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Home , 10 on Broadway, 1976 Pulitzer Prize, 42nd Street Moon, Ann Reinking, A Broadway Musical, Barney Martin

“Isn’t It Swell . . . Nowadays?”: The Reception History of on Stage and Screen

A thesis submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Music

in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory

of the College-Conservatory of Music

by

Michael M. Kennedy

BM, Butler University, 2004

MM, University of Hartford, 2008

Committee Chair: bruce d. mcclung, PhD

Abstract

The musical Chicago represents an anomaly in history: its 1996 revival far surpassed the modest success of the original 1975 production. Despite the original production’s box-office accomplishments, it received disparaging reviews regarding the cynicism of the work’s content. The musical celebrates the crimes and acquittals of two murderesses, and is based on Maurine Dallas Watkins’s coverage as a reporter of two 1924 cases, from which she generated a 1926 Broadway play. The 1975 Broadway production of

Chicago: A Musical utilized this historical source material to comment on contemporary American society, highlighting parallels between the U.S. justice system and the entertainment industry, which critics and audiences of the post-Watergate era deemed as too cynical. Although Chicago initially achieved a mixed reception, the revival’s producers made few changes to ’s music, ’s lyrics, and Ebb and Bob ’s book, aside from simplifying the title to Chicago: The Musical. This suggests that the musical’s newfound success can be attributed to a societal shift in the perception of its subject matter. With further success from Chicago’s 2002 film adaptation, the originally dark and sardonic material became a hit and found itself as mainstream entertainment at the turn of the millennium.

The contrast between the revival’s and film adaptation’s rave reviews and the musical’s initial mixed reception has received little scholarly attention. This thesis provides the most thorough account of Chicago’s reception history, which includes a comparison of the critics’ reviews of both Broadway productions in addition to a selection of reviews for its first national tour and 2002 film. An interdisciplinary methodology with criminological and sociological theories demonstrates that Chicago’s growth in popularity has paralleled American society’s

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changing attitudes towards crime, deviance, and celebrity worship—from reactionary conservatism of the to narcissistic consumerism of the 1990s, when audiences finally could identify with Chicago’s anti-heroic femmes fatales undermining law and order.

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Copyright 2014 © by Michael M. Kennedy. All rights reserved.

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Acknowledgments

The motivation for this thesis stemmed from discussions with my advisor and committee chair, bruce d. mcclung. As a consummate pedagogue and scholar of musical theater, Professor mcclung bestows continual encouragement, impeccable suggestions, and exhaustive critical editing with an extraordinarily acute attention to detail. I have been fortunate to develop my research and writing skills through several of his courses, especially his seminar on the methods for completing a graduate thesis, document, or dissertation. I am greatly indebted to him for his guidance, without which completion of this project would not have been possible.

My deepest gratitude also goes to my other thesis committee members, Jonathan Kregor and Roger Grodsky, for their invaluable assistance during the preparation of my thesis proposal and final draft. Professor Kregor contributed his scholarly insights concerning the broad interdisciplinary themes of my topic, particularly his suggestion to explore the issue of

America’s anti- era having an effect on Chicago’s changing reception. Professor Grodsky’s acumen as a musical theater professional afforded me with an insider’s knowledge regarding the cultures surrounding Chicago’s two Broadway productions.

I offer my sincere appreciation to George Boziwick and the other employees of the Music

Division at The Public Library for the Performing Arts for facilitating my use of the

Fred Ebb Papers. I likewise am grateful for the help from Mark Horowitz and the Music

Division’s staff at the ’s Performing Arts Reading Room, where I had access to the and Collection. During my research trip to Washington, DC, my close Adriane Fink and Zack Stachowski allowed me to stay at their respective homes, for which I am thankful.

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I developed many ideas used in this project through conversations with other musical theater scholars, notably Jeffrey Magee, Todd Decker, and Alex Bádue. My colleague Jessica

Frost offered me great encouragement during the early stages of this thesis. And my good friend

Bill Hale frequently provided me with the most up-to-date Broadway news, especially concerning Chicago’s revival production.

Finally, I could not have accomplished this without the love and support from my family.

My wife, Kate, has given me endless votes of confidence in my academic and professional ventures. My mother, Marilyn Kennedy, has inspired my love for musical theater since I was old enough to walk. This included her taking me to see the national tour of Chicago’s revival production when I was sixteen years old, at which point I instantly fell in love with the show as well as with the creative styles of John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Bob Fosse. And I thank Kate,

Mom, and our dear friend Gary Beplay for always being exceptionally eager to accompany me on research trips to New York and for informing me of their theater excursions while I was at the library rifling through archival papers, press clippings, . . . and all that jazz.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... vi

List of Tables ...... viii

List of Figures ...... ix

Introduction ...... 1

Literature Review ...... 3

Methodology ...... 7

Chapter 1. The Rise of Revision and Decline of Originality: Problematizing Broadway at the End of the ...... 9

Confronting Revision: Revivals, Revisals, and Revues ...... 12

A Nostalgic Turn: Contextualizing Revision ...... 19

New York’s City Center Encores! ...... 27

Chapter 2. “It’s All a Circus, Kid”: Cynical Chicago’s Transcendence from Conviction to Reprieve ...... 33

Ill-fated Beginnings: Chicago’s 1975 Production ...... 35

Serendipitous Circumstances ...... 43

Reprieving Chicago ...... 51

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Chapter 3. American Society’s Changing Perception of Crime and Deviance during the Late Twentieth Century ...... 57

Criminological Understandings of the ...... 59

America’s “Right Turn” during the 1970s ...... 66

Reemergence of Liberalism in 1990s America ...... 70

A Criminological Understanding of Chicago ...... 74

Chapter 4. “Who Says That Murder’s Not an Art?”: Chicago’s Deviance and American Popular Culture ...... 84

Revising the American Dream: The Era of Anti-heroes ...... 88

Femme Fatale Endings ...... 94

Chicago’s Success ...... 99

Conclusion ...... 105

Bibliography ...... 109

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List of Tables

Table 1.1. Longest-running Broadway musical revivals and their original productions ...... 13

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1. Musicals that opened on Broadway from the 1967–68 to 1996–97 seasons ...... 21

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Introduction

In the second half of the twentieth century, Bob Fosse (1927–1987), John Kander

(b. 1927), and Fred Ebb (1928–2004) were a formidable presence on Broadway. With a career spanning five decades, Fosse choreographed and/or directed some of the most celebrated musical productions of that era, including (1966) and (1972). ’s forty-two-year collaboration represented the longest tenure between a and lyricist in

Broadway’s history. Scholars have roundly praised several of Kander and Ebb’s works, such as

Cabaret (1966), for furthering the “”—a self-referential presentation that uses musical numbers as commentary in order to interrupt the narrative, which creates a Brechtian

Verfremdungseffekt, or “distancing effect,” drawing the audience’s attention to the “artifice of theater.”1

This Broadway triumvirate’s most enduring stage collaboration, the concept musical

Chicago (1975), underwent a rocky climb to its illustrious legacy. The most lucrative production in Kander and Ebb’s career came from the 1996 revival of this show, while theater critic Martin

Gottfried notes how this production also represented “the first blockbuster hit of [Fosse’s] life,” despite it coming nearly a decade after Fosse’s death.2 The musical’s original production achieved only a mild critical success, as it received several bad reviews during its commercially profitable three-year run, which seemed to result more from the drawing power of its cast rather than its content.3 Critics and audiences during the post-Watergate era largely disapproved of a

1 James Leve, Kander and Ebb (New Haven, CT: Press, 2009), 1–5.

2 , All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), vii.

3 John Kander and Fred Ebb, as told to Greg Lawrence, Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 119–31.

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musical glorifying crime. Chicago had been based on two real-life Chicago murderesses who were acquitted in 1924.4 The musical’s appeal waned during its second season as A outshone it in every way, which included earning , the 1976 for

Drama, and a record-breaking fifteen-year run.

In 1996 a concert staging of Chicago opened as part of New York’s City Center Encores! series on 2 May. Critics and audiences lauded the show’s four performances, which convinced producers to transfer the production to Broadway’s

Theatre on 14 November.5 This revival far surpassed the original production’s success as it won six Tony Awards and a Grammy Award for Best Musical Show . Furthermore, the revival has run seven times longer than the original production to become the third-longest running musical and the longest running American musical in Broadway history.6 Remarkably, though, changed very little to the show’s content from 1975, aside from simplifying the sets, costumes, and choreography.7 The revival’s success persuaded Miramax producers to create a film adaptation—a 2002 blockbuster that won six , including Best Picture.

How then does a show, originally disparaged for its cynicism, be revived on stage and screen more than twenty years later and become a critical and commercial smash hit without any significant alterations to its content? Because critics and audiences no longer deemed the work’s

4 Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2010), 581–82. Maurine Dallas Watkins, a Chicago Tribune reporter, adapted her coverage of the two cases into a 1926 Broadway play. According to Stempel’s plot summary, “ has an extramarital affair and her lover; manipulates her husband, the law, and the press to get herself acquitted; then trades on her newfound notoriety to become a vaudeville celebrity in an act with fellow murderess .”

5 Chicago’s revival transferred to the Schubert on 11 February 1997 and then to the Ambassador Theatre on 29 January 2003, where the production currently runs, as of 23 March 2014.

6 In 2012 Chicago’s producers began marketing the show as the longest running “American” musical in Broadway history, since The Phantom of the (10,879 performances, as of 23 March 2014) and (7,485) are both British .

7 Kander and Ebb, Colored Lights, 138.

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cynicism as a flaw, a change in society’s attitude towards its subject matter must have occurred.

In this study I demonstrate that the change in Chicago’s reception relates to the transformation in the American perception of crime, deviance, and celebrity between 1975 and 1996.

Literature Review

Chicago’s reception history has received limited scholarly attention. Gottfried’s biography of Fosse compares the success of the show’s two Broadway productions. However,

Gottfried is not able to offer Fosse’s reaction to the musical’s reversal of fortune since Fosse did not live to see its revival.8 Similar to Gottfried’s biography, Sam Wasson’s Fosse gives anecdotal accounts of the director-choreographer’s professional and personal relationships, work habits, and erratic behavior during Chicago’s original production. Wasson does not include an analysis and comparison of this production’s various critical reviews, nor does he focus on the musical’s revival.9 Moreover, neither Gottfried nor Wasson place Chicago’s reception history in a socio- cultural context. In Kander and Ebb’s memoir, Colored Lights, they reflect on the changing critical reactions to the musical but do not provide defensible reasons as to why the revival was more successful than the original production.10

James Leve’s Kander and Ebb serves as the first comprehensive study of the creators and their accomplishments. His discussion of Chicago primarily focuses on conceptual matters with the original production, such as the adaptation from Maurine Dallas Watkins’s 1926 play, an analysis of the musical’s score, and a summary of its vaudevillian references. Leve briefly alludes to the musical’s cynicism causing its initial negative critical reception; although, he does not contextualize these problems with a country reeling in the wake of Watergate, the Vietnam

8 Gottfried, All His Jazz, vii–viii and 346–52.

9 Sam Wasson, Fosse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 377–448.

10 Kander and Ebb, Colored Lights, 119–40 and 207–18.

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War, and Patty Hearst’s abduction. Leve’s discourse barely mentions the 1996 revival except to acknowledge the show’s newfound popularity despite its unchanged content; however, he does not attempt to explain its success nor does he provide a comparison of specific critics’ reviews of the two productions.11 Regarding Chicago’s film version, Leve discusses its creation, but mostly defers to Raymond Knapp’s The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, which includes the most extensive scholarship of the film’s aesthetic. Yet, Knapp does not refer to the revival’s popularity or the shift in cultural climate, which enabled the movie to succeed.12

Concerning Kander and Ebb’s self-referential style, Jeffrey Scott Neuman’s master’s thesis assesses Chicago’s original production. Neuman proposes how the composer-lyricist team employed metadramatic principles and vaudevillian conventions to express their societal views.

He discusses the 1975 version’s production history and its negative reception; but he simply relates such criticisms to production issues rather than offering an appraisal of the socio-cultural tenor of the period.13 Also, Neuman completed his thesis in 1998 just as the revival surpassed the original production’s box-office success and four years before the film adaptation. Thus, he was unable to compare the musical’s complete reception and the cultural changes during this time.

Erin Auerbach’s master’s thesis briefly contrasts Chicago’s reception between 1975 and

1996 by linking the show’s depravity to societal attitudes of contemporaneous events.14

However, only a small portion of this thesis concerns Chicago; its cursory discussion relies on

11 Leve, Kander and Ebb, 77–102.

12 Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, NJ: Press, 2006), 102–15.

13 Jeffrey Scott Neuman, “‘And That’s Show Biz, Kid’: Self-referential Theatricality in the Musicals of John Kander and Fred Ebb” (MA thesis, University of Colorado-Boulder, 1998), 42–97.

14 Erin Auerbach, “From Revolution to Revolt in the Theatre Artistry: A Shift in American Attitude from Vietnam to Watergate Reflected in the Musicals Chicago and ” (MA thesis, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, 1998), 39–47 and 51–53.

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secondary sources, such as histories by Kevin Grubb and Richard Kislan.15 Moreover,

Auerbach’s thesis neither includes a comprehensive listing of the critics’ reviews of either

Broadway production (citing only three reviews) nor draws on interdisciplinary methods and theories from criminal studies.

Certain monographs have established a link between popular entertainment and cultural currents as portrayed in mass media. John Bush Jones’s Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social

History of the American Musical Theater uses specific Broadway shows to reveal changes in social and political ideologies throughout the twentieth century. For the 1960s and 1970s, Jones posits how the development of concept musicals, or as he labels them “fragmented musicals,” reflected an emerging culture.16 However, he does not put Chicago in this sub- , but instead he categorizes it as among the “entertaining” and “diversionary” shows of the

1970s, including (1970), (1972), (1975), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978).17 Jones’s only mention of Chicago’s revival concerns its being among the milieu of retrospective musicals in the 1990s, but he does not consider the production’s reception.18 In contrast, David Walsh and Len Platt’s Musical Theater and American Culture discusses Chicago in terms of it being a “fragmented” or “concept” musical with a “social realist” depiction of American ideology in the late twentieth century.19

15 Kevin Boyd Grubb, Razzle Dazzle: The Life and Works of Bob Fosse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); and Richard Kislan, Hoofing on Broadway: A History of Show Dancing (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987).

16 John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theater (Hanover, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 269–91. Jones avoids the term “concept musical” because he considers it to be “non-descriptive.” His survey of “fragmented musicals” includes Hair (1968), (1970), The Me Nobody Knows (1970), (1971), Godspell (1971), Pippin (1972), Runaways (1978), and Working (1978).

17 Ibid., 269.

18 Ibid., 311.

19 David Walsh and Len Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 117–31.

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Recent studies have investigated Chicago’s historical source material, from which much of the musical’s cynicism derives. Michael Lesy’s Murder City and Douglas Perry’s The Girls of

Murder City both portray the decadent Chicago of the Jazz Age as the epicenter of crime in

1920s America, with the city’s thriving deviants, sensationalist news media, and corrupt judicial system. Included in their accounts is Watkins’s 1924 coverage as a Chicago Tribune reporter of the arrests, trials, and acquittals of and Belva Gaertner, who served as inspiration for Chicago’s Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, respectively.20 Zsófia Anna Tóth’s Merry Murderers contextualizes these two real-life murderesses and Watkins’s propagation of their celebrity statuses with the various representations of the in twentieth-century

American culture.21

The U.S. population’s changing perception of deviance has received much attention, but not necessarily in relation to musical theater. David Downes and Paul Rock’s Understanding

Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule Breaking serves as an authoritative source on former and current criminological theories. Their discussions of the Chicago School, anomie, subculturalism, and radical and feminist criminologies illustrate prevalent twentieth- century societal perspectives towards the criminal behavior depicted in Chicago.22 Through a history of deviance and control in North America and Europe, Dario Melossi’s Controlling

Crime, Controlling Society connects these criminological theories with economic, political, and

20 Michael Lesy, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007); and Douglas Perry, The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago (New York: Viking, 2010).

21 Zsófia Anna Tóth, Merry Murderers: The Farcical (Re)Figuration of the Femme Fatale in Maurine Dallas Watkins’ Chicago (1927) and Its Various Adaptations (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011).

22 David Downes and Paul Rock, Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule Breaking, 6th ed. (New York: , 2011).

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sociological issues.23 He develops ideas first presented in his article “Changing Representations of the Criminal,” which explains the oscillating attitudes of sympathy and antipathy towards lawbreakers. Melossi concludes that in the United States 1970s conservatism reacted against radical 1960s ideals to create a fearful culture that vilified immoral behavior; however, during the 1990s, liberalist control resulted in a popular culture that viewed criminals as the victims of a suffocating social order.24

Two studies from the 1990s analyze data that reveal shifts in how the U.S. public viewed crime and its punishment in the late twentieth century. Political scientist William G. Mayer undertook a study that gauged the variations in public opinion on a variety of issues between

1960 and 1988. From his analysis of several different surveys, Mayer concludes that the 1970s served as a turning point towards neo-conservatist public opinion.25 Barbara Sims’s dissertation tests previously held criminological theories using results from the 1996 National Opinion

Survey on Crime and Justice. The results show that a majority of people polled actually favored rehabilitation over stricter forms of punishment, which signified a shift in ideology from the prior conservative era.26

Methodology

My thesis presents a comparative reception history of the critical reviews for Chicago’s original and revival productions and film adaptation in order to trace its growth in popularity

23 Dario Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society: Thinking about Crime in Europe and America (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008).

24 Dario Melossi, “Changing Representations of the Criminal,” British Journal of Criminology 40, no. 2 (2000): 296–320.

25 William G. Mayer, The Changing American Mind: How and Why American Public Opinion Changed between 1960 and 1988 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 14–16.

26 Barbara A. Sims, “Thinking about Crime and Punishment: An Analysis of the Public’s Perceptions of Causation and Sanctions” (PhD diss., Sam Houston State University, 1997).

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after two decades.27 The bibliography provides a comprehensive listing of these primary sources.

Through an interdisciplinary methodology combining reception history with sociological and criminological theories, I reveal a difference in the American public’s perception of crime between 1975 and the end of the twentieth century, when Chicago’s celebrity criminals no longer posed a threat to American morality, which could actually identify with their self- absorption and the cult of celebrity.

During the early 1970s, events such as the prolonged Vietnam War, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, the Watergate scandal, and the resignation of President Nixon created a loss in national confidence, which resulted in a culture that became rather unsympathetic to the type of corruption depicted in Chicago. In contrast, mass media’s constant references to deviance during the 1990s brought about an indifferent American popular culture. This created consumers who either accepted immorality or craved publicized scandals, such as those involving O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky. Also during this time, the entertainment industry offered wildly successful films and series that glorified unlawful characters, such as , Pulp

Fiction, and The Sopranos. With this altered cultural taste, Broadway critics and audiences no longer condemned Chicago for its celebration of crime. Thus, U.S. society’s extensive exposure to deviance in the late twentieth century softened the overall perception of criminality and celebrity worship.

