Based on Maurine Dallas Watkins' 1926 play about Jazz Age Chicago, the 1996 revival won 6 Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Musical, more than any revival had won before.
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Maurine Dallas Watkins covered the Cook County courts for the Chicago Tribune and turned two 1924 murder cases into her 1926 play. Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly descend from the real defendants she watched charm a jury. That reportorial origin is the show's spine: it is a piece about the press and the courts manufacturing a celebrity together, written by someone who had watched it happen from the gallery.
John Kander wrote the music and Fred Ebb the lyrics, with Ebb and Bob Fosse sharing the book. Their organising idea was that every number is a vaudeville turn assigned to a specific performer of the period — Kander and Ebb have described Roxie as a Helen Morgan act, Velma as Texas Guinan, Billy Flynn as Ted Lewis, Matron Mama Morton as Sophie Tucker, with Bert Williams and Eddie Cantor in the mix as well. The original production opened in June 1975 and ran 936 performances, but audiences found its cynicism cold and the season belonged to A Chorus Line.
The rehabilitation came from a concert. City Center's Encores! series staged a stripped-back Chicago in May 1996; the concert staging became the production, and it transferred to Broadway that November under Walter Bobbie with choreography by Ann Reinking in Fosse's style. The band sits center stage in what reads as a jury box, the cast is in black, and there is essentially no scenery. It won six Tony Awards in 1997, including Best Revival of a Musical, both leading performances, direction, choreography and lighting.
It is easy to file as a dance show with good legs. The joke underneath has aged into documentary: a defendant becomes a celebrity, the celebrity is acquitted, and the acquittal becomes an act. On 23 November 2014 the revival passed Cats to become the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, and it remains the longest-running revival the theatre has produced.
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Chicago is an American musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Ebb and Bob Fosse. Set in Chicago in the Jazz Age, the musical is based on the 1926 play of the same name by Maurine Dallas Watkins, then a journalist covering the city's courthouse beat. A satire on corruption in the administration of criminal justice, the plot follows felons who manipulate their stories to develop celebrity status.
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