There’s a familiarity that’s part of the package when you sit down to watch Chicago, the musical that is now half a century old, tailored around its potent combination of sassy characters, sultry tunes and sexy dance numbers.
Several of its songs feel like old friends, including the opening number All That Jazz, which not only establishes the mood but, given the slickness with which it’s being performed in a new season of the show that’s opened in Cape Town, sends expectations sky-rocketing for two hours of effervescent entertainment.
A story that revolves around the sordid adventures of a couple of murderers seeking undue attention in Chicago’s jazz-fuelled Twenties might sound potentially heavy and harrowing, but the joy of the show is in the clever balancing of the underbelly of its rancorous characters with dark humour and downright steamy song-and-dance routines.
The resulting concoction is a spectacular guilty pleasure, perfectly poised at the intersection of bittersweet and utterly vicious.
It is, after all, a show that simultaneously condemns and makes a meal out of the double standards of the very same America that is right now being torn asunder by a president playing much the same game with the media and the public that the musical’s crafty killers engage in.
The creators of Chicago — composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb (the same duo who crafted New York, New York) wrote the songs, while Ebb fleshed out the story alongside celebrated choreographer and director Bob Fosse — understood the fun to be had from preying on the public’s lust for tawdry tales about dirty rotten scoundrels.
And they clearly knew enough about the thin line distinguishing good from evil to conjure up a slew of magnificent song-and-dance routines, all of them apparently impervious to the passage of time.
Chicago remains almost shockingly fresh. There’s the cheeky way that it glosses comedically over homicide, the manner in which it adds glamour and sex appeal to a women’s prison, and the sharp musicality it brings to the conspiratorial nature of criminal justice.
Its characters don’t simply argue their case before the law — they turn to the audience and wink, sharing the conceits of the cleverly crafted story in the form of lyrics that add poetry and whimsy to the more macabre, twisted components of the plot.
It is the story of killers getting away with murder because they manage to dazzle the public, trick the press and win over the jury with their camera-ready smiles and empathy-evoking stories. Oh, yes, and their dazzling good looks don’t hurt one bit, either.
In fact, they win us over, too. Of course they do.
I didn’t realise until now just how interactive Chicago was. By its very nature it vehemently dispenses with the illusion of a fourth wall, but during its recent opening-night performance in front of a full house in Cape Town, people were in their seats expressing their emotions out loud, so in thrall of what was unfolding on stage they could not resist participating, verbalising their awed delight.
Sat next to me, I had one friend — a huge fan of the show — who was so in her element she desperately wanted to sing along (she didn’t, but only because of my sideways glances).
On the other side, another friend — a Chicago virgin — was gasping out loud, not only at the sexiness of it all, but at the cleverness of the jokes, the ribald, the steamy naughtiness so tastefully done. And — perhaps more than anything — there were his alarmed exhalations of breath at the sheer professionalism and sparkle of the production.
Squashed between these two enthralled friends, and surrounded by such a receptive and genuinely captivated audience, I was unable to stop myself from dancing in my seat, rhythmically tapping my thigh.
I swayed considerably more than Jonathan Roxmouth, the golden-voiced charmer who, as the show’s first-class sleazeball, Billy Flynn, never deigned to really dance but with his velvety harmonising simply swept just about everyone off their feet, leaving the audience breathless.
There are towering performances across the board, in fact.
There’s Samantha Peo, who is as perky, quirky and dazzling as ever as she dishes up layer upon layer of wayward energy to deepen her Velma Kelly. And there’s a really stirring, sweetly melancholic performance of Mister Cellophane by Dean de Klerk, who plays the cuckolded and cluelessly soft-hearted husband of the show’s other headline-grabbing murderer, Roxie Hart, played by Kiruna-Lind Devar.
And there’s Tankiso Mamabolo as Matron Mama Morton, the devil-may-care prison warder who sings her way through When You’re Good To Mama as if it’s meant to be a verbal striptease.
Around Velma and Roxie, the story that’s spun is of a pair of murderers more concerned with personal notoriety (and the eventual spin-off vaudeville musical they’ll star in, thanks to their fame) than they are with winning their respective court cases, which might in fact see them hanged for their crimes.
More than anything, it’s the ensemble that got my juices fired up, though. The thrill of witnessing masterful choreography really takes flight as performers, who elsewhere in the show might only have a few cameo lines, get the chance to dance in ways that make the blood rise.
The ensemble brings such steamy, surrender-your-firstborn swagger to the stage that, as wonderful as the solo numbers and more intimate scenes are, it’s these energetic group numbers that remind you what it is to feel alive.
The shock for anyone who shows up to see Chicago for the first time is how clever and sophisticated it is. There is meaning hiding behind every smile and each sexily gyrated hip.
Nobody expects to encounter so much psychological depth lurking in a musical that sexily satirises a wayward justice system, nor to witness such emotionally powerful swipes made about prison suicide or the horrors of being a foreigner thrown into an American prison. But these are among the pertinent issues that are raised, and beautifully explored, in a show that’s so much more than rapturous spectacle.
Which means, too, that what we are seeing is more than merely a sexy bit of vaudevillian cleverness, but an actual song-and-dance ritual, a cast working through various questions of social injustice.
It’s highly palatable and watchable and quite beautiful, but it is nevertheless a reckoning, a dressing-down of the establishment. While we’re baptised in the razzle-dazzle and the rapture of the entertainment, we’re simultaneously made to resist being anaesthetised by it and instead feel the pull of its more provocative spirit.
It is a musical about bad people doing despicable things and by some ludicrous moral logic we applaud when they get away with murder. If that isn’t an honest reflection of something that’s wrong with society, what is?
Chicago’s citizens, like real-life Americans more broadly, are dazzled by the camera flashes and tearjerker tales concocted by its scheming protagonists, but the show is secretly admonishing us, reminding us to pay attention to the truth that’s simmering beneath the surface.
It wants to sensitise us, to hold a mirror to our own capacity to look the other way when the challenge is too hard and, hopefully, encourage us to be more dutiful as citizens of a society composed of human interactions.
It is a mesmerising show, full of the very razzle-dazzle its cast sings about, and it’s as reliable as ever as a reflection of the weirdness of the world we live in.
It’s also a shock to me that — a week after seeing the show — the songs continue to creep up on me, filling my head with vast and wonderful sequences, the strutting, pouting, sultry rhythms of the dance numbers taking over my mind’s eye so I can almost feel the seductive power of the dancers’ taut bodies seeping into every cell of my own.
That’s not just showbiz, baby — that’s art.
Chicago is on at Artscape Opera House in Cape Town until 28 September and Montecasino’s Teatro in Johannesburg from 3 October.
Chicago storms back onto the South African stage with sizzling performances, biting satire and timeless razzle-dazzle that feels surprisingly fresh after 50 years