27 For an explanation of reception history, see Jim Samson, “Reception,” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.libraries.uc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/40600 (accessed 22 March 2013).

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Chapter 1

The Rise of Revision and Decline of Originality:

Problematizing Broadway at the End of the Twentieth Century

On 2 May 1996, New York’s City Center Encores! resurrected Chicago—already a disregarded musical and deemed a Broadway relic by the series’ producers. Concluding the series’ third season of presenting “Great American Musicals in Concert,” the musical’s weekend of four performances generated curiosity about its selection despite meager expectations.1 During its first three years, Encores! presented concert stagings of mostly Golden Age and pre-Golden

Age shows that had originated on Broadway more than thirty-five years prior.2 The series’ 1994 inaugural season revived Fiorello! (1959), (1947), and (1941). For its second season, Encores! presented (1950), Out of This World (1950), and Pal

Joey (1940). And in 1996 (1939) and (1943) preceded the resurrection of Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville (1975). Save for Chicago, Fiorello! represented the most recent and longest original production with its 795 performances during

1959–61. Chicago had enjoyed a run of 936 performances before closing on 27 August 1977.3

In his review of Chicago’s performances at City Center, Ben Brantley summarized the prevalent questions following the announcement of Chicago’s inclusion in the third season of

Encores!: “Wasn’t the show a bit young for the archival treatment? Why a concert version of a

1 Ben Brantley, “Musical’s Brief Revival Mixes Joy and Contempt,” New York Times, 4 May 1996.

2 Larry Stempel periodizes the Golden Age between Oklahoma! (1943) and (1964). Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 333.

3 For information on the scheduling of Encores!, see “Encores! Previous Seasons,” Center, http://www.nycitycenter.org/Home/On-Stage/Encores!/Previous-Seasons (accessed 5 September 2013).

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musical whose impact relied so heavily on dance? And how do you do Fosse without Fosse?”4

These concert performances of Chicago featured the cast alongside an onstage orchestra and used minimal sets and costumes while providing sufficient action and choreography to evoke the original.5 Then Encores! series’ artistic director, , qualified Chicago’s selection by describing it as “a dark satire that got lost in the excitement about [in 1975]” and stressed the importance of doing a show “that happened in the past twenty years.”6

Unpredictably though, what began as four concert performances led to one of the biggest reversals of fortune in Broadway history. Kander and Ebb’s account of Chicago’s first Encores! performance underscores their astonishment at the musical’s newfound appeal. In 1996, with the majority of their time devoted to their newest musical (1997), the composer and lyricist had had no involvement with Chicago’s revival; although, they had heard rumors of the performance’s quality from a few members of the company. Despite these rumors Kander and

Ebb were skeptical of the show’s potential, as Ebb confessed, “We were both exhausted and neither one of us even wanted to go see the show.”7 But, having begrudgingly gone to see the performance, Kander described their initial amazement: “As we walked through the theater door, the atmosphere was all of a sudden electric. You could sense it almost before the show started.”8

4 Brantley, “Musical’s Brief Revival Mixes Joy and Contempt.”

5 Ibid. Chicago’s sets at Encores! simply included two ladders and an assortment of black chairs, while the show’s minimalist costumes consisted of dark, revealing outfits for the chorus members and stylized little black dresses for the principal women and suits for the principal men.

6 As quoted in Mel Gussow, “Resuscitating Musicals with a Bit of Fresh Air,” New York Times, 15 February 1996.

7 John Kander and Fred Ebb, as told to Greg Lawrence, Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 137–38.

8 Ibid., 138.

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Ebb concurred by stating: “It was unbelievable . . . . I doubt that City Center ever had that kind of a reaction to a musical before. I had never seen anything like that. It was like hysteria.”9

Chicago’s success at City Center convinced producers Barry and Fran Weissler to transfer the production to Broadway.10 The husband-and-wife team retained many of the cast and crew from the concert version. This included their convincing Bobbie to continue as the show’s director, which caused him to resign as Artistic Director of Encores! so that he could dedicate himself fully to the Broadway production.11 On 14 November 1996 at the Richard Rodgers

Theatre, Chicago: The Musical opened as a Broadway revival—the first Encores! work to do so—commencing the show’s record-breaking eighteen-year, open-ended run.12

Though an astonishing achievement, the success of Chicago’s revival naturally fits within a post-1980 musical theater era that has favored familiar content over original book musicals.

The 1990s represented a seminal decade for retrospection on Broadway, which experienced an upsurge in the ratio of revivals and revues to original productions as well as the notoriety of repertory companies, such as Encores!, entirely devoted to presenting stripped-down versions of

Broadway relics. Such repertory companies have emerged in (1993),

(1997), Washington, DC (1998), Chicago (2000), and Boston (2000). In 1994 the American

9 Ibid.

10 Peter Marks, “On Stage, and Off,” New York Times, 10 May 1996. The Weisslers have favored producing revivals over original productions on Broadway, with eighteen of their twenty-six Broadway productions (including plays and musicals) being revivals. And of their six original musical productions, one was a one-man revue (André DeShield’s Harlem Nocturne, 1984) and one was a dance-revue based on the music of (, 2010).

11 Peter Marks, “On Stage, and Off,” New York Times, 5 July 1996. Whereas the show’s concert performances simply utilized the title Chicago, the Broadway revival opened as Chicago: The Musical. This also contrasts the original 1975 production’s title, Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville, which echoed and ’s prototypical concept musical : A Vaudeville (1948).

12 Four other Encores! presentations subsequently have transferred to Broadway: (2000, 2003); The Apple Tree (2005, 2006); (2007 [Summer Stars series], 2008); and Finian’s Rainbow (2009). [The first set of dates within the parentheses refer to when each show played at City Center, while the second set of dates refer to when their revivals opened on Broadway. For Finian’s Rainbow these events happened in the same year.]

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Theatre Wing recognized the rising prominence of musical revivals and established the Tony

Award category for “Best Revival of a Musical.” Prior to this, the considered the restaging of musicals and plays together in the category of “Best Revival.”13 With revivals dominating Broadway at the end of the twentieth century, why was Chicago considered

“un-revivable,” as evident from its initial selection for concert treatment through Encores!? And why did the revival’s eventual success surprise so many, including its creators? These questions require interrogating first, the sub- of revision, and second, the retrospective climate of

Broadway prior to Chicago’s revival.

Confronting Revision: Revivals, Revisals, and Revues

Whether a musical or a play, a Broadway show often will enjoy a revival—a restaging of a work after the closing of its original production. Musical theater scholar David H. Lewis recognizes that this process encounters various pressures:

The revival producer faces two conflicting agendas: On the one hand, he has the psychological advantage of courting a more sympathetic press and audience with an already-respected chestnut, and his economic investment will be a bargain compared to the millions required nowadays to get a brand new show into working order before the critics are invited to take a look. On the other, his marketing instincts will compel him to promise a “new and improved” version of that chestnut, which opens to door to all sorts of tinkering.14

“Tinkering” with a musical may include alterations to the score, , book, or any combination of these elements. Such innumerable possibilities when reworking a show yield countless degrees of fidelity to the original production. This has caused the term “revival” to

13 Stempel, Showtime, 653–54.

14 David H. Lewis, Broadway Musicals: A Hundred Year History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 173. For a concise explanation on the business of producing musicals as divided into administrative and non- administrative roles, see Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 285–87.

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become a catchall embracing various amounts of tinkering—from revivals that remain relatively close to the original production to those that are wholesale reworkings, or “revisals.”

Despite the musical theater industry’s penchant for revision, even the most celebrated revivals typically do not experience longer runs than their initial stagings.15 Table 1.1 provides a comparison between the durations of the most financially successful Broadway musical revivals and their respective original productions.

Table 1.1. Longest-running Broadway musical revivals and their original productions Year Revival’s Number Year Original Production’s Revival of Performances Original Number of Title of Musical Opened Opened Performances Chicago 1996 7,205a 1975 936 Oh, Calcutta! (revue) 1976 5,959 1969 1,314b 1998 2,377 1966 1,165 2001 1,524 1980 3,486 Grease 1994 1,505 1972 3,388 1992 1,143 1950 1,200 Get Your Gun 1999 1,045 1946 1,147 2008 996 1949 1,925 1994 947 1927 572 Kiss Me, Kate 1999 881 1948 1,077 No, No, Nanette 1971 861 1925 321 1987 784 1934 420 Fiddler on the Roof 2004 781 1964 3,242 1996 780 1951 1,246 A Chorus Line 2006 759 1975 6,137 Source: Data from Internet Broadway Database, http://ibdb.com/index.php (accessed 25 March 2014). a The number of performances listed for Chicago’s current revival is as of 23 March 2014. b The original production of Oh! Calcutta! opened Off-Broadway.

Of the fifteen revivals listed, only six had longer runs than their original productions. Three of these cases—No, No, Nanette (1925), Show Boat (1927), and Anything Goes (1934)—represent

15 Jessica Sternfeld, “Revisiting Classic Musicals: Revivals, Films, Television, and Recordings,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 2nd ed., ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 327–30.

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shows that originated in musical theater’s pre-Golden Age market, whose volatility is not easily comparable with the standardization and inflated economy of post-World War II Broadway.

The Jazz Age of the 1920s experienced unprecedented opulence and a multitude of new theatrical productions, resulting in a highly competitive environment for original musicals. In contrast, the 1930s endured the Great Depression and societal strife, which stunted Broadway’s market to the point that the more profitable culture of Hollywood enticed many musical theater creative teams away from the Great White Way.16 These effects limited Broadway’s output in such a way that Anything Goes served as only one of three musicals from the 1930s that ran longer than four hundred performances.17 Subsequently, the 1940s ushered in an era of musical plays branded with the marketing of definitive productions that were authenticated through original cast recordings.18

As another example of a revival more successful than its original, Oh! Calcutta! (1976) benefitted from its status as a low-budget revue—a musical entertainment that, while usually lacking a plot, consists of cohesive variety acts with a unified cast.19 The revival of Oh!

Calcutta! added emphasis on the show’s novel presentation of absurdity, nudity, and sexually oriented skits, which musical theater scholar Larry Stempel suggests succeeded because of the

16 bruce d. mcclung, Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 154.

17 Geoffrey Block, “The Melody (and the Words) Linger On: American Musical of the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 2nd ed., ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 103–4. The following were the two other 1930s musicals that had more than four hundred performances: (1931, 441 performances), which, after having closed in January 1933, was immediately revived from May to June 1933 for an additional 32 performances; and DuBarry Was a Lady (1939, 408 performances).

18 Bruce Kirle, Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-process (Carbondale, IL: Southern University Press, 2005), 12.

19 Stempel, Showtime, 208–10, 466–69, and 603. To differentiate low-budget revues such as Oh! Calcutta! from extravagant revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies, Stempel refers to the former as “intimate” or “little” revues and to the latter as “spectacular” revues.

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show’s “espousal of traditional and rather unenlightened views of sexuality at the height of ’s and the gay liberation movements.”20

But of revivals lasting longer than their originals usually does not hold true for book musicals from or since the Golden Age.21 For example, the original production of

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific ran for 1,925 performances, while the show’s critically acclaimed 2008 revival lasted for only 996. As a post-Golden Age example, Grease’s

1994 revival achieved an exceptionally long run of 1,505 performances—only two decades after its original production—but still did not succeed to the extent of the original’s 3,388 performances, which began in 1972.22 Not listed in Table 1.1, serves as a special case of a Golden Age musical that ran longer as a revival (1979), with 554 performances, than in its original staging (1954), which lasted only 152 performances. The show’s producers had intended for the initial production to be a limited run since they had sold the property to NBC for a 1955 television broadcast, which inaugurated numerous television productions of the show until 1960, with reprising her title role in each instance. The musical’s first Broadway revival in 1979, which attempted to closely reproduce the original, already had a strong fan base whose members were familiar with the product from their childhoods.23

As Table 1.1 shows, two Kander and Ebb shows—Chicago (1996) and Cabaret (1998)— represent the longest-running revivals of book musicals in Broadway’s history, and each of these

20 Ibid., 738, n. 603. The revival of Oh! Calcutta! ran initially Off-Broadway from 24 September through 5 December 1976 before transferring to Broadway.

21 Though unusual for a Golden Age book musical to have a revival run longer than its original production, Chicago’s reversal of fortune is not unprecedented. ’s original 1940 production lasted 374 performances, while its critically successful 1952 revival ran for 540 performances.

22 The 1994 revival of Grease was among the nominees for the first occurrence of the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, ultimately losing to . The 2008 revival of South Pacific won this award, besting yet another revival of Grease.

23 Stempel, Showtime, 416 and 651.

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lasted significantly longer than their respective original productions. Aided by a historically significant narrative and an innovative, non-linear structure, Cabaret had already gained the status of being a seminal work through its prodigious successes on Broadway (1966) and as a film adaptation (1972), which underwent significant alterations from the stage production. Its

1998 revival benefitted from even more substantial changes to the book, lyrics, and music.24

Such modifications commonly occur with a revival in order to bring the new production up to date or to improve upon initially flawed material; but when such alterations result in a significantly different production from the original, this serves as an example of a “revisal.”25

Curiously, however, Chicago’s “revival” differed greatly from Cabaret’s “revisal.” The producers of Chicago’s revival changed little to the show’s content, aside from simplifying the sets, costumes, and dancing as well as slightly editing the script. Reacting to the City Center performance, Kander noted, “What is amazing is that it’s the same orchestrations, the same dialogue snipped a bit, the same choreographic style.”26 When transferring Chicago’s revival to

Broadway, the producers remained mostly faithful to the Encores! minimal staging. Thus,

Chicago’s revival represents an anomaly, as it far surpassed the original production’s success without altering much of its content.

The difference between “revival” and “revisal” concerns fidelity to the initial production and staging. While many scholars and historians categorize revivals as a genre of a single purpose, the actual process is multivalent. For example, Jessica Sternfeld explains how a

24 Scott Miller, Strike up the Band: A New History of (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann), 103–5. As an example of Cabaret’s perpetual critical acclaim, the show’s original Broadway production won eight Tony Awards, its film adaptation won eight Academy Awards, and its 1998 revival won four Tony Awards.

25 Bud Coleman, “New Horizons: The Musical at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 2nd ed., ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 293.

26 Kander and Ebb, Colored Lights, 138.

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successful revival achieves “something to the original material that is powerful, unexpected, or so deft that audiences are interested in returning to it,” which satisfies the impetus “to explore its inherent artistic possibilities and find new audiences.”27 This does not speak to the intricacies of the actual procedures or the external and internal factors when reviving. The American Theatre

Wing offers a nuanced definition of revival, most recently updated in 2005:

A “Revival” shall be any production in an eligible of a play or musical that . . . is deemed a “classic” or in the historical or popular repertoire . . . [or that] was previously presented professionally . . . in substantially the same form [anywhere in ; or, after the 1946–47 season when Off Broadway was defined, in an eligible Broadway theatre] and that has not had a professional performance in the Borough of Manhattan at any time during the three years immediately preceding the Eligibility Date.28

Yet, as Stempel argues, this definition only deals with external aspects of a show’s revival and not the internal sense of curatorship or revisionism that has firmly gripped many Broadway producers and enthusiasts.

Stempel categorizes the practice of reviving musicals into three different levels. The first concerns the maintaining or restoring a show to its original state, resulting in the highest form of authenticity. Focusing on historical reconstruction, City Center’s Encores! series represents a fundamental example of this practice. Stempel’s second category considers the most type of revival in which producers comply with the initial material while making modifications that render the work more suitable for contemporary audiences, which occurred with the aforementioned revivals of Grease and South Pacific. The third level constitutes the aspect of

“reinventing” a preexisting work into something unique, which may significantly alter the show’s original expression. Stempel views Cabaret’s 1998 revival and the original production of

27 Sternfeld, “Revisiting Classic Musicals,” 325.

28 As quoted in Stempel, Showtime, 646.

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Crazy for You (1992, adapted from George and ’s [1930]) as examples of this third category. However, he labels as a “revisal” while simply referring to the former as “the radically reconceived Cabaret.”29

Yet, various dynamics are possible during the revival process, which makes this sub- genre of musicals impossible to categorize into distinct levels as Stempel suggests. Whether reaffirming a show’s inviolability, modernizing proven material, or providing a second chance for a previous flop, reviving a musical does not comprise an exact science, and producers must gamble when determining to what degree a show’s content should be modified.30 Demonstrating a broader definition of the term “revisal” than that of Stempel, Bud Coleman suggests a moral dilemma involved with this practice:

While the producers clearly marketed their productions of My One and Only [1983, derived from the Gershwins’ (1927)] and Crazy for You as ‘new’ Gershwin musicals . . . , the revisals of Annie Get Your Gun [1999] and [2002] did not have titles that distinguished them from their original incarnations. Unlike various versions of a song recorded by different artists, these revisals are not interpretations of a work of art, they are unique works of art. It is ahistorical and unethical to present a work to audiences under its old title when it contains significant alterations to its original form.31

While Coleman labels each of these as a “revisal,” the American Theatre Wing actually categorized My One and Only and Crazy for You as original musicals (because they had unique titles and were significantly different from their original sources) and the latter two examples as revivals (since they retained their original titles and more closely resembled their initial stagings)—according to the Tony Award categories to which these shows were nominated.

Furthermore, the American Theatre Wing officially does not acknowledge the category of

29 Ibid., 646–47.

30 Lewis, Broadway Musicals, 172–75.

31 Coleman, “New Horizons,” 294.

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“revisal,” which simply has functioned as an industry insider’s term. Therefore, musical productions’ numerous possibilities for revision create a vague system of overlapping classifications, upon which theater scholars and professionals do not necessarily agree. Despite such challenges with terminology, however, the essence of reviving has permeated American musical theater since the end of the Golden Age, especially during the and 1990s when a multitude of revisionist genres came to the fore.

A Nostalgic Turn: Contextualizing Revision on Broadway

Toward the end of the twentieth century, Broadway experienced a dramatic shift in aesthetic taste. The industry’s participants deemphasized the long heralded quality of originality and concentrated instead on ’ growing nostalgia by offering a majority of productions that utilized familiar material.32 Musical theater scholars and enthusiasts have expressed disappointment over revision becoming the fundamental aesthetic of this era. Opera and musical theater historian Kurt Gänzl writes: “A good, faithful revival of a classic musical is a joy not to be missed . . . , but at the heart of the musical theater—its chief attraction—will always be the brand new musical. . . . With the decade [1990s] more than half gone, the scoresheet is not looking terribly healthy.”33 Journalist Barry Singer also laments this trend: “Fear and philistinism among producers had grown so pronounced that backing an original musical . . . was coming to be perceived as an act of almost aberrant rashness.”34

Composer Mark N. Grant’s self-acknowledged hagiography of Golden Age musicals, The

Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical, contextualizes the post-1960 period as the “fall” of the

32 Mark N. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Hanover, NH: University Press of New , 2004), 2–6.

33 Kurt Gänzl, The Musical: A Concise History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 417.

34 Barry Singer, Ever After: The Last Years of Musical Theater and Beyond (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2004), 68.

