself and had its own momentum.

THE BIG TEST

A big test came in 2002 when Hollywood made a movie of Chicago, starring Catherine Zeta Jones, Renee Zellweger and Richard Gere. The movie was a smash at the box office, eventually winning the Academy Award for Best Picture—the first movie musical to do so since Oliver! in 1968.

Surely a hit movie would kill the Broadway production! People soon could rent it for far less than the cost of a Broadway ticket. But Chicago surprised everyone once again. It was now familiar to a wide public. When tourists came to New York and wanted to see Spamalot, The Book of Mormon or Hamilton, or whatever the big hit was at the time and found it was sold out, they asked what else was playing. When they saw Chicago, they knew what they were getting.

But it’s not just nostalgia or familiarity that has kept Chicago running. The show is sexy and funny and really delivers the full entertainment quotient.

The revival of Chicago kept running and running. On Aug. 27, 2011, it passed its old nemesis A Chorus Line, becoming the longest-running American-written Broadway musical of all time, and in November 2014 it even passed Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, to become the second longestrunning Broadway show of all time. On June 25, 2022, Chicago played its 10,000th Broadway performance. There have been more than ten separate national tours.

Today, only Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera has run longer on Broadway, and recently has announced its closing in January 2023.

How much longer will Chicago run on Broadway? Will it eventually pass Phantom? You will be watching the stellar new 25th anniversary national touring company tonight. Judge for yourself!