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musical, which eventually led at the turn of the millennium to the “age of McMusicals: corporately franchised stage happenings that are actually music videos packaged for theater.”35

In 2004 theater aficionado Ethan Mordden provided the same bleak diagnosis of the genre as

Grant:

Today the musical is suffering dislocation and alienation. It no longer leads the culture. It follows, adopting the degenerative policies of schlock. Smart creators share the stage with inarticulate idiots specializing in worthless forms based on exhausted old song catalogues and the staging of movies. Present-day America has summoned up a new kind of musical, coarse and uneducated, Broadway’s equivalent of the lower life-forms that have become our national idols.36

While not as despondent as Gänzl, Singer, Grant, or Mordden, Coleman acknowledges that musical theater at the millennium “owed much to the past,” “creating sub-genres which would have been unrecognizable to its original creators.”37

Quantitative data corroborate Broadway’s recent deficiencies in originality. Beginning with the season that followed Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret and concluding thirty years later with the season of Chicago’s revival, Figure 1.1 provides by season the number of original book musicals, revivals of book musicals, and revues that opened on Broadway.38

35 Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical, 309.

36 Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-five Years of the Broadway Musical (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1.

37 Coleman, “New Horizons,” 285. Some of the emerging sub-genres that Coleman mentions include revisals, “jukebox musicals,” “dansicals,” and adaptations from movies.

38 According to the American Theatre Wing, during this period Broadway seasons occurred from June 1 through May 31 of the following year. My study utilizes the classification system of musical sub-genres presented in Richard C. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Figure 1.1 does not include musicals performed as concerts or in repertory off-Broadway, which I have confirmed with the Internet Broadway Database, http://ibdb.com/index.php (accessed 25 March 2014). While Norton’s chronology encompasses a broad range of theatrical genres, including operetta, pantomime, burlesque, and plays with music, my study focuses on Broadway productions of new book musicals, revivals of book musicals, and revues, with the latter referring to late twentieth-century musical revues or one-person shows that eschew plot and retrospect or parody catalogues of song or dance. For the category of revues, Figure 1.1 presents both original and revival productions within this same classification, since the sub-genre of the revue as a whole constitutes retrospection.

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16

14

12

10

8 New Book Musicals 6 _ Revivals 4

2 Revues

0 Number of musical productions opened productions of musical Number

Broadway seasons

16

14

12

10

8 New Book Musicals 6 _ Revivals 4

2 Revues

0 Number of musical productions opened productions of musical Number

Broadway seasons

Figure 1.1. Musicals that opened on Broadway from the 1967–68 to 1996–97 seasons Source: Data from Richard C. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3:198–593.

The data in Figure 1.1 illustrate a decrease in Broadway productions from 1967 to 1997; but this severe decline is partially due to a considerable reduction in new book musicals. In contrast,

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revues and revivals of book musicals became prominent Broadway offerings. The 1993–94 and

1994–95 seasons provide watershed examples of this aesthetic shift, as these were the first years that revivals outnumbered new book musicals.39

A survey of musical theater criticism and scholarship from these decades reveals various explanations for the decline of original book musicals and the increasing commercialism among the Broadway industry. In 1979, after Broadway had experienced a few seasons of reduced output, music critic Eric Salzman predicted the industry’s looming financial difficulties in the succeeding decades. He contended that a paradox existed: the revitalization of musical theater depended on the development of new, innovative sub-genres; but with a multitude of genres— such as rock , concept musicals, and avant-garde works—having emerged in the post-

Golden Age era, Broadway’s strained economic resources could not easily support such diversity of original productions since this seemed to overextend audience bases.40 In 1987 historian

Gerald Mast noted another factor that weakened Broadway’s commercial vitality, at the center of which stood the musical—historically one of New York’s primary tourist attractions. The gradual decline of musical productions resulted from what Mast labeled “musical inflation” as younger audiences were drawn to contemporary technological forms of entertainment, such as music videos, which rendered the tradition of live performances less attractive to the youth demographic.41 In 1988 drama professional and scholar Richard Hornby recognized a more concise explanation for Broadway’s aesthetic shift: revivals simply were providing better quality

39 This watershed moment of revision was highlighted by the American Theatre Wing’s creation of the Tony Award category “Best Revival of a Musical” in 1994.

40 Eric Salzman, “Whither American Music Theater?,” Musical Quarterly 65 (1979): 238–44.

41 Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1987), 348–49.

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than new book musicals, which had become excessively “sentimental,” “shallow,” and

“pretentious.”42

Economic and cultural factors during the 1990s firmly established Broadway as an artistic community focused on revision rather than originality. At the beginning of the decade, theater critic Thomas Disch tallied a plethora of negative constraints on Broadway: competition from electronic media, escalating costs, power of the critics, depletion of creative forces, internal social stresses, and the deterioration of Broadway’s neighborhood.43 As the decade progressed,

Richard Kislan observed that the previously mentioned hardships, particularly the deteriorating

Broadway district, necessitated the gentrification of , which affected programming as producers became more comfortable reviving already familiar material while catering primarily to tourists. This brought about an onslaught of alternatives to originally conceived book musicals—not only revivals and revisals, but also jukebox musicals and movie stagings as well as the Disney invasion.44

A jukebox musical may employ a collection of pre-existing songs in various ways. It may emphasize a single composer or songwriting team either while not utilizing a plot, such as

Smokey Joe’s Café (1995, songs by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller). It may also incorporate an original plot, such as Mamma Mia! (1999, featuring the music of ABBA) and Rock of Ages

(2009, with “hair band” hits from the 1980s). Or a jukebox musical may be disguised as a

42 Richard Hornby, “The Decline of the American Musical ,” The Hudson Review 41, no. 1 (1988): 185. Basing his observations on the 1987–88 Broadway season, Hornby remarked that the revival of Anything Goes was a much stronger production and more successful than two highly touted original musicals, Teddy & Alice and , although the latter proved to be both a popular and critical success.

43 Thomas M. Disch, “The Death of Broadway,” The Atlantic Monthly 267, no. 3 (1991): 92–96, 98–99, 102, and 104.

44 Richard Kislan, The Musical: A Look at the American Musical Theater, 2nd ed. (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1995), 269–95.

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pop/rock concert that contains some form of biographical narrative, such as (2006, featuring the music of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons).45

The relationship between Broadway and the cinema during their Golden Ages primarily denoted stage-to-screen adaptations. But since the 1990s, the reverse procedure has become common as producers utilize popular films as the source for “original” musicals. This transference from screen to stage includes both movie musicals, such as State Fair (1996), and predominantly non-musical films, such as Big (1996) and The Producers (2001).46 The Walt

Disney Company has been at the forefront of this practice. Since the opening of Beauty and the

Beast in 1994, Disney Theatrical Productions has maintained a presence on the Great White

Way—perhaps overwhelmingly so—further made apparent by Disney acquiring the New

Amsterdam Theatre in 1995.47

John Bush Jones offers a cultural view of Broadway’s retrospection by comparing it to

America’s nostalgia epidemic, which began in the 1970s before further intensifying in the subsequent decades. He attests that the “prime precondition for widespread nostalgia is severe discontent with the present.”48 During the course of the 1980s, several troublesome events produced discontent among Americans and caused them to recall better times.49 To supply the public’s demand for escapist entertainment, Broadway producers have systematically

45 Coleman, “New Horizons,” 287–89.

46 Ibid., 294–96.

47 For more information on Disney’s impact on Broadway, see Lewis, Broadway Musicals, 183–93.

48 John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theater (Hanover, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 305.

49 Ibid., 306. Jones cites the following events as significant instigators of America’s nostalgia: the American public’s loss of faith in the U.S. government and economy during Reagan’s presidency, the 1982 unemployment rate of 10.4% (highest since 1940), the 1986 shuttle Challenger explosion, growing fear from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the 1987 stock market crash, and late-1980s controversies concerning celebrity televangelists.

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manufactured nostalgia in the forms of musical sub-genres that skirt original concepts or contemporary issues.50

Susan Russell correlates the manufacturing of nostalgia on Broadway to Jean

Baudrillard’s theory of “simulacra,” which refers to a “system of simulated reality” that replaces actual reality, signifying the collapse of a “true lived experience.”51 Russell provides a cogent example of this phenomenon:

The practice of unifying visual integrity is expected in live theatre, but Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of The Phantom of the Opera [1988] on Broadway, changed the perception of liveness in his production by altering time. After Phantom’s immediate success at the Majestic Theatre, Cameron Mackintosh locked the theatre piece in the past. Every subsequent production had the same blocking, staging, and choreography as the 1988 original. Mackintosh demanded that all Phantom everywhere embody the same dramatic interpretations as their counterparts in the original Broadway cast. . . . By removing the “now,” Cameron Mackintosh showed corporate America how to create a fluid theatre product. By moving liveness into the past, Mackintosh could reproduce and distribute it.52

Akin to this , Broadway producers have established a tradition of embodying corporate

America’s replication of familiar products, even with book musicals.

Thus, during the 1980s and 1990s, Broadway gradually established the aesthetic paradigm that revision had greater commercial value than originality. In 1998 New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini summarized the effects of Broadway’s economy on its lack of originality: “If audiences will turn up for a familiar old show, why should investors take a risk on

50 Ibid., 308–30.

51 Susan Russell, “The Performance of Discipline on Broadway,” Studies in Musical Theatre 1, no. 1 (2007): 97.

52 Ibid., 99. When Russell published this article in 2007, Phantom’s “locked” version had played twenty years and had been replicated countless times. In 2012 this musical received its first makeover in twenty-five years, and this “newly reimagined” production has toured the United Kingdom and the United States for the past two years. However, the Broadway production, still in an open-ended run at the Majestic Theatre, has not changed from the original “locked” version of 1988. Kenneth Jones, “ and Cameron Mackintosh to Bring Revised Phantom to U.S. in November,” , 26 February 2013, http://www.playbill.com/news/article/175367- Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-and-Cameron-Mackintosh-to-Bring-Revised-Phantom-to-US-in-November (accessed 16 March 2014).

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something new? The more successful the revival movement becomes, the more this supposed celebration of the American musical’s past will wind up stifling its future.”53 Gänzl outlines the cumulative effect that these economic and aesthetic factors have had on Broadway’s infrastructure. To attract newer generations and demographics as an audience base, Broadway producers rely on familiar material, which they often enhance into grandiose spectacles. As a result, musicals have become expensive “events,” which the layperson will attend only a few times per year, and productions that are not spectaculars or established box-office sensations tend to struggle. Thus, producers are less willing to gamble on unknown sources or artists. Since producers usually invest in proven talent and content, new musical writers and encounter difficulty in launching their careers, which ultimately has made musical theater enthusiasts uncertain about and concerned for the genre’s future.54

Despite such assertions of American musical theater’s momentous transformation and decline, revision seems historically to have been an inherent aspect of the genre since its beginnings. Theater scholar Bruce Kirle cites the importance of adaptability and revivability by referring to musicals as a whole genre of “works-in-process,” which contradicts many formalist historic narratives that tend to regard the 1940s—with the commencement of Broadway’s

Golden Age and ’s “integrated” works—as the beginning of the musical becoming a genre of closed, autonomous, and definitive texts. In contrast to such narratives, Kirle contends that musical theater’s authenticity truly resides in the collaborative production process rather than in authorial content.55 He also explains that American musical theater’s revisionist quality has developed as a product and reflection of popular culture: “The

53 Anthony Tommasini, “A Crowd of Old Musicals Squeezes the New,” New York Times, 16 August 1998.

54 Gänzl, The Musical, 415–21.

55 Kirle, Unfinished Show Business, 1–8.

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privileging of the closed text is inextricably linked with the idea of definitive performance. If popular culture is a product of its given cultural moment, how can one subscribe to the idea of a definitive performance, since that very notion is dependent on historical relativism?”56 Kirle further claims “that there can be no definitive production of a musical apart from a given cultural moment and that, consequently, the texts of musicals are in themselves necessarily incomplete.”57 While at first blush Kirle’s theory concerning Broadway musicals seems plausible, there are notable exceptions, such as Les Misérables (1987) and The Phantom of the

Opera (1988), which were both in “locked” productions for decades, before recently being given makeovers.58

New York’s City Center Encores!

Connected to Broadway’s nostalgic turn was the founding of repertory companies. Such bastions of curatorship further added to Broadway’s retrospective climate at the end of the twentieth century, which provided a platform for Chicago’s revivability. Based on ’s Lost

Musicals series (founded in 1989), New York’s City Center Encores!: Great American Musicals in Concert was established in 1994 to revisit neglected shows, often considered “un-revivable” because of their diminished appeal.59 Judith Daykin, executive director of City Center from 1992 to 2003, founded this series in order to bring exposure to these “works not likely to get

56 Ibid., 10.

57 Ibid., 12.

58 Mark Shenton, “ Speaks Out on Revised London-bound Les Miz; Mackintosh Responds,” Playbill, 30 June 2010, http://www.playbill.com/news/article/140822-Trevor-Nunn-Speaks-Out-on-Revised- London-Bound-Les-Miz-Mackintosh-Responds/I%3E;-Mackintosh-Responds (accessed 16 March 2014); and Jones, “Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh to Bring Revised Phantom to U.S. in November.”

59 Encores! has distinguished itself from its predecessor by using orchestral accompaniments for its productions, while Lost Musicals’ productions have usually utilized piano only. For more information on Lost Musicals production format, see www.lostmusicals.org (accessed 17 October 2013).

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produced.”60 Such archival treatment of musicals had predecessors in New York in the preceding decades. In 1977 John Bowab presented concert versions of (1963) and

Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) at Town Hall. In 1981 Bill Tynes created the New Amsterdam

Theatre Company, which restored Broadway relics as semi-staged productions during the

1980s.61 But the Encores! series has achieved unprecedented success, which musical theater scholar Garrett Eisler contextualizes:

Since its founding as a not-for-profit company in 1994, Encores! has enjoyed a meteoric rise in its cultural capital. Its openings are now reviewed by New York Times first-string critics alongside fully produced plays, even if the short run has almost ended by the time the notices are published. Ten of its productions have been recorded and released on CD, thus joining the musical theatre discography. . . . Encores! itself received the cultural legitimation of a special Tony for general “Excellence in Theatre” in 2000. The A-list Broadway musical theatre performers (like Patti LuPone, Victor Garber, , and Kristen Chenoweth), who regularly bestow their presence upon the series, only further consecrate the three annual concerts at . . . as must-see events in the musical theatre season—more so than many other more officially “Broadway” openings.62

Encores! has inspired other major American cities to establish their own companies devoted to the curatorship of musicals: Los Angeles’ Reprises! (founded in 1997), Words and Music in

Washington, DC (1998), Chicago’s Ovations! (2000), and Boston’s American Classics (2000).63

60 As quoted in Lawrence O’Toole, “Musicals from Way Back When for Now,” New York Times, 6 February 1994. The founding artistic director of Encores!, Ira Weitzman, quit after the company’s first season. Weitzman explained, “I was a little ambivalent about working on concert versions of old shows. . . . Obviously, my whole life has been devoted to the production of new musicals.” As quoted in Singer, Ever After, 293, n. 41.

61 Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen, 130–31. Regarding the 1977 Town Hall series, Bowab canceled what was to be the final installment—a concert version of The Golden Apple (1954). Regarding the Company, following Tynes’ death in 1988, John McGlinn directed the company for a short period and focused its operations primarily on recording of old shows.

62 Garrett Eisler, “Encores! and the Downsizing of the Classic American Musical,” Studies in Musical Theatre 5, no. 2 (2011): 134.

63 Preceding New York’s Encores!, San Francisco’s series began in 1993. Stempel, Showtime, 654. In July 2013, Encores! Off-Center launched as a complementary Off-Broadway series to present “smaller-scale and nontraditional shows outside the established Broadway mold,” which City Center’s Encores! has neglected. Rob Weinert-Kendt, “Musical Revivalists with a Cause: Encores! Off-Center Tilts Toward the Political,” New York Times, 3 July 2013.

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With Encores! performances running for only a single weekend, this retrospective series initially presented concert versions of musicals. While most of the series’ presentations feature casts reading directly from scripts with little to no blocking, some Encores! musicals approach the value of semi-staged productions by utilizing minimal sets, costumes, lighting design, stage action, and choreography. Such was the case with Chicago, which attempted to recreate Fosse’s original choreography through the expertise of , who had served as a replacement for the actress playing the lead role of Roxie Hart in the original production in addition to having had an intimate relationship with Fosse.64 High production values are impractical for Encores! because of its condensed rehearsal period (approximately two weeks) that precedes the weekend of performances.65

The Encores! performances of Chicago received wildly enthusiastic reviews, despite the original 1975 production having left “an acrid aftertaste in so many memories.”66 Furthermore, among the Encores! productions during the series’ first three seasons, Chicago was the most profitable, as it helped raise its season’s total gross to over $1 million, which neither of the previous two seasons had accomplished.67 Chicago’s success inspired the artistic staff at

Encores! to present semi-staged productions rather than concert versions. Since Chicago four other Encores! shows have transferred to Broadway as revivals, but none has achieved the same

64 Aileen Jacobson, “Razzle-dazzle and a Killer Celebrity,” Newsday, 4 May 1996. Like the subsequent Broadway revival, the Encores! production of Chicago was marketed as having choreography “in the style of Fosse.”

65 Viertel, “Putting on Encores!,” New York City Center, http://www.nycitycenter.org/Home/On- Stage/Encores!/Putting-on-Encores! (accessed 5 September 2013). With regards to the truncated rehearsal and performance processes, Viertel describes an Encores! production more similar to “an athletic feat than a Broadway show.”

66 Brantley, “Musical’s Brief Revival Mixes Joy and Contempt.”

67 Harry Haun and Robert Viagas, “Hit Encores! Chicago Definite for B’way,” Playbill, 18 June 1996. Encores! has yet to publish the exact figures of ticket sales for each production during its first three seasons.

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level of critical or financial success. The revival of Wonderful Town with Donna Murphy played at City Center in 2000, but its transfer to Broadway did not materialize until 2003, after which it ran for 497 performances. Encores! presented The Apple Tree in 2005; in 2006 the Roundabout

Theatre Company transferred this production to Broadway for a closed run of 99 performances, with starring in both versions. Finian’s Rainbow drew rave reviews at City

Center in 2009 before its disappointing 92-performance Broadway run opened and closed the following season. With these three examples, the Broadway revivals were more expanded productions than their concert stagings at Encores!. The 2008 critically successful revival of

Gypsy featuring Patti LuPone ran on Broadway for 332 performances after having originated in

2007 as part of Encores! supplemental series, Summer Stars, which was designed to feature brief summer productions of famous Broadway shows with full staging, sets, and costumes.

Chicago’s revival has demonstrated unparalleled success, both as a semi-staged concert version and as a full Broadway production currently in its eighteen-year, open-ended run. This is even more remarkable considering the revival’s recreation of the original production’s content.

Musical theater scholar Scott Miller disputes this claim, however, arguing that Chicago’s revival is rather inauthentic to the original: “The show was taken out of its period context, some of the script cut, and much of Fosse’s nastiness and brutal (but legitimate) cynicism was rejected in favor of a sunnier feel. The show suffered for it. It lost its teeth and much of its original impact.”68 While some truth resides in Miller’s first assessment—marginalizing the show’s period context through minimal staging—the revival’s producers actually changed little to the show’s book, music, and lyrics, as Kander confirms, “It was still the same funny, nasty piece that

68 Miller, Strike up the Band, 145. Miller credits the 2002 film version for redeeming Chicago’s Broadway revival, but he does not clarify the reason for this except to suggest that it was “brilliant” and “utterly electrifying.”

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it had been.”69 Concurring with Kander’s evaluation, Mordden rates Chicago among the most authentic of all 1990s revivals:

Is this Chicago the most faithful of the nineties revivals? The book is lightly cut, and the cast in erotic uniform rather than realistic costumes, as they had been in 1975. Still: the orchestrations have not been remastered, so to say, by some new man, much less newly written from scratch. The choreography tries to recall the original dancing as loyally as possible. And the spirit, above all, is Fosse. . . . Chicago—another Verdon show performed without Verdon, not to mention a Chita show without Chita—could almost be a touring version of the original paying a call on Broadway at the end of its line but with a brand-new set of leads for extra pep. It fully deserves its great success.70

In a 2001 interview with Foster Hirsch, stage producer and director Harold problematized the issue of revivals by attesting, “Revivals are chipping away at the reputation of shows.”71 Ironically, during this same interview, Prince praised Chicago’s revival: “Chicago . . . is a rare exception: it was a better show, in the concert form of the revival, than in the original production”72—but he does not clarify as to why. With such meager expectations at the outset of

Chicago’s revival and its astonishing accomplishments that followed, what then accounted for the show’s stunning reversal of fortune? Since its content remained largely the same and the revival had no drawing power in terms of spectacle or high production values, societal attitudes about the material must have changed.73 To fully explain for the show’s newfound success, the

69 Kander and Ebb, Colored Lights, 139.

70 Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen, 129.

71 As quoted in Foster Hirsch, and the American Musical Theatre, 2nd ed. (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2005), 191. Hirsch paradoxically juxtaposes Prince’s sentiment toward revivals against Prince’s acceptance of directorial duties for the 1994 revival of Show Boat.

72 As quoted in ibid., 191.

73 A shift in societal perspective can also explain the reversal of fortune between Pal Joey’s original production and first Broadway revival. Stempel writes: “The show hadn’t changed between 1940 and 1952: the revival kept the original substantially intact. What had changed was the sensibility of certain theatergoers; and what had changed that sensibility most likely was the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein, which had won public acceptance for more penetrating musical plays in the interim.” Stempel, Showtime, 286. However, Stempel fails to entertain a cultural shift in the audience’s sensibility: because Pal Joey represented one of the earliest anti-hero musicals, it met resistance during the stark economic depression of 1940 before becoming non-threatening during the economic boom of the 1950s.

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next chapter provides a comparison of the reviews for Chicago’s original and revival productions, which demonstrates a gathering consensus among the critics.

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Chapter 2

“It’s All a Circus, Kid”:

Cynical Chicago’s Transcendence from Conviction to Reprieve

Regarding its length of run, Chicago’s original Broadway production achieved success with 936 performances and thus cannot be designated a “flop.” Yet, it received a mixed critical reception and several disparaging reviews, which pointed to the show’s overly pessimistic content as its essential flaw. These criticisms clung to Chicago, despite its eleven Tony Award nominations (winning none) and commercially profitable three-year run, the latter of which seemed to result more from the drawing power of its cast and creative team rather than the work’s content.1

As a lavish spectacle of amorality, Chicago became synonymous with “cynicism” because of the show’s scathing commentary of America’s judicial system and the entertainment industry. Such a perspective tarnished the musical’s legacy by rendering it untouchable for nearly two decades. In 1983 Ethan Mordden summarized the show’s mixed reception, despite the production’s box-office achievements and its “stupendous” performativity:

Razzle dazzle is what the show exposes; ironic that it so dazzled while exposing it. But then there is a lie in show biz, which few musicals have been able to confront: it wants to please and share, but it’s made of narcissistic exhibitionism. . . . The presentation was hard, bright, and mean—like its subject. It was fashionable to knock Fosse that season, so praise was muted. . . . You jerks! the murderesses virtually tell us at the close. We got off because of our presentation, which in this man’s system has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. They throw flowers at the audience, but the irony stings, and that may well be why Chicago couldn’t compete with A Chorus Line. . . .

1 John Kander and Fred Ebb, as told to Greg Lawrence, Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 119–31.

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. . . Chicago was a hit, and Fosse took blame anyway. Twenty years from now, they’ll die to see it—but . . . Chicago will be a wild card already played. It won’t even be in the discard pile. It’s over.2

Mordden demonstrates some degree of prescience by suggesting that future audiences would clamor for the show. But despite his grim prediction that such forthcoming productions of

Chicago would seem trite, the musical became exalted in 1996 through archival treatment at

Encores! and its subsequent Broadway revival, when critics and audiences overwhelmingly praised both the revival’s production and the musical’s content. Thus, an examination of

Chicago’s critical reviews reveals a shift in societal attitudes regarding the work and explains its unprecedented reversal of fortune.

Because of the nature of open-ended runs on Broadway, a musical’s success heavily depends upon critics’ reviews to develop advance ticket sales and a sustaining audience. Positive reviews can extend a show’s run, while poor reviews can force an early close.3 In a 1975 interview with Richard Natale, prior to the opening of Chicago’s original production, Kander and Ebb acknowledged the importance of musical theater critics and their reviews’ effect on a production’s success. The duo also expressed their general anti-critic stance because most critics have stringent rules and limitations for what makes good theater and a rancorous manner in expressing their displeasure for bad theater, as Ebb quipped: “No one remembers benign critics.

. . . Mean critics last longer.”4 But Kander and Ebb praised Clive Barnes, New York Times theater critic from 1965 to 1977, because he qualified his reviews by attempting to identify the creators’

2 Ethan Mordden, Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 173–75.

3 As a notable example of poor reviews forcing a show’s early close, songwriter Paul Simon’s $11 million musical, The Capeman, fostered much hype before opening on 29 January 1998, but because of the critics’ scathing reviews it closed after only sixty-eight performances. Even Simon’s fame could not maintain the production. Rick Lyman, “After Rocky Run, Capeman to Close,” New York Times, 6 March 1998.

4 As quoted in Richard Natale, “With a Song in Their Hearts . . . ,” Women’s Wear Daily, 21 February 1975.

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intentions and then used that basis when evaluating the show’s effectiveness. Ironically, Barnes was who found Chicago’s original production most disappointing with its negative outlook on contemporary society, despite Kander’s belief that a period setting (such as used in

Chicago) renders a show less realistic.5

A comparative reception history of Chicago’s two Broadway stage productions documents the musical’s growth in popularity after nearly twenty years of dormancy.6 My study surveys the major critical reviews for these productions in order to plumb the changing reception of the work’s cynical content. Such cynicism stemmed initially from Fosse, who had the most influence on the show’s original production as its director, choreographer, and co-author. I also problematize factors that effectively lengthened the original production’s run, despite the musical’s mixed reception. Contrasting the original production’s plight with the revival’s success reveals how the element of “cynicism” developed from having a negative connotation in 1975 to a positive one in the late 1990s.

Ill-fated Beginnings: Chicago’s 1975 Production

Chicago’s original production seemed doomed from the outset of rehearsals, which began on 26 October 1974. The musical’s producers intended the show to complete its rehearsals by the end of November in preparation for a tryout engagement in Philadelphia, preceding a planned

Broadway opening on 7 January 1975. But the producers scrapped this timetable after Fosse’s mild heart attack on 4 November—the day of Chicago’s first table read. Knowing that the show needed Fosse at the helm, the producers opted to postpone the schedule rather than to cancel the

5 Ibid.

6 In terms of scope, this study focuses on the major critics’ reviews of Chicago’s Broadway productions, although I occasionally do consider the work’s reception outside of New York.

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project.7 Fosse suffered two more heart attacks while in the hospital and underwent a cardiac bypass on 15 November. This necessitated a more extensive period of rest for the director. Fosse finally returned to work in March 1975, when rehearsals resumed.8

Even with such preliminary hardships, the production generated interest among the theater community for its exemplary roster, including Fosse, Kander and Ebb, and an all-star trio for the show’s leads—Gwen Verdon (Roxie Hart), (Velma Kelly), and Jerry

Orbach (). But the production also garnered excitement by other means. Besides its advertisements in print and on television, some of Chicago’s songs developed a following long before as different performers had sung them in cabaret venues since December

1974. For example, Rivera had performed “All That Jazz” at the Grand Finale on numerous occasions. Such promotion of Chicago’s score also included performers who were not associated with the production, such as Shelley Ackerman, Joan Hackett, and Mare Allen Trujillo. In addition to this exposure, some of Chicago’s songs appeared on television shows, such as those featuring , , , and the Smothers Brothers.9 With the production delay, Ebb considered this previewing of the score ideal, “with spots opening all over the city for the type of theatrical singer who knows what to do with a show song.”10

Despite the early buzz, the production encountered a frosty reception at its tryout in

Philadelphia. Three local newspaper critics panned the show, and several New York scouts

7 Sam Wasson, Fosse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 384–90; and “Fosse Fatigue Causes Delay in Start of Chicago Rehearsals,” Variety, 6 November 1974.

8 Wasson, Fosse, 390–94 and 407; and Barbara Rowes, “After Three Coronaries and Critical Surgery, Bob Fosse Puts His Heart and Soul into All That Jazz,” People, 3 March 1980. The situation of Fosse’s heart attacks and open-heart surgery affecting the rehearsal process for Chicago serves as the basis for Fosse’s 1979 film, All That Jazz. But the movie’s title is the only direct reference to Chicago. Martin Gottfried, All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 349–54.

9 Ernest Leogrande, “Scoring in Advance,” Daily News, 20 February 1975.

10 As quoted in ibid.

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agreed with them. With such discouraging reports, the creative team made edits to the show, which pushed back its Broadway opening from 15 May to 3 June—thus, putting the show into the 1975–76 Broadway season, during which Chicago would compete with A Chorus Line.11

The dispiriting critiques continued after the show’s Broadway opening. As theater critic for , Barnes lauded certain production elements, such as the music’s effectiveness as a pastiche of 1920s vaudeville as well as the show’s “three superlative, knock- em-in-the-aisles performances by three stars who glitter like gold-dust all evening.”12 However,

Barnes ultimately found Chicago disappointing and denounced the show for its stylized techniques and immoral substance:

You can only wonder who ever thought it was suitable for a musical. This is what went wrong. The musical had lost its moorings from the very beginning. . . . So one is left with some beautiful bits and some dazzling pieces, but an eventual feeling of disappointment. All that talent should have been spent polishing up something else; all that love for Chicago should have toddled somewhere lusher and more productive.13

Also at the Times, Walter Kerr concurred with Barnes, writing, “It’s altogether too heavy to let the foolish story breathe.”14

Reviewing Chicago’s opening night for New York’s Daily News, Douglas Watt introduced the term that haunted the show’s legacy for the following two decades: cynical. He considered it to be the overall impression of the entire evening, although he recognized the superb cast, Fosse’s brilliance as an innovative director and choreographer, the exemplary sets and costumes, and Kander and Ebb’s score, the latter of which Watt found not entirely original

11 Hobe Morrison, “New York Scouts Chicago in Philly,” The Herald News, 24 April 1975.

12 Clive Barnes, “Stage: Chicago, Musical, Disappoints,” New York Times, 4 June 1975.

13 Ibid.

14 Walter Kerr, “Chicago Comes on Like Doomsday,” New York Times, 4 June 1975.

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but rather “serviceable and attractive.”15 In a follow-up article about the show, Watt qualified his initial reaction by describing an “awry” feeling that the show exuded: “It is a heartless musical, and intentionally so. For what Fosse and his collaborators have tried to do is make a sordid, sensational little murder story represent a whole period, the ’20s, and then to convey it in existential terms.”16 Watt acknowledged that this was similar to Cabaret’s approach of presenting a corrupt, decadent society from the past, but such material seemed appropriate and effective alongside Cabaret’s setting in Berlin on the eve of World War II. For Watt Chicago’s only “touching” moment came when (as Amos Hart) sang “Mister Cellophane” and then apologized for taking up the audience’s time: “It’s a deliberately corny turn to a deliberately corny song, but it is offered by the only sympathetic figure in the show and the moment suddenly throws the rest of the evening into relief, showing it up as the brilliantly empty affair it really is.”17

Other reviewers of Chicago likewise expressed their concerns over the show’s cynicism having a negative effect on audiences. In Variety Hobe Morrison claimed that the show, despite its positive characteristics, did not have mass appeal that would result in a long Broadway run or touring productions. He cited the work’s unattractive vulgarity, which perhaps bore too close a resemblance to “the loud, lurid, smugly cynical Chicago of the Prohibition era.”18 In the

Christian Science Monitor, John Beaufort heralded the production’s performers and its status as a “Broadway spectacular,” but found its substance wanting:

15 Douglas Watt, “A Bold and Cynical Chicago,” Daily News, 4 June 1975.

16 Douglas Watt, “Not My Kind of Show, Chicago Is,” Sunday News, 15 June 1975.

17 Ibid.

18 Hobe Morrison, “[Review of] Chicago,” Variety, 11 June 1975.

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The brash vulgarity and seamy decadence of Chicago are part of its calculated comment. . . . Unfortunately, this rogue’s gallery of freaky caricatures, being totally heartless, evoke no sympathy. Scorn by itself dulls the sensibilities...... The first nighters were certainly razzle-dazzled. Yet, for all of its flamboyance, talent, and superdirected energy, Chicago wound up seeming hollow, melancholy, and abrasively alienating. Could that be what Mr. Fosse intended?19

In The Village Voice, Ross Wetzsteon proposed the intent behind the show’s content:

“The creators of Chicago, in attempting to portray America as cynical, corrupt, vulgar, and shabby, have themselves produced a cynical, corrupt, vulgar, and shabby musical.”20 Wetzsteon suggested that its exploitative narrative was similar to those of Cabaret and Pippin. But unlike its predecessors, Chicago’s decadence and cynicism was much more pointed because of its

American setting. He derided the beginning of the show’s second act as particularly negative, when Velma (Rivera) haughtily greets the audience with “Hello, suckers, welcome back”—an instance which Wetzsteon described as a “smug gesture of complicity, seemingly welcoming us inside, allowing us to escape self-hatred by laughing at ourselves, [but] actually feels more like being spit on.”21

Despite so many negative reviews, a few critics liked the work. The critic

Martin Gottfried was the leading advocate for both the musical and Fosse. He commented on its virtuosic techniques and vaudevillian presentations: “The ingenuity of stylization keeps the characters unreal and remote, more like puppets than people and impossible to care about.”22

Thus in Gottfried’s opinion, the production should not have disgusted or repelled audiences because its mode of performativity served as a Brechtian distancing effect. However, he failed to

19 John Beaufort, “A New Broadway Season and Already Two Big Hits!,” The Christian Science Monitor, 6 June 1975.

20 Ross Wetzsteon, “Welcome Back, Suckers,” The Village Voice, 11 June 1975.

21 Ibid.

22 Martin Gottfried, “Verdon, Fosse, and Chicago,” New York Post, 4 June 1975.

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contemplate fully the show’s subject. He qualified such matters a few days later in an article praising Fosse for his consummate artistic strength. But while merely acknowledging that the show had no “heart,” Gottfried still contended that Chicago’s production represented its most integral characteristic that made it “musical theater on a tremendous scale.”23

Some other critics similarly focused primarily on production values. Rex Reed praised

Chicago for its show-stopping numbers complemented by its glitzy facade. And, like Gottfried,

Reed considered the dark topic acceptable because of its distance from 1970s culture: “There is a cynical comment beneath the slickness and gloss, about the mockery of judicial process, set in an earlier and more entertaining period to keep things happily removed from the troubles of today.”24 In their reviews, Keitha McLean, Richard Watts, and Jack Kroll likewise pardoned the musical’s subject in favor of its exemplary production and appropriation of vaudevillian tropes, prompting McLean to label Chicago as “escapist” entertainment and a “mindless musical,” which does not require effort from one’s social conscience.25 Yet, such dismissals of Chicago’s social commentary ignored its overall concept of a corrupt American urban society that values fame over lawfulness. These positive reviews deemed the musical’s subject remote or unbelievable—which failed to acknowledge that it had been based on actual events.

23 Martin Gottfried, “Star Directors: Bob Fosse,” New York Post, 7 June 1975. I have found evidence that Gottfried had been the sole critic to Fosse during the director’s hospitalization. An undated 1974 letter from Gottfried to Fosse reads: “This is no way to of a ping-pong rematch. Besides, I’m counting on Chicago for a super hit.” Box 47A, Folder 15, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter BFGVC). This communication suggests that Gottfried had a close relationship with Fosse, and thus he may have been favorably disposed to Chicago.

24 Rex Reed, “It’s Great to Return Home to Chicago!,” Daily News, 6 June 1975.

25 Keitha McLean, “[Review of] Chicago,” Women’s Wear Daily, 4 June 1975; Richard Watts, “Chicago Certain to Make a Killing,” New York Post, 7 June 1975; and Jack Kroll, “My Kind of Town,” Newsweek, 16 June 1975.

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Many theater critics and insiders have since credited Chicago’s cynical content to the show’s director. Mordden claims, “Chicago was truly his [Fosse’s] work,”26 as the director wanted as much control as possible. One way that Fosse achieved this was by retaining many crew and chorus members from his previous production, Pippin. Mordden emphasizes how

Fosse’s style and ideals influenced every element of Chicago’s original production, including

Tony Walton’s design for the show curtain and poster, featuring seven women in “languorous

Fosse poses.”27 In a special New York Times feature on Chicago late in the summer of 1975, critic Stephen Farber placed the musical’s outlook directly onto Fosse’s shoulders and described the production as the director’s acidic valentine to Broadway. Farber summarized how most critics had deemed the property “a visually striking but cold and empty spectacle,” in the way that its social criticism links crime and show business: “Chicago is suffused with a deeply felt sense of horror and outrage that has nothing to do with social protest; the intensity of the musical grows from Fosse’s bitterness toward the showbiz world that has nourished him.”28

Following his multiple heart attacks, hospitalization, and open-heart surgery in late 1974,

Fosse acknowledged his repugnance towards the U.S. justice system, the media, and the entertainment industry:

I’m afraid this show [Chicago] is my image of America right now. . . . It’s about the lack of justice in our legal procedure: how justice and law hardly function at all. It makes some interesting comments on the press, about the way they make celebrities out of killers, exploiting and glamorizing criminals. When you think of people like Charlie Manson, or see Mafia killers publishing their autobiographies, you can see that Chicago isn’t just about the ’20s. It says some things that are pertinent for today, for now.29

26 Mordden, One More Kiss, 129.

27 Mordden, Broadway Babies, 171–72.

28 Stephen Farber, “Bob Fosse’s Acid Valentine,” New York Times, 3 August 1975.

29 As quoted in Wasson, Fosse, 413.

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Fosse’s sardonic outlook saturated Chicago’s visual and aural tone, and drew upon Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt. Fosse relished theatergoers’ expressions of displeasure with the work’s cynicism. Sam Wasson reveals that, when audience members walked out during the middle of a Chicago performance, Fosse would exclaim, “We got ’em!”30

Consequently, several critics took issue with Fosse’s pessimism when reviewing the production. Similar to Barnes, Brendan Gill of found the production disappointing as its superb cast, excellent dancing, glittering set, and period-appropriate music simply served to conceal the musical’s lack of actual substance. But Gill blamed Fosse for the final result: “A tirelessly inventive man, [Fosse] fills the stage with droll tricks and sunny surprises, and we are sorry when we become aware that the tricks and surprises exist not to further a substantial action but to conceal the lack of one.”31 In his review Watt had specifically mentioned Fosse’s choreography as being brilliant for its technique but ultimately unsatisfying and often distracting. Watt described the mostly silent chorus, dressed in evocative attire and undertaking sexy dances, as it “slinks in and out of the main action, posing and moving suggestively and in slow motion,” which relegated the chorus members to being “soulless ornaments to the proceedings.”32 T. E. Kalem likewise characterized the show’s choreography with sultry descriptors, especially the manner in which its stars, Verdon and Rivera, executed

“erotic poetry in motion,” as they were supported by the show’s “bacchanalian” chorus.33

Theater critics and professionals used the tropes of visual eroticism, sardonic humor, and cynicism as representing Chicago’s most salient features, which contributed to the work’s biting

30 As quoted in ibid.

31 Brendan Gill, “Any Town,” The New Yorker, 6 June 1975.

32 Watt, “Not My Kind of Show, Chicago Is.”

33 T. E. Kalem, “Fossephorescence,” Time, 16 June 1975.

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social critique. And ultimately such elements arose from Fosse’s perspective of his industry and life in general. The Wall Street Journal’s Edwin Wilson invoked these tropes when describing

Fosse’s main achievement with Chicago:

Mr. Fosse is saying that three elements in our society—the media, trial law, and show business—have much in common. In their theatricality, their desire for sensationalism, and their emphasis on razzle dazzle, they are inextricably intertwined. In our world we turn criminals into heroes and heroines and dramatize their deeds to the point where we cannot tell fact from fiction. Crime becomes glamorous, no matter how rotten.34

In his biography of Fosse, Gottfried remarks how a “blackness of spirit that had been flowing from Fosse” governed many of the director’s edits to the musical and its original production, including the book, lyrics, scenery, lighting, costuming, and staging.35 Such alterations prompted

Ebb to note, “The atmospheric pressure that [Fosse] imposed on Chicago was just too much for it to sustain.”36

Serendipitous Circumstances

Because of its initial mixed reception, Chicago earned unexpectedly low profits during its first couple of months with moderate ticket sales and few sell-outs. Yet, a series of events helped to increase its box office, thus prolonging its run on Broadway. The first such event came with additional star power. From 8 August to 13 September 1975, replaced an ailing

Verdon in the lead role of Roxie Hart. Verdon underwent throat surgery in late July, having two nodes removed, which required an extensive recovery period that included ten days of enforced silence followed by singing lessons to strengthen her voice.37 Chicago’s producers announced

34 Edwin Wilson, “Show Biz with a Sharp Edge,” The Wall Street Journal, 5 June 1975.

35 Gottfried, All His Jazz, 342. For more about Fosse’s growing cynicism during Chicago’s original production, see Wasson, Fosse, 407–23.

36 As quoted in Gottfried, All His Jazz, 342.

37 Joyce Haber, “Minnelli as Verdon’s ‘,’” , 5 August 1975.

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her substitute on 31 July. Critics and theater professionals regarded Minnelli’s gesture as a

“classy” move and unprecedented for a star of her magnitude to work as a temporary replacement.38

Minnelli’s acceptance of the role generated excitement for the production. On the day of the announcement, long lines of people waiting to purchase tickets formed outside the 46th

Street Theatre. All of Minnelli’s scheduled performances were sold out within a week, during which she prepared for the role. To fill the gap between Verdon’s surgery and Minnelli’s opening, Verdon’s understudy, Lenora Nemetz, played Roxie from 30 July to 7 August.39 The producers’ and creative team’s decision not to entrust the role to the understudy during Verdon’s entire absence suggests that the production would not have survived without a star actress in the lead, which gives credence to the reviewers who had identified the production’s star power as its primary asset.

With its newfound star attraction, Chicago received a veritable second opening week.

However, Minnelli privately wished that her performance not be advertised, because she claimed to be doing this simply as a favor to Fosse, Kander, and Ebb, with whom she had become very close. As a result of her request, Minnelli’s name did not appear on the theater marquee, in the

Playbill, or in any form of advertising. The audience was simply informed of the substitution on the cast billboard in the lobby and during a pre-curtain announcement.40 Initially the producers banned the press from covering Minnelli’s performances, because she did not want to be compared with Verdon. But one of Broadway’s most powerful critics, Barnes, threatened the

38 Earl Wilson, “Liza Will Sub for Ailing Gwen,” New York Post, 31 July 1975.

39 Patricia O’Haire, “She’s the Star—If Only for 9 Days,” Daily News, 8 August 1975.

40 Patricia O’Haire, “For Liza, It’s Fireworks and Flowers,” Sunday News, 10 August 1975. O’Haire’s coverage of Minnelli’s opening night came before the producers’ ban on critics at her substitute performances was lifted.

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producers by suggesting that the New York Times potentially would refuse coverage for any future productions involving any one of the creative team or producers unless critics were allowed to review Minnelli. Consequently Chicago’s producers dropped their policy and agreed to admit the press, who deemed the event “must news.”41

Many critics altered their preliminary verdicts of the show. Barnes considered it a stronger production at his second viewing, but also commented on how Fosse had reworked the production to minimize Minnelli’s dancing. Although praising Minnelli for her superb talents,

Barnes acknowledged that she was an entirely different type of performer from Verdon, who was a stronger dancer while Minnelli was a singer known for films and concerts. Even though Barnes still described Chicago as a “Brechtian outpost of glamour, squalor, and sublime discontent,” he now called it a “must-see” show as he succumbed to some of its “beautifully decadent charms” and identified Minnelli as having brought out Roxie Hart’s “lovable reverberations and schmaltzy bitterness.”42 Other critics, such as Marilyn Stasio, credited Minnelli for improving the production:

For all its breathtaking force, the fabulous talent of Liza Minnelli has had the effect of blunting the show’s keener edges. Verdon’s unsentimental Roxie was a consenting collaborator in the system. Minnelli’s dynamic murderer is much more a decadent society’s victim, a thoughtless, impetuous sinner whose moral innocence is bruised, but essentially uncorrupted.43

Thus, in many critics’ opinions, Minnelli helped to soften the show’s degree of cynicism. More importantly, audiences had a new reason to attend—to see a movie star.

Originally Chicago’s champion, Gottfried actually soured on this casting substitution, presumably because he had initially praised the show for its production format, which changed

41 Hobe Morrison, “Barnes Breaks Ban on Reviews of Liza’s Chicago Pinch-hit,” Variety, 13 August 1975.

42 Clive Barnes, “Liza Minnelli Lends Talents to Chicago,” New York Times, 15 August 1975.

43 Marilyn Stasio, “Lighter ’n Liza,” Cue, 25 August 1975.

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with Minnelli’s presence. While agreeing that both Minnelli’s acceptance and Verdon’s approval of the star replacement exemplified “classy” and “egotistically magnanimous” gestures,

Gottfried panned Minnelli’s abilities:

It would be nice to provide a happy ending for this by finding her now a first rate stage performer, but the truth is that she isn’t. You don’t learn to act in the theater by working night clubs, concerts, and in the movies...... Her sloppy New York dialect is irritating and her comic attitudes are crudely mistaken. She can barely pretend to act. . . . The show itself is contradicted by her dynamic presence, it being essentially its own star. The greatest strength of Chicago is its look—the sensational dance groupings and physical trappings. . . . Minnelli’s star presence distracts one from the dazzle.44

Gottfried defended the work by suggesting that its merits could sustain an audience without star power. Consequently, he received a pile of mail (from Chicago’s angry fans, creative team, and performers) regarding his judgment of Minnelli and the production’s new tone. In a subsequent article, he remained adamant about his initial critique, demeaning Minnelli’s cult appeal and her inadequacies as a stage performer when compared to Verdon. He did not consider a simple substitution to be in itself a “theatrical event”—since such situations are the reason to have understudies—and he declared the producers’ handling of the situation to be rather “amateur.”45

But Gottfried was alone in his chastising Minnelli, as other reviewers recognized her superb performance and movie-star status, which had improved ticket sales. Minnelli’s run received extensive coverage as far as the West Coast to inform her Hollywood following, and rumors circulated about the possibility of Minnelli starring in a film adaptation of Chicago.46

Furthermore, Minnelli’s presence helped to develop a sustaining audience for the stage

44 Martin Gottfried, “It’s Liza for Gwen in Breezy Chicago,” New York Post, 14 August 1975.

45 Martin Gottfried, “It’s Not a Cabaret, Old Chum,” New York Post, 13 September 1975.

46 William Glover, “What’s Chicago Between Friends?,” Los Angeles Times, 8 August 1975; Rex Reed, “Liza Dazzles in Chicago; Mitchum a Great Detective,” Daily News, 15 August 1975; and Frank Meyer, “After B’way, Liza Minnelli All Tuned Up for Chicago Film,” Variety, 17 September 1975.

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production beyond her scheduled performances, as one of Chicago’s producers, Robert Fryer, explained: “Our business is 40 percent repeats. People who have already seen Gwen as Roxie

Hart now want to see Liza. And people who have only seen Liza come out of the theater saying:

‘We’ll have to see Verdon, too.’ The scalpers are getting $50 per ticket now to see either star, since the show is a sellout for months.”47 Thus, the rotation of Verdon to Minnelli to Verdon in the late summer of 1975 generated newfound enthusiasm for Chicago, which carried the production into the next Tony Award season, when it received eleven nominations.

Despite having high expectations for Chicago at the 1976 Tony Awards, the show’s producers and creative team were disappointed by it not winning in any category. Two of the collaborators actually voiced their resentment towards members of the Tony Award selection committee: Fryer in a 26 April 1976 letter to Alex Cohen, and Fosse in an undated letter to

Marilyn Stasio. Both disapproved of many of the committee’s selections, specifically George

Rose being eligible for and winning the Best Performance by a Leading in a Musical award for a revival of , which had opened on 25 March 1976—which Fryer and

Fosse considered very late in the committee’s voting process, having opened less than a month before the ceremony.48 Also, they were angered by the nomination and win for Donna

McKechnie as the Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical. They argued that her role in A Chorus Line was a supporting one, and that she should not be put in the same category with stars such as Verdon and Rivera. As Fryer objected, “I am perfectly happy that we received

47 As quoted in Joyce Haber, “Chicago Liza’s Kind of Musical,” Los Angeles Times, 19 August 1975. Chicago’s ticket prices in 1975 were normally between $16 and $18. Later that Fall, Chicago benefitted from the resolution of the twenty-five-day strike of Local 802, American Federation of Musicians. It was among four musicals that reopened on 13 October 1975, and it received a standing ovation at the onset as Broadway patrons were excited to see any sort of musical theater, even the cynical Chicago. Peter Coutros and Mark Liff, “B’way Melody Heard Again on the Great White Hooray,” Daily News, 14 October 1975.

48 Adding insult to injury, Rose won this award for his portrayal of Alfred P. Doolittle, truly a minor supporting role in My Fair Lady, beating out both Orbach and Ian Richardson (Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady).

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eleven nominations, but I do think an injustice was paid to Verdon, Rivera, Fosse, Ebb, and

Kander.”49 While voicing his displeasure, Fosse recognized the negative impact that the Tony shut-out would have on the production: “I confess that I am totally partisan. I would have liked the Chicago performers to win in these categories. The Tony’s and the Oscar’s have gone way beyond ‘honor.’ They now mean money at the box office. . . . I believe that a show that wins

‘Best’ and/or one or more starring awards can possibly add a year to its run.”50

Following its shut-out at the Tony Awards, Chicago lasted a little over a year. Excitement for the production gradually faded, while its more successful rival, A Chorus Line, continued unabated. Chicago eventually lost two of its most precious assets when Nemetz replaced Rivera as Velma Kelly on 28 July 1976 and Ann Reinking replaced Verdon as Roxie Hart on 7 February

1977. Both replacements remained in these roles until the show’s closing on 27 August 1977.

Orbach played the role of Billy Flynn for Chicago’s entire Broadway run and subsequent North

American tour, when he was joined by Penny Worth (Roxie) and Carolyn Kirsch (Velma).

Chicago’s first tour played in eleven cities from August 1977 to August 1978.51

Though New York critics comprise the primary source for the musical’s reception,

Chicago’s struggles during its first national tour also speak to its limited appeal. Morale surrounding the national tour quickly soured as the show met resistance at its first stop, The

Municipal Theatre Association of St. Louis (hereafter ), from 29 August to

4 September 1977. The Muny’s management requested that Chicago’s creative team change

49 Box 52B, Folder 3, BFGVC.

50 Box 47C, Folder 11, BFGVC.

51 Box 94, Folder 8, Fred Ebb Papers, LPA Mss 2005-001, The for the Performing Arts, New York (hereafter FEP). The itinerary for Chicago’s first North American tour was as follows: St. Louis, 29 August to 4 September (1977); Boston, 12 September to 15 October; Toronto, 17 October to 12 November; Miami, 14 to 26 November; , 28 November to 31 December; Cleveland, 2 to 14 January (1978); Baltimore, 16 January to 4 February; Philadelphia, 6 to 18 February; Chicago, 20 February to 6 May; Los Angeles, 9 May to 24 June; and San Francisco, 27 June to 5 August.

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most of the show’s foul language, including the elimination of “Class,” which contains an excess of vulgar words. In a 28 July 1977 letter from E. R. Culver III (The Muny’s General

Manager) to Ira Bernstein (one of Chicago’s contracting agents), Culver listed the vulgarities that The Muny’s management wanted altered, because they believed that these would be

“objectionable to our audience (as well as to other ‘family’ audiences outside of New York

City).”52

Despite initial protests from Fosse and Ebb, Chicago’s creative team ultimately relented and authorized certain modifications to the script for The Muny’s production. This mostly involved replacing derogatory terms simply with “Bleep” or with some of the following suitable alternatives: saying “S.O.B” or “dirty louse” instead of “son of a bitch”; using “damn” rather than the more blasphemous “God damn”; June remembering “You’ve been messin’ with the milkman!” and not “screwin’ the milkman!” when she recounts her crime during the “Cell Block

Tango”; and Roxie exclaiming “I gotta tinkle!” as opposed to the standard coda to her first appearance, “I gotta pee!” At the insistence of Fosse and Ebb, however, the song “Class” was retained.53

Chicago encountered more obstacles at subsequent stops on the tour. Concern grew for the show during its run at Chicago’s Blackstone Theater (now the Merle Reskin) from

20 February to 6 May 1978 when reviewers commented on how the production did rather poorly at the box office. But its producers decided to correct this problem by replacing the tour’s lead actresses with the show’s original leads of Verdon and Rivera—a rare strategy for a production

52 Box 95, Folder 44, FEP.

53 Box 55, Folder 3, FEP.

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during the middle of a tour stop.54 The inclusion of Verdon and Rivera improved ticket sales and saved the tour, which again demonstrated how star appeal served as the antidote for the work’s cynicism. Verdon and Rivera remained with the tour through its completion, which proved to be

Verdon’s final engagement as a stage performer.

Similar to the situation at The Muny, Chicago’s tour met further challenges at its final two stops: Los Angeles’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion from 9 May to 24 June 1978, and San

Francisco’s Orpheum Theater from 27 June to 5 August 1978. Both stops were part of

California’s Civic Light Opera series, whose management suggested that Chicago’s creative team soften the show’s vulgarity by changing some of the foul language and cutting “Class” to accommodate the expected conservative audience. Civic Light Opera’s list of requested changes was very similar to that of The Muny’s from the previous year.55 again Fosse and Ebb resisted most of the requests, but did allow for the few aforementioned modifications that they felt did not alter the show’s style or narrative. In a 23 April 1978 letter to Fosse, Ebb described how he was actually “offended” by such requests to edit the show’s text and “loathed” making any changes, including his refusal to eliminate “Class” as this number “fortifies our central idea, and is necessary to the structure and strength of both the Matron and Velma.”56 While most of the foul language and sentiment remained, both productions did well financially—primarily because of the star power of Verdon and Rivera. However, notices and reviews of the productions often warned patrons about the show’s content and frequently referenced its

54 Glenn Syse, “New Names to Sell: Will Verdon and Rivera Razzle-dazzle Chicago?,” Chicago Sun- Times, 26 March 1978.

55 Despite the continued success of Chicago’s 1996 revival and changes in cultural mores, the musical’s content still runs afoul with theater management in conservative cities. For example, a 2014 tour stop in Dubai not only encountered similar resistance to the libretto’s vulgarities but also to the female actors’ provocative outfits.

56 Box 95, Folder 44, FEP.

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contemptuous story.57 Following Chicago’s first North American tour, enthusiasm gradually waned for the show, as its next national tour did not occur until after the success of its Broadway revival, which rewrote the musical’s legacy.

Reprieving Chicago

In terms of casts, it is impossible to quantify whether Chicago’s 1975 or 1996 production had the greater star power. But the various critics and scholars who have compared both productions suggest that the revival’s opening-night cast did not surpass (and perhaps did not come close to reaching) the star magnitude of the original production. This perspective is confirmed when comparing the two productions’ star billings. For the original production, its poster, copy advertising, and Playbill title page headlined the three stars’ names. In contrast, the revival’s leads did not possess such billing as their names were listed underneath the title.

The initial cast of the revival featured as Velma Kelly, Reinking reprising her earlier role as Roxie Hart, as Billy Flynn, and as Amos Hart.

From this lineup, only Neuwirth was recognized as a Broadway “star” of the mid-1990s, aided by her impressive theater credits and numerous film and television appearances. Naughton had won a Best Actor Tony for the musical six years earlier, but his theater career paled in comparison to that of his predecessor, Orbach. Reinking and Grey represented iconic names from the annals of Broadway, but both were well past their primes. While critics praised

Neuwirth and Naughton for their exemplary performances, several reviewers considered

Reinking and Grey too old for their parts, but which the critics pardoned because of the

“vintage” nature of the Encores! series. Many critics faulted Reinking for her limited acting and

57 Lawrence Christon, “Chicago Backed Up by Boulder Dam,” Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1978; Gardner McKay, “Original Cast Sparkles in Fosse’s Sassy, Brassy Chicago,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 12 May 1978; Stanley Eichelbaum, “Cool, Tough, Electrifying Musical,” San Francisco Examiner, 28 June 1978; Paul Hertelendy, “Chicago Breezes into S.F., More Brazen Than Brassy,” Oakland Tribune, 30 June 1978; and Richard Simon, “Making Evil Delightful,” Sacramento Union, 3 July 1978.

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singing abilities, while Neuwirth dominated the stage as the much stronger all-around talent.

However, most critics agreed that the true “stars” of Chicago’s revival were Walter Bobbie’s direction and Reinking’s choreography “in the style of Bob Fosse,” which did not simply imitate but effectively revitalized the exhilarating showmanship of the late director-choreographer.58

Just as the visual features of Chicago’s original production and revival were lauded in similar language, its cynicism remained as the primary descriptor for the work’s content.

Following the musical’s Encores! performances, New York Times critic Ben Brantley recalled the “glibly cynical and artificially cold” nature of the original production, as well as Fosse’s

“love-hate relationship” with Broadway: “Chicago was, in a sense, the evil twin of its rival musical [A Chorus Line], as acerbic and cold-hearted as the other was sentimental and warm.”59

Yet, Brantley regarded Chicago’s concert performances much more favorably than did his predecessors who had panned the original production. One such predecessor, Barnes, now with the New York Post, actually had the opportunity to review the work’s presentation at Encores!.

Barnes found the newer version (albeit trimmed to a concert setting) much more effective and enjoyable than when he first saw the show:

By reducing the story to the bare bones of a cynical anecdote about notoriety and show-biz, Walter Bobbie’s staging could concentrate on those show-biz vaudeville bits and pieces always at the musical’s formerly obscured heart. . . . What a cast! And what a pity the show cannot have an extended lifespan after this well-timed encore!60

58 Aileen Jacobson, “Razzle-dazzle and a Killer Celebrity,” Newsday, 4 May 1996; Donald Lyons, “Bob Fosse’s Chicago Back on Broadway,” The Wall Street Journal, 15 November 1996; and Marc Peyser, “A Hot Wind Blows In from Chicago,” Newsweek, 25 November 1996.

59 Ben Brantley, “Musical’s Brief Revival Mixes Joy and Contempt,” New York Times, 4 May 1996.

60 Clive Barnes, “In Chicago Revival, Encores! Scores!,” New York Post, 6 May 1996.

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But Chicago did earn an extended lifespan with its transformation into a Broadway revival with a fleshed-out production that included more staging and a complete book when compared to the

Encores! concerts, while still retaining its stripped-down style.61

With the reviews of Chicago’s Broadway revival, the critique of the musical’s cynicism changed. When comparing this favorable revival to the show’s initial mixed reception, Brantley cited a moment that Wetzsteon had found reproachable in the original production:

By the time the priceless Bebe Neuwirth . . . greets the audience at the beginning of the second act with the salutation “Hello, suckers!,” it’s a label we’re all to happy to accept. The America portrayed on stage may be a vision of hell, but the way it’s being presented flies us right into musical heaven...... This new incarnation . . . makes an exhilarating case both for Chicago as a musical for the ages and for the essential legacy of Fosse, whose ghost has never been livelier than it is here.62

Brantley’s enthusiasm for the show’s unscrupulous sentiment, complemented by the specter of

Fosse, suggests that contemporary critics and audiences wanted to be seduced by Chicago’s chilling indictment.

Barnes also expressed newfound excitement for the musical’s revival, while still sensing the presence of Fosse. Qualifying his initial disappointment with Chicago, Barnes’s “re-review” declared the original production to have been “over-produced and over-pretentious.”63 But

Barnes does not explain why that was the case, except to point to the simplicity of the show’s new guise. Otherwise he acknowledges many elements that remained the same between the two productions: the show’s vulgar language and cynical narrative; its great performances by strong leads; its Brechtian presentation of vaudeville numbers accompanied by an on-stage orchestra; and Fosse’s sardonic imagery, such as “synchronized gesticulations, grotesque frozen poses,

61 Clive Barnes, “Chicago Second to None,” New York Post, 15 November 1996.

62 Ben Brantley, “A Lively Legacy: A Come-hither Air,” New York Times, 15 November 1996.

63 Barnes, “Chicago Second to None.”

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sexy snarls, undulating shoulders, swiveling pelvises, and tipped derby with the hand insolently splayed on the brim.”64 The revival likewise changed the perspective of Daily News critic

Howard Kissel, who initially considered the work to be a “trashy show,” but now considered the revival to be an important theatrical event, which “reminds us that musicals are about songs and performers, not scenery.”65 However, Barnes and Kissel failed to explain why they were no longer disappointed by the show’s amoral plot, which had been a major element that they denounced in the original production, but which still existed in the revival.

Similar to Brantley’s favorable reception of the revival, many critics noted how

Chicago’s pessimistic content seemed more acceptable in the 1990s than in previous decades.

Variety’s Greg Evans deemed the show in its style and sentiment to be a proper tribute to Fosse and his cynical nature, “yet the cynicism is presented with such panache—not to mention out- and-out good humor—that it’s hard to imagine any audience being put off.”66 In Linda Winer’s

Newsday review of the revival’s opening night, she described how the audience seemed to eagerly anticipate all of the musical’s biting elements (including the emcee’s opening speech and the plethora of sultry song-and-dance). More significantly Winer qualified the show’s cynicism as an asset, not a hindrance: “It is bliss. It is also edgy, erotic, cynical, funny, nonstop stylish, and though based on a 21-year-old show, so prescient about ’90s justice, the press, and celebrity

64 Ibid. Barnes’s change of opinion towards Chicago had precedence. New York Times critic Brook Atkinson altered his judgment of Pal Joey between its 1940 original production and 1952 revival. When reviewing the former, Atkinson rhetorically asked, “Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” while in 1952 he deemed the work “a pioneer in the moving back of musical frontiers, for it tells an integrated story with a knowing point of view.” As quoted in Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 286.

65 Howard Kissel, “Putting the Chic in Chicago: Revival Better Than Original,” Daily News, 4 May 1996; and Howard Kissel, “Great Cast and Songs Turn Musical into a ‘Class’ Act,” Daily News, 19 November 1996.

66 Greg Evans, “[Review of] Chicago,” Variety, 15 November 1996.

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that it’s almost eerie.”67 Time’s Richard Zoglin acknowledged that Chicago did not fit within the category of “sure bet” revivals, because it had not been long enough to develop nostalgia and because of its infamously dark material. But the revival achieved great success because of the

1990s redefinition of the musical’s cynicism, as Zoglin indicated, “What seemed cynical in 1975 is now au courant. Chicago hasn’t merely aged well; it has come of age.”68

Chicago’s revival contended with another Kander and Ebb musical at the 1997 Tony

Awards: Steel Pier. Kander was disheartened by Steel Pier’s mixed reception, but still considered this work as being “the most memorable experience of his career,” as it was the most

“romantic” show that he and Ebb had ever written—a quality more in line with Kander’s tastes.69

Like Chicago’s original production, Steel Pier received eleven Tony nominations but won none.

Unlike its predecessor, however, Steel Pier suffered a short run of only seventy-six performances from 24 April to 28 June 1997. While Chicago’s original production had one primary rival in A

Chorus Line, Steel Pier was beaten at the Tony Awards by two musicals, which won five awards apiece: and the revival of Chicago.70 Thus, Kander and Ebb’s most “cynical” musical

(which was more to Ebb’s tastes as a jaded New Yorker) dominated the duo’s most “romantic” musical (in line with Kander’s “sentimental” Midwestern tastes).71

67 Linda Winer, “A Murderers’ Row That’ll Slay You,” Newsday, 15 November 1996.

68 Richard Zoglin, “Chicago Was Once a Problem: Now’s It’s a Triumph,” Time, 25 November 1996.

69 John C. Tibbetts, “And the Music Goes ’Round: An Interview with John Kander,” in Reflections on American Music: The Twentieth Century and the New Millennium—A Collection of Essays in Honor of the College Music Society, ed. James R. Heintze and Michael Saffle (New York: Pendragon Press, 2000), 190.

70 The 1997 Tony Awards were held on 1 June. At this ceremony, Titanic won for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (), Best Original Score (), Best Orchestrations (), and Best Scenic Design (Stewart Laing). Chicago won for Best Revival of a Musical and bested Steel Pier for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical (Neuwirth), Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical (Naughton), Best Direction of a Musical (Bobbie), Best Choreography (Reinking), and Best Lighting Design ().

71 Tibbetts, “And the World Goes ’Round,” 195 and 198.

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A change in society’s attitude towards Chicago’s subject softened the negative critique of its cynicism, which critics and audiences no longer found unacceptable. In a New York Times extended feature on the revival shortly after its opening, Vincent Canby explained how the musical’s cynicism was a quality that was in tune with the current era: “With the multi- channeled ubiquity of television in the 1990s, we have become an avid audience for a world more often concerned with presentation than content. As our world plays to us, we observe it with detachment, demanding only that it entertain us so we can accept it as showbiz.”72

72 Vincent Canby, “In an Age of Con, Cynical Makes Sweet Music,” New York Times, 24 November 1996.

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Chapter 3

American Society’s Changing Perception

of Crime and Deviance during the Late Twentieth Century

Chicago’s reversal of success between the late 1970s and the late 1990s seems predicated on the American public’s oscillating attitudes between revulsion and sympathy towards the glorification of crime and celebrity, which the musical strongly exemplifies. Such swings in societal perspective have historical precedence, according to criminologist Dario Melossi who describes a paradigmatic shift between two scenarios that modern societies frequently experience:

One scenario sees a fractured, quickly changing society expressing a concept of itself as a plural and conflictual entity, within which deviance, or indeed crime, is relative to the standpoint of the one who is doing the defining, and the representation of the criminal is an essentially contested representation: some criminals, at least, play more the role of innovators and heroes than that of . . . . Such “open” types of society have followed or preceded societal periods when, at least from the standpoint of elites, the fracturing and disorganization reached “unthinkable excesses,” and the requirement for re-instituting a unity of authority, purpose, and hierarchy . . . asserted itself as a matter of social life and death. During these periods, predominant (“monist”) theories of social order were oriented toward unity and cohesion, the normative order was consensually shared, and views about criminals were centered on the label of “the public enemy.” Wrongdoers were now seen as morally repugnant individuals, in the eyes of criminologists and the public alike, especially because offenders were considered to bring a deadly threat to society’s moral order.1

This shift between “open” and “monist” outlooks exemplifies the sociological theory of “long cycles.”

Melossi explains a modern society’s “long cycle” as being approximately a fifty-year time-span consisting of “peaks” and “troughs,” which usually depend upon domestic and

1 Dario Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society: Thinking about Crime in Europe and America (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 249–50. This text expands on ideas initially presented in Dario Melossi, “Changing Representations of the Criminal,” British Journal of Criminology 40, no. 2 (2000): 296–320.

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international socio-economic developments or regressions. A society reaches its “peak” following a long period of prosperity (approximately two to three decades), which suddenly ends as the state experiences an economic emergency. Subsequently, the emergency persuades the populace to call for more severe forms of control and punishments for various cultural subversions, such as deviance and crime. This incurs a “crisis” epoch of similar length to that of the previous prosperity. This period of crisis leads to a society’s “trough,” when the crisis finally has been vanquished and prosperity begins anew. During this new period, cultural control becomes less severe as the public becomes more inclined to offer rehabilitation for criminals as an alternative to harsher punishments.2

Melossi alludes to a corresponding fifty-year “long cycle” occurring in the United States from 1945 to 1995, concluding one year before Chicago’s performances at Encores! and revival on Broadway. Following World War II, the nation experienced a fiscal recovery that gradually shaped an American culture more lax than before the war. As Melossi describes, this atmosphere led to the “deeply subversive élan” of the 1960s and early 1970s, preceding the United States’ latest “peak” circa 1975 (the year of Chicago’s first opening on Broadway), which in turn provoked the onset of America’s “crisis decades” from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.3

Incarceration rates and criminological perspectives are strongly linked to political and societal trends, which potentially influence popular opinion towards various cultural products— such as the Broadway musical. This chapter examines prevalent criminological, sociological, and political theories regarding the late twentieth century in order to ascertain the changing public opinion of criminal behavior between the dates of Chicago’s Broadway productions. However,

2 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 229–32.

3 Ibid., 230.

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regarding such sociological theories, criminologists David Downes and Paul Rock advise, “no particular theory can cover every facet of every problem yet stay practicable and coherent.”4 The sociology of crime and deviance represents a field abundant with theories, each rife with ambiguities, differentiations, data, limitations of findings, and often biased political or social agendas, in addition to criminology’s and sociology’s polyvalent definitions for “culture.”5 But negotiating various theories from the eras in question reveals the prevailing societal perspectives towards the glorification of crime and celebrity as exemplified in Chicago.

Criminological Understandings of the United States

In order to appreciate the radicalization that occurred in U.S. society towards the end of the twentieth century, one must first understand the fundamental criminological ideals on which the culture was based. The country’s founders descended from emigrants who wanted liberation from religious and political persecution, and consequently these forefathers sought to create a new society free of these ills, while using their parental European system as a model. Melossi contextualizes the ensuing independent nation as a “genuine workers’ society” with an

“extremely dynamic social model, able to expand to ever new markets, and exercise hegemony over wide expanses of land.”6 This Republic’s first social principle of control was built upon the ideology of Protestantism, especially concerning New England culture, which predominantly served as the moral touchstone for the nation’s socio-economic direction. This Protestant ethic placed an emphasis on community and equality.

4 David Downes and Paul Rock, Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule Breaking, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21.

5 For more on the diversities of and ambiguities within criminology, see Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 1–48. For a criminological perspective on the various definitions of “culture,” see David Garland, “Concepts of Culture in the Sociology of Punishment,” Theoretical Criminology 10, no. 4 (2006): 419–47.

6 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 85–88.

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Melossi describes the early U.S. penal system as being based on the principle of

“horizontal separation, the isolation of the criminal/sinner from his companions, and the establishment instead of vertical communication with the representatives of religious and temporal authority.”7 This bore resemblance to European monastic life and corresponded with

Martin Luther’s political ideals, although with a negative exclusionary effect. However, Melossi identifies a cognitive dissonance with such a democratic society that professed enlightenment ideals, while it actually enacted harsh oppression and suffering in its penitentiaries.

Demonstrating more exclusivity than several contemporaneous European penal institutions, the early U.S. system of criminal control operated with a great deal of inequality, which disadvantaged those at the bottom of the social who could not afford indulgences within the legal system.8

Developed around the turn of the twentieth century, the “Chicago School” of sociology represented a significant advancement in the discipline. Among the leaders in the sociology of urbanism and crime in the 1920s and 1930s, researchers, such as Robert

Park, Louis Wirth, Ernest Burgess, and Nels Anderson, required an approach that could practically apply theories to a large urban center with frequent expansion and a broad continuum of cultures.9 Their ethnographic methodology utilized private documentation, anthropological fieldwork, and court and census records. Analyses of these sources provided criminologists with a means of distinguishing among different city districts, which individually were labeled either as a “natural area” or a “zone in transition.” While the former label referred to a community with

7 Ibid., 91.

8 Ibid., 88–98.

9 Park and fellow University of Chicago sociologist George Herbert Mead integrated formalism and pragmatism to establish the foundations for American sociology. Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 55–56.

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inhabitants that exhibit normative behavior, the latter denotes a “turbulent area” that stands apart from the other districts with its high levels of crime and deviance.10

Melossi regards the Chicago School to have been much more inclusive than the initial

Protestant social theory of the United States. Because of their close proximity to their subjects,

Chicago criminologists developed an “appreciation” of the various “deviant” underworlds, which grew from the flood of European “outcasts” that the city gained.11 Wirth encapsulated several of the Chicago School’s social theories in his 1938 essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life.”12 Melossi describes this essay’s hypotheses regarding the consequences from the diversity of Chicago’s new urbanism:

In such a new situation, the old type of solidarity . . . that was typical of traditional society is being increasingly replaced by competition and a formal kind of social control. Secondary relationships replace primary ones. The urban dweller is faced with a trade- off. Whereas she acquires freedom from traditional controls, she loses spontaneity, a shared morality, and feelings of community and belonging. The possibility of “anomie” and “predatory relationships” therefore ensues.13

As Melossi mentions, new criminological perspectives derived from the Chicago School—many of them being types of “strain theory,” which focus on the detachment from societal consensus.

Based on the theories of French sociologist Émile Durkheim in the 1890s, anomie refers to the absence of law or moral standards within a society. In the 1930s American sociologist Robert K.

Merton applied this premise to U.S. culture. He explained anomie as an individual trying to attain societal goals by non-standard means. Merton characterized the nation as an assemblage of

10 Ibid., 72–73. From the 1880s to 1920s, Chicago was America’s fastest growing city because of its massive influx of the European working-class. Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 103–4.

11 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 99–105.

12 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): 1–24.

13 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 126–27.

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different sects of people who all shared the goal of attaining the American Dream, but some citizens strove for such success via unlawful avenues.14

Another derivative of the Chicago School is subcultural theory of delinquency, which became a common sociological perspective in the 1960s and 1970s. Criminologists of that era used this method to create distinct cultural layers with categories based on class, age, community, and gender. Based on this model, lower-class minorities typically received the

“subculture” stigma. Downes and Rock describe the hierarchy applied within subculture theory during this era:

Overall, . . . there loomed in stable ascendancy the “dominant” culture: White Anglo- Saxon Protestant culture, the ascetic, achievement-orientated, highly competitive, middle- class way of life. Everyone was pulled to this centre of cultural gravity: none could escape its clutches, though in line with the model underlying Merton’s theory of anomie, those most embroiled in the system’s imperfections could kick against it in various ways. Deviant subcultures could be originated as a reaction against it; once they came into being, they became a form of constraint in themselves. Delinquents acted out delinquent subcultures.15

With this effect of delinquency perpetuating itself, criminologists such as Travis Hirschi and

Michael R. Gottfredson assumed the responsibility of discussing such deviant behavior with the social agenda of promoting public morality. This form of “control theory” promotes ethical behavior by emphasizing the stark cost of unlawfulness and striking some degree of fear into both the “dominant” white, middle-class culture and the various subcultures.16

News media of the 1970s perpetuated this model of social hierarchy and public “control.”

Sociologist Sanford Sherizen describes the sensationalist nature of media reports on crime during this decade: “These news stories contain specialized images of crime, images which have little to

14 Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 97–134.

15 Ibid., 133–34.

16 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 204–8.

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do with the realities or complexities of crime. . . . The mass media audience becomes informed but not knowledgeable, interested about details but dulled by overstimulation, concerned about understanding but limited in comprehending.”17 Sherizen carried out an empirical study that identified occurrences and portrayals of crimes in four Chicagoan newspapers in 1975. Murder or manslaughter represented approximately half of the crimes reported, despite theft and other similar misdemeanor violations occurring more than one hundred times more frequently. With very little contraction of homicide reporting, these newspapers demonstrated sensationalism and overstimulation of the populace—as indicative of 1970s (and later) U.S. media.18

Because the Chicago School, anomie, and subculturalism all emphasized the differentiation of social sects, they consequently generated some degree of about their subjects, especially regarding minorities and members of the lower class. To correct these stereotypes, new criminological theories emerged in the 1970s. Radical criminology aimed to correct structural inequalities associated with class and race. This type of criminology-from- below paved the way for feminist criminology to develop.19

Second-wave feminism reformed certain aspects of America’s politics, liberal arts, and social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, which included the emergence of feminist criminology with the influence of pioneers such as Frances Heidensohn and Carol Smart.20 This movement

17 Sanford Sherizen, “Social Creation of Crime News: All the News Fitted to Print,” in Deviance and Mass Media, ed. Charles Winick (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1978), 206–7.

18 Ibid., 210–15. Sherizen points out that 1970s U.S. media’s conservative perspective of crime was due to most crime reporters of this decade typically being older men with little formal education and conservative political attitudes, especially compared with other fields’ reporters who were usually younger and had liberal-arts backgrounds.

19 Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 257 and 278.

20 James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 43; Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 306; and Zsófia Anna Tóth, Merry Murderers: The Farcical (Re)Figuration of the Femme Fatale in Maurine Dallas Watkins’ Chicago (1927) and Its Various Adaptations (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 8–9.

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sought to dispel many false assumptions about gender definitions in the various academic disciplines as well as the propagated stereotypes in the mass media. Sociologist Gaye Tuchman documents how 1950s–1970s American media illustrated misogynistic societal values that problematized women, despite this demographic representing approximately 51 percent of the population and more than 40 percent of the work force during the 1970s. Tuchman concludes:

“Working women are condemned. Others are trivialized: they are symbolized as child-like adornments who need to be protected or they are dismissed to the protective confines of the home. In sum, they are subject to symbolic annihilation.”21 Activist Helen Butcher recognizes how such trivialization of women in traditional media of this time occurred through fragmentation and over-simplification:

We find that woman’s representation in the media is orientated round the images of “mother,” “housewife,” “wife,” and “sexual object.” These are the “norms” within which women are pushed to conform, which individual women have to negotiate. They all represent woman as negativity, woman as oppressed: she only exists through her relationships to men, she can only be consumed by men.22

Feminist criminology developed as a critique of the era’s dominant criminologies that often neglected the subject of female criminality. Downes and Rock describe how “unfeminist” criminologists commonly assumed women as being “irrational, compulsive, and slightly neurotic.”23 Moreover, such criminologies primarily considered the sexual deviance of women, with more emphasis on prostitution than on rape—the latter usually discussed in terms of having been encouraged or falsely exaggerated by the female victim. As Downes and Rock explain,

21 Gaye Tuchman, “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media” in The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance, and the Mass Media, rev. ed., ed. Stanly Cohen and Young (London: Constable, 1981), 169–70.

22 Helen Butcher, et al., “Images of Women in the Media,” in The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance, and the Mass Media, rev. ed., ed. Stanly Cohen and Jock Young (London: Constable, 1981), 325.

23 Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 288.

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these misogynistic studies also attempted to reveal empirically “that rates of female crime are much the same as those of male crime, but appear far lower because of under-reporting, lower detection, and greater leniency in prosecution and sentencing.”24

To counteract this androcentric view of the system, feminist criminologists began shifting the victim-status on to women in order to reveal that women are actually over-controlled (such as with prostitution) and under-protected (such as with rape and domestic violence cases, where men are often treated leniently).25 These feminist studies have used the data concerning low crime rates of female offenders to answer the question of why people do not commit deviance. Downes and Rock summarize that the solution “lay in the differential application of formal and informal social control, women being more prone to emotional regulation by intimates in private space, men to impersonal control by officials in public space.”26

But, along with other poststructuralist perspectives, feminism did not fully gain status as a standard sub-discipline within sociology and criminology until the 1990s (with third-wave feminism), and thus it could not sway mass public opinion or policy in the 1970s.27 The dominant criminological trends preceding this era all demonstrated some aspect of inequality with regard to their subjects. Early American Protestantism had advocated complete separation of deviants from society, while the ethnographic twentieth-century models (Chicago School, anomie, and subculturalism) still relied on some degree of class, racial, and gender stereotypes.

24 Ibid., 290.

25 Ibid., 295–300.

26 Ibid., 306.

27 Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out, 43; and Tóth, Merry Murderers, 8–9.

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America’s “Right Turn” during the 1970s

In order to counter various radical (or “New Left”) cultural movements that had flourished during the 1960s, neo-conservatism emerged as a dominant force by the mid-1970s, which swayed American public sentiment to the right.28 Political scientist William G. Mayer undertook a study that gauged the variations in public opinion on a variety of issues between

1960 and 1988. He reached his conclusions through an assemblage of several different surveys from various nation-wide polling organizations. Mayer’s findings largely follow Melossi’s “long cycle” model with a change in the social environment occurring during this same period.29

Mayer observes that the United States experienced growing liberalism from 1960 to

1965, amidst the nation’s economic and cultural upswing. Subsequently, 1966–1973 represented one of the society’s most volatile eras with regards to culture and politics. During this time, despite public opinion becoming more aware of liberal agendas (such as racial and gender equality, sexual freedom, gay liberation, and foreign policy reform), the total ideological framework was quite ambiguous as no single party had yet gained autonomous control.30

Mayer indicates the “The Great Right Turn” towards majority conservatism began in

1968. This ideological shift became slightly deterred by scandals surrounding the Nixon administration; but such controversies were less about political affiliation and more about the public’s growing wariness of government corruption, which actually fed the conservative platform that proposed a need for smaller government. The year 1974 provided a significant

28 Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out, 10–12 and 26–29.

29 William G. Mayer, The Changing American Mind: How and Why American Public Opinion Changed between 1960 and 1988 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 4 and 112. The survey topics that Mayer primarily focuses on include “the death penalty, busing, school prayer, abortion, and the ERA; defense spending, arms control, and military intervention; taxes, spending, welfare, regulation, and the environment.”

30 Ibid., 14–15.

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turning point towards the conservative stronghold through several events: a considerable reduction of America’s presence in Vietnam, the resolution of the Watergate scandal with

Nixon’s resignation on 9 August, numerous race riots (including those in Boston, Detroit, and

Morristown, NJ), and the expansion of the welfare program. These events all influenced U.S. public opinion to view negatively upon the country’s direction. Further compounded by nation- wide energy shortages, runaway inflation, and a diminishing economy in the early 1970s, panic grew amongst the American public, who consequently called for a shift to more conservative social and moral values than those expressed in the previous decade.31 Historian Dominic

Sandbrook labels this ideological transition as the “collapse of liberalism” and “rise of conservatism” in the 1970s, when even Democrats “shifted to the right” with the election of the

“fiscally conservative” Jimmy Carter in 1976.32

Melossi contextualizes the “downswing” in the United States from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s as the “crisis decades,” when several new societal obstacles arose, while paradoxically certain social inequalities diminished (such as those related to the civil rights and women’s rights movements). The new obstacles included severe economic reform, greater class division, stringent control of the working class, and rising unemployment—the latter of which coincided with a decrease with Americans’ average wages, as throngs of women entered the job market. Furthermore, rising crime rates during the liberal 1960s prompted the growing popularity

31 Ibid., 16 and 123. The United States officially ended its involvement with the Vietnam Conflict on 15 August 1973 with the passing of the Case-Church Amendment. However, the military gradually reduced its troops in Vietnam until 1975.

32 Dominic Sandbrook, “American Politics in the 1990s and ,” in American Thought and Culture in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2008), 24–25.

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of radical conservatism, which endeavored to deter the various forms of deviance that liberalism had allowed.33

Ultra-conservative speakers, such as Barry Goldwater in the late 1960s and Spiro Agnew in the 1970s, attested that the increase in crime represented only a fraction of the potential disruption that liberal and minority agendas could have on societal values. These ultra- conservatives labeled any subversive elements of the burgeoning countercultures as “crime” or

“terrorism,” while they simultaneously popularized notions of “traditional” culture (meaning middle- or upper-class, white, and non-urban).34 Policy makers depicted criminal elements as being part of an unwanted “risk-society,” in which criminals represented “conscious risk-takers” rather than simply wrongdoers.35 This type of depiction followed the policy recommendations of

James Q. Wilson—an influential political scientist who specialized in criminology—whose book

Thinking about Crime advocated that the justice system should be more severe with offenders so as to increase the risk of crime.36

Such perspectives shaped the national consensus during the Reagan administration of the

1980s. During this time, “zero tolerance” crime policies were enacted and continued into the early 1990s (for example by New York City Rudolph Giuliani in his attempts to gentrify certain areas, such as the Midtown Theater District).37 With this and similar policies being endorsed nation-wide, public opinion swayed to believe that such stringent penalties were beneficial to society at large. Mayer concludes: “Since the mid-1960s [up to 1988], there has

33 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 199–200.

34 Ibid., 200–201.

35 Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 346.

36 James Q. Wilson, Thinking about Crime (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

37 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 200 and 215.

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been at least a 30 percent increase in approval of the death penalty, in the desire for less lenient courts, and in the belief that prisons exist to protect society and to punish the guilty, not to rehabilitate wrongdoers.”38

As a result of these radical conservative ideologies, America’s “crisis decades” experienced a dramatic increase in criminal incarcerations. In 1970 the United States’ imprisonment rate was approximately 100 inmates for every 100,000 citizens. This rate grew to around 300 prisoners per 100,000 citizens by the late 1980s and to slightly more than 400 inmates per 100,000 citizens by 1995.39 Consequently, the public’s fear of punishment led to a fall in crime rates during the 1980s and early 1990s, although criminologists debate as to whether the public’s fear of crime also declined.40 As a leading expert on criminal sentencing in the

United States, Marc Mauer concludes that approximately 75 percent of the reduction of violent crimes in the 1990s was not related to the increase in imprisonment rates but was rather influenced by other societal factors, such as the overall improved economy, diminished demand within the drug trade, and demographic shifts among communities. Mauer also endorses governmental policies that attempt to identify causes and cures for criminal behavior rather than simply those that focus on incarceration.41 Thus, through a new prosperity, American society

38 Mayer, The Changing American Mind, 128.

39 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 202–3 and 233. Since the beginning of the new millennium, the U.S. imprisonment rate has plateaued at around 500 prisoners for every 100,000 citizens. In terms of prisoner totals, the United States’ prison population in 1980 was around 500,000 and around two million by the turn of the millennium. Marc Mauer, “The Social Cost of America’s Race to Incarcerate,” Phi Kappa Forum 82, no. 1 (2002): 29.

40 Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 350.

41 Mauer, “The Social Cost of America’s Race to Incarcerate,” 29–30.

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neared its “trough” in the mid-1990s, when the “crisis decades” finally came to an end, indicating the commencement of the nation’s latest cultural and economical upswing.42

Reemergence of Liberalism in 1990s America

As the U.S. economy and general well being of its citizens became more secure towards the late 1980s and early 1990s, liberalism began to reemerge. Sandbrook notes that conservative dominance of America in the 1970s and 1980s prompted “liberal howls of pain about the alleged collapse of civil liberties, the rise of a new moneyed elite, the undeclared war on the working poor, and other dire predictions of a right-wing apocalypse.”43 In the 1980s the Reagan administration had achieved high approval ratings, but Democrats had argued that the president was much more popular than his national policies. Moreover, Republicans also saw their strength in congress decline in every election post-1980. Mayer suggests that 1980s American public opinion demonstrated ambiguity in terms of precise political alignment, as the two parties contested for control.44

Criminologists deem that 1970s–1980s conservative policies effectively reduced crime rates by the early 1990s, particularly in major U.S. cities. The resulting lower crime rates and economic upturn prompted the resurfacing of more broadminded societal attitudes in the early

1990s, at the onset of the Clinton administration. Melossi suggests that public opinion in this decade started to express a less stringent view towards domestic forms of criminality. The public conversely grew wary of new forms of society-wide or international crimes, such as drug trafficking and/or violence, and global terrorism.45

42 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 230–32.

43 Sandbrook, “American Politics in the 1990s and 2000s,” 23.

44 Mayer, The Changing American Mind, 16–18.

45 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 215 and 223–29.

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Notable atrocities had occurred in the 1980s and early 1990s under a conservative administration (but not all necessarily because of Republican policies). These occurrences complemented the general millennial anxiety that burdened the 1990s. Historian James

Livingston recounts several of the unfortunate happenings in the United States at this time, which caused societal panic: random acts of universal violence, the decline of familial patriarchy in U.S. culture, the ongoing AIDS epidemic, the First Gulf War in Iraq (1991), the al Qaeda terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center (1993), the federal siege of a Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas (1993), and Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist bombing of an Oklahoma

City federal office building, killing 168 and injuring more than 600 people (1995).46 Downes and

Rock identify other trends of corporate misconduct and government corruption that have generated public concern since the 1990s:

In criminological terms, capitalists have also, for the past two decades, been behaving extraordinarily badly. A host of highly criminogenic trends have been set in motion, at times almost perversely—financial deregulation, deindustrialization, massive job losses, homelessness, rising trends of poverty and inequality, and the force feeding of the “new individualism” by consumerist pressures.47

Thus, the types of criminality that had caused alarm in the 1970s had now become less threatening than other widespread phenomena.

A neo-liberal public perspective of crime emerged during the 1990s. Criminologist

Barbara Sims demonstrates how this shift is apparent with data from the 1996 National Opinion

Survey on Crime and Justice, a nation-wide study that questioned how strongly the public agreed with commonly held perspectives of criminologists and policy makers about criminal causation and control. This telephone survey randomly sampled all U.S. households, and its demographic

46 Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out, xxi and 63.

47 Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 358.

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sampling compared closely to that of the 1990 U.S. census.48 Regarding their general attitudes towards types of criminal sanctions, 85 percent of responders agreed that rehabilitation served as a proper means of punishment, with the possibility of such practices leading to a criminal’s reintroduction into society. And said responders were even more likely to favor rehabilitating methods depending on the situational characteristics of a crime. These results indicate that much of the American public in the mid-1990s demonstrated a less conservative view of crime and punishment than those of the two previous decades.49

As one influence on this new, lenient societal perspective in the 1900s, the United States developed into a plural, eclectic culture through the process of globalization and the onset of the

Information Age. The U.S. population became more informed than that of previous eras through the wide-reaching media and new digital technologies.50 An example of the media’s influence on public opinion is demonstrated with the outbreak of the 1992 Los Angeles riots (caused by the acquittal of the four police officers who brutalized Rodney King). Melossi notes that towards the end of this catastrophic event significant strides were made in the media towards promoting

“pacification and social cohesion,” which included Rodney King being featured in a 1 May television interview stating, “Can’t we all just get along?”51 The riots officially ceased three days later. Thus, although news reports still exemplified sensationalist tendencies during the riot— which always has been indicative of news reporting in the United States—King’s interview and

48 Barbara A. Sims, “Thinking about Crime and Punishment: An Analysis of the Public’s Perceptions of Causation and Sanctions” (PhD diss., Sam Houston State University, 1997), 1 and 13–17.

49 Ibid., 5–6, 70, and 86.

50 Martin Halliwell, “Contemporary American Culture,” in American Thought and Culture in the Twenty- first Century, ed. Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 211–12.

51 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 224.

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similar promotions of peace through the media were able to have far-reaching impacts on public opinion.

Television experts John R. Hill and Dolf Zillmann recognize that media influence has also had a profound effect on juror sensitivity with the 1990s emergence of the “doctrine of victimology” that bestows certain criminals with victim-status.52 This characterization results from defense attorneys stressing their defendants’ history of enduring abuse, which creates sympathy for criminals among jurors, who are then more likely to absolve the criminals of certain malfeasances. Hill and Zillmann suggest that such growth in jury sympathy stemmed from talk-shows that covered deviant behavior. A primary example of this is Oprah Winfrey with her “extraordinary empathic skills in extracting self-disclosures and gut-wrenching confessions from her guests,” which promote “societal sensitivity about crimes and the circumstances of their perpetration”—effects that she herself has acknowledged.53 As a result of this effect, television watching habits have become heavily scrutinized during voir dire examinations in jury selection processes since the 1990s. In 1994 celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz coined the neologism

“Oprahization of the law” to refer to sympathetic treatment for “wronged wrongdoers” by jurors, whom he equated with “social workers.”54

To test this “doctrine of victimology,” in 1999 Hill and Zillmann conducted a survey that exposed participants to an assortment of The Oprah Winfrey Show episodes that discussed either crime or non-related issues. The participants subsequently answered questions regarding their recommended sanctions for various nonviolent and violent crimes. According to the survey’s

52 John R. Hill and Dolf Zillmann, “The Oprahization of America: Sympathetic Crime Talk and Leniency,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 43, no. 1 (1999): 67.

53 Ibid., 67 and 80.

54 As quoted in ibid., 67–68.

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results, “punitive recommendations for the commission of both nonviolent and violent crimes were substantially lower after exposure to crime-mitigating programs than after exposure to programs unrelated to crime.”55 This suggests that the 1990s liberal public perspective sympathized more with such forms of delinquency than did the 1970s conservative public.

A Criminological Understanding of Chicago

Several of the aforementioned criminological and sociological tenets are observable in

Chicago, which derives its criminal content from the opulent Jazz Age of the 1920s. According to Melossi’s “long cycle” model, this era represented a socio-economic “peak” for the United

States before its subsequent years of devastating crises after the onset of The Great Depression in

1929.56 Fosse adapted Chicago’s scenario from a 1926 play of the same name by journalist and playwright Maurine Dallas Watkins, who had based her debut script on two real-life murder cases that she had covered as a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1924.57 Journalist Douglas Perry notes how Watkins was fortunate to have achieved front-page status with this story, since male reporters usually received the best stories in this era: “‘Girl reporters’—that was what everyone called women hacks—almost never made it to the front page. . . . The Tribune, at least, wanted a true ‘feminine perspective’ on women criminals.”58 Using such a feminine outlook on female criminality corresponds to the Chicago School’s advocating the study of criminal behavior from a close, familiar perspective.

55 Ibid., 79.

56 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 230.

57 James Leve, Kander and Ebb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 77–78. Watkins initially titled her play A Brave Little Woman before it was renamed Chicago for its Broadway production. Watkins’s play received two cinematic treatments prior to Fosse’s musical adaptation: Chicago (1927), a produced by Cecil B. DeMille; and Roxie Hart (1942), directed by William A. Wellman and starring . Michael Lesy, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007), 198.

58 Douglas Perry, The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago (New York: Viking, 2010), 33.

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The two murder cases were near each other in time, but unrelated; however, Watkins found similarities between them and reported them as a single, unified story. On 11 March,

Belva Gaertner shot and killed her lover, Walter Law, in the front seat of her car, which had been purchased from Law by Belva’s millionaire ex-husband, William Gaertner (thirty years her senior). Upon her arrest on 12 March, Belva admitted to being drunk with Law, but could not remember anything else that happened. She also professed: “Why it’s silly to say I murdered

Walter. . . . I liked him and he loved me—but no woman can love a man enough to kill him.

They aren’t worth it. . . . There are always plenty more.”59 On 3 April, Beulah Annan shot and killed her lover, ex-con Harry Kalstedt, in her bedroom after they had had a few drinks together.

Kalstedt died four hours later, at which point Beulah called her husband, Albert Annan (a mechanic much older than her), and convinced him that Kalstedt had attempted to sexually assault her. When the police arrived at the crime scene, Albert initially admitted to shooting

Kalstedt before Beulah ultimately confessed to the murder.60

Watkins recognized the allure of the two murderesses and illustrated their kinship as two attractive women with weaknesses for older men, illegal booze, and handguns.61 Though an alcoholic, Belva had been a cabaret singer with the stage name Belle Brown. Beulah, a small- town girl from Kentucky, was the more beautiful of the two and vicariously received more media interest.62 Enticing the Tribune’s male readers, Watkins’s sensationalist reporting style depicted

Beulah and Belva as sympathetic, yet erotic vamps, while utilizing irony and humor in order to

59 As quoted in Lesy, Murder City, 195.

60 Leve, Kander and Ebb, 78; and Lesy, Murder City, 195.

61 Leve, Kander and Ebb, 78.

62 Lesy, Murder City, 195–96. Lesy suggests that Beulah’s beauty alone influenced national newsreel crews to come to Chicago to film her.

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expose the prejudice by which society treated these female criminal offenders.63 Such sensationalist news reports were popular in the early 1920s; but this style does not correspond to the aforementioned sensationalist news media of the more conservative mid-to-late 1970s

(contemporaneous with the musical Chicago’s original production), when such a reporting style served to instill fear and distaste in the public rather than to elicit excitement and titillation.

Perry acknowledges how Belva and Beulah, along with their companions on Murderess’

Row, naturally captured the 1920s Chicago public:

Everyone in the city wanted to read about the fairest killers in the land. These women embodied the city’s wild, rebellious side, a side that appeared to be on the verge of overwhelming everything else. Chicago in the spring of 1924 was something new, a city for the future. It thrived like nowhere else. Evidence of the postwar depression of 1920–21 couldn’t be found anywhere. The city pulsed with industrial development. . . . And yet this exciting, prosperous city terrified many observers. Chicago took its cultural obsessions to extremes, from jazz to politics to architecture. Most of all, in the midst of Prohibition, the city reveled in its contempt for the law.64

Significant developments in Beulah’s case won her even more attention. Before the trial began,

Beulah announced that she was pregnant, which delayed the court proceedings in accordance with Illinois law while also gaining her more sympathy from the public.65 Meanwhile, some of her adoring male fans procured her two first-rate lawyers, William Scott and W. W. O’Brien (the latter being the more influential of the two). During her trial, at O’Brien’s suggestion, Beulah took the stand in her own defense and claimed that, when she and her victim both reached for the gun, she was doing so in consideration not just of her own life but also that of her unborn child.66

63 Tóth, Merry Murderers, 160.

64 Perry, The Girls of Murder City, 3–4.

65 Kevin Boyd Grubb, Razzle Dazzle: The Life and Works of Bob Fosse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 194.

66 Lesy, Murder City, 203–4.

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O’Brien described his client as “a frail little girl struggling with a drunken brute.”67 A twelve- member, all male jury (with four bachelors) unanimously acquitted Beulah because of her sympathetic story and her alluring visage.68 Perry notes how this was commonplace, because the

1920s Illinois justice system always utilized all-male juries, who almost never convicted attractive women.69 On the day of her acquittal, Beulah left her husband before finalizing their divorce in July 1926.70 However, Beulah died in 1928 in a sanitarium under an assumed name, having never achieved the same level of fame that she had garnered during her trial.71

Recognizing the cultural appeal of this story, Watkins moved to the New York area after her subjects’ trials were completed, and she enrolled in Yale’s Drama School workshop while also working as a newspaper drama and movie critic in New York City. As an assignment for the drama workshop, she adapted her material on Beulah and Belva into a comedy play, Chicago, which later opened on Broadway at the on 30 December 1926 and ran for

172 performances.72 Several details from these cases found their way into Watkins’s script for

Chicago.73 Beulah and Belva became the characters Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, respectively, with most of the play’s focus being on the more sympathetic Roxie. Her victim was renamed

Fred Casely, while her much older “meal-ticket” husband became Amos. And her two lawyers were condensed into the slick character of Billy Flynn, while Watkins included her own

67 As quoted in Grubb, Razzle Dazzle, 194.

68 Lesy, Murder City, 196; and Grubb, Razzle Dazzle, 194.

69 Perry, The Girls of Murder City, 6.

70 Lesy, Murder City, 204.

71 Grubb, Razzle Dazzle, 194.

72 Lesy, Murder City, 196.

73 Maurine Watkins, Chicago, 1926, ed. Thomas H. Pauly (reprint, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997).

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character portrayal with Mary Sunshine. The play also utilizes all of the aforementioned important developments in Beulah’s trial.

But more significantly, Watkins’s play utilizes these plot elements to satirize the immoral perspective of 1920s society, which valued decadence and corruption. Her writing exemplifies several of the dominant criminological and sociological ideals of the twentieth century, notably subculturalism with delinquency breeding delinquents (as Roxie and Velma are portrayed as jazz babies turned into killers because of liquor and men) as well as anomie, with the two femmes fatales attempting to achieve their goals of becoming famous via unlawful means. Chicago also perpetuates the prevalent criminological assumption that the U.S. justice system is too lenient on female criminals as the show’s primary characters frequently receive favorable treatment and are ultimately acquitted.74 And Chicago’s female criminality undermines the gendered of women (with the norms being “mother,” “housewife,” and “sexual object”) with the show’s depiction of “unruly women,” such as Roxie getting away with murder while also separating from her husband, demonstrating how “feminine evil” destroys “familial bliss.”75 Although such exploitations of criminality appealed to the public in the Jazz Age, all of these tenets naturally subverted the dominant white, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture of twentieth-century mainstream America.

Prior to its musical adaptation, Watkins’s story penetrated mid-twentieth-century

American popular culture with the 1942 film Roxie Hart, directed by William A. Wellman and starring Ginger Rogers (Roxie) and Adolphe Menjou (Billy Flynn). Though based on Watkins’s play, this film takes two significant departures from the 1924 true-life case. First, in Roxie Hart

74 The musical Chicago provides one instance of a female prisoner receiving her full punishment when the death penalty is enacted upon Hunyak, one of the six Merry Murderesses.

75 Tóth, Merry Murderers, 11.

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the featured reporter of the crime is a man, Homer Howard (George Montgomery), who becomes romantically involved with and marries Roxie following her acquittal. Second, the film’s scenario reveals that Roxie is innocent of the murder, which actually was committed by her first husband, Amos (George Handler), who is arrested at the film’s climax.76 Roxie allows herself to take the initial blame exclusively as an attempt to gain celebrity and help advance her stage career, because, as previously mentioned, a woman was rarely ever convicted of a crime in 1920s

Chicago.77

Effectively lightening some of the play’s dark material, the film’s creators sought to appeal to mid-twentieth-century American sensibilities while also being in accordance with the moral guidelines of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code, which had been adopted by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1930 and was in use until 1968. The film adhered to the code’s three general principles:

1. No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin. 2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented. 3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.78

While the film comically mocks aspects of 1920s Chicago, including its media sensationalism and corrupt judicial system, such ridicule did not transgress the Production Code’s principles, because Roxie does not violate any crimes and becomes a common housewife by film’s end.

76 Nunnally Johnson, Roxie Hart, DVD, directed by William A. Wellman (Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2004). The film also includes the character of reporter Mary Sunshine (played by Spring Byington), but as a minor supporting role.

77 Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 111.

78 As quoted in Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code, 2nd ed. (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 286–87.

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Roxie Hart was the last adaptation of Watkins’s work that she herself approved. After the film’s release, Watkins denied several requests for permission to the play’s rights while also paying an annual fee to the company that owned Chicago to prevent any revival productions of it.79 She expressed regret at having ever written a comedy about such corruption, and she felt guilty for having used her sensationalist news reporting to help Beulah and Belva be acquitted.80

Among those who were incessantly denied rights to the work, Fosse and his third wife, Verdon, had shown interest in the late 1960s for adapting the material into a Broadway musical.

Immediately following Watkins death in 1969, her estate relented on the author’s rigid stance and finally awarded Chicago’s rights to Fosse, Verdon, and producer Robert Fryer.81

With the 1975 musical Chicago, Watkins’s property received a more cynical treatment than any of its previous adaptations. Ebb and Fosse’s sardonic book combined with Kander and

Ebb’s vaudevillian tunes amplified the work’s adulation of criminal behavior and its parallels between the U.S. justice system and the entertainment industry. Raymond Knapp describes the problematic results:

[Fosse’s] 1975 Chicago offered up a world that contained no conventionally “good” perspective with which audiences could identify, so that what counts as good is generally something between naïveté and stupidity (thus, Roxie at times and her husband throughout), which can hardly be expected to provide a reliable moral compass. Indeed, conventional notions of morality seem simply beside the point in Chicago. In one important sense, this marks a kind of historical division point, after which, within a certain line of theatrical development, the idealist notion of self is eclipsed by performances as such.82

79 Lesy, Murder City, 198; Grubb, Razzle Dazzle, 193; Leve, Kander and Ebb, 78; and Martin Gottfried, All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 159.

80 Lesy, Murder City, 198; and Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, 111.

81 Grubb, Razzle Dazzle, 193; and Leve, Kander and Ebb, 78. Verdon was the first of these collaborators to show interest in adapting Chicago into a musical and performing the lead role, which she had wanted ever since seeing the 1942 film Roxie Hart. Fosse seemingly wanted to adapt Chicago into a musical for Verdon’s sake, supposedly out of guilt for his numerous infidelities. Leve, Kander and Ebb, 77; and Gottfried, All His Jazz, 286.

82 Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, 238.

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Knapp’s analysis had been antedated in many of the critics’ reviews of Chicago’s original production, which had pointed to the production’s performativity as its singular redeeming feature. The preeminent champion of the musical in 1975, Martin Gottfried, captured this sentiment: “The greatest strength of Chicago is its look.”83 And within that look, the work’s stark amorality alienated conservative audiences at the onset of America’s “crisis decades” (from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, according to Melossi’s “long cycle” theory).84

In addition, with its presentation of female criminals advocating deviance and corruption,

Chicago undercut several advancements of 1970s liberal feminism, which had called for a positive portrayal of women as strong and virtuous, and gender equality in the workplace and home. Subverting this movement, Chicago vividly depicts women’s emancipated sexuality as a destructive force and a danger to men. Nowhere was this more potently illustrated than in the

“,” during which six women display their sensual femininity through aggressive physicality while simultaneously recounting how they each disposed of their male counterpart. Chicago also challenged 1970s feminist criminology, which had sought to dispel many of the false assumptions about women, by reviving the sexist attitude that women had received leniency with the U.S. justice system and the notion that women were “irrational, compulsive, and slightly neurotic.”85 Ethan Mordden’s 1983 account of the original production’s mixed reception summarized why Chicago had found itself out of step with the times: he

83 Martin Gottfried, “It’s Liza for Gwen in Breezy Chicago,” New York Post, 14 August 1975.

84 Melossi, Controlling Crime, Controlling Society, 230.

85 Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, 288–90.

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intimated that Chicago was un-revivable because its performative “wild card” had already been played. In his words, “It won’t even be in the discard pile. It’s over.”86

The unexpected success of the musical’s 1996 Broadway revival proved Mordden wrong.

It also rendered untenable Knapp’s 2006 theory that Chicago’s 1975 production represented a

“historical division point, after which . . . the idealist notion of self is eclipsed by performances as such.” For the 1996 Broadway revival, the production staff’s decision to retain Encores! minimalist staging had subjugated the work’s performativity in favor of stripping it down to its cynical core. Critics still lauded Fosse’s choreographic style but also documented that audiences now clamored for corruption with anticipation and identified with the musical’s idealist notions of self. 87 As Richard Zoglin’s review put it, “What seemed cynical in 1975 is now au courant.”88

Such a seismic cultural shift had also rendered Chicago’s Verfremdungseffekt impotent: what had initially caused some audience members to flee the 46th Street Theatre now drew them en masse to the .

Chicago’s promotion of cultural subversion and degenerative morality was accepted in the late 1990s, when liberal theater audiences found in the musical resonances of the “doctrine of victimology.” Billy Flynn’s invention of Roxie’s history as an orphaned convent girl who consistently has been manipulated and maltreated by men—one of whom impregnated her— convinces the press to depict her in a positive light. While the musical’s scenario clearly exposes the falsities associated with Roxie’s fabricated back-story, 1990s audiences connected with her character and the other Merry Murderesses. Television programs of the 1990s, such as The

86 Ethan Mordden, Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 175.

87 Linda Winer, “A Murderers’ Row That’ll Slay You,” Newsday, 15 November 1996.

88 Richard Zoglin, “Chicago Was Once a Problem: Now’s It’s a Triumph,” Time, 25 November 1996.

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Oprah Winfrey Show, had portrayed deviant offenders as victims of abuse, so as to garner sympathy from the viewer, who could then identify with their plights and possibly justify their transgressions, leading to what criminologists have termed “the Oprahization of the law.”

Theatergoers did not necessarily condone the acts of criminality in Chicago, but in light of more threatening atrocities, hardened audience members no longer considered such deviant behavior shocking or dangerous. In 2003 Ebb hypothesized the reasons for such causality:

I think that the audience caught up with the show, and history has been a great friend to us. We are living in a time of sensational murders and people either getting away or not getting away with them depending on what you believe. We have been helped enormously by the O. J. Simpson case, presidential adultery, and similar stories that suddenly had our sort of jaundiced worldview in the headlines.89

89 John Kander and Fred Ebb, as told to Greg Lawrence, Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 139.

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Chapter 4

“Who Says That Murder’s Not an Art?”:

Chicago’s Deviance and American Popular Culture

Societal ideologies are linked inextricably to popular culture. Consequently, scholars often critique modes of popular expression in order to serve their respective agendas. Sociologist

Clinton R. Sanders suggests that negative critiques of American popular culture (especially products promoting deviant behavior) notably surged in the 1970s and 1980s: “Spearheaded by the religious right on the one hand and neomarxist analysts on the other, popular culture was again seen as the source of moral decay and/or the primary tool of the ‘ruling class’ intent upon establishing authoritarian hegemony.”1 But by the 1990s, a more pluralist perspective of popular trends emerged. Sanders explains that, pace the previous “elitist” critiques that viewed popular culture as degrading society and its consumers, “the pluralist perspective emphasizes a separate- but-equal orientation toward contemporary culture” and demonstrates that popular culture is

“intrinsic” to societal direction.2

Numerous sociologists and musical theater scholars have studied how Broadway musicals closely correspond to popular culture trends by exemplifying the social history of the

United States and reflecting society’s changing ideologies and values.3 But musical theater also

1 Clinton R. Sanders, “‘A Lot of People Like It’: The Relationship Between Deviance and Popular Culture,” in Marginal Conventions: Popular Culture, Mass Media, and Social Deviance, ed. Clinton R. Sanders (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1990), 5.

2 Ibid.

3 Lari Dianne Young, “A Historical View of Twentieth-century American Society as Witnessed through Musical Theatre: 1927–present” (PhD diss., Texas University, 1994), 121–28; John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theater (Hanover, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 1; and David Walsh and Len Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 1–5.

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operates in various ways as a leader and developer of American culture. Raymond Knapp proposes: “The American musical has done more than merely interact with its local—that is, its

American—context. It has played a significant part in shaping that context, as well, by addressing both the ideals of America and its realities, and helping us deal with the frequent disparity between them.”4 Through their treatment of cultural issues, Broadway musicals provide means with which audiences can have their personal and societal identities reified.5

Despite being centralized in , Broadway productions have extensive correlation with American popular thought because of their reaching a large base of consumers.

Since Broadway’s 1996–97 season (when Chicago’s revival opened), Broadway has averaged a seasonal attendance of approximately 11,750,000 (which includes attendance for both musicals and plays).6 Additionally, North American touring productions (which predominantly consist of musicals) have averaged slightly more than 13,000,000 in seasonal attendance during the same timeframe.7

These statistics do not account for worldwide productions of Broadway musicals, which have carried their expressions of American cultural identities to a vast number of non-native audiences. David Walsh and Len Platt acknowledge that musical theater “has been a primary and accessible voice through which the American way of life has expressed itself to the people of the

4 Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 284.

5 Walsh and Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture, 2; and Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, 282–84.

6 “Broadway Season Statistics,” : The Official Website of the Broadway Theatre Industry, http://www.broadwayleague.com/index.php?url_identifier=season-by-season-stats-1 (accessed 7 January 2014).

7 “Touring Broadway Statistics,” The Broadway League, http://www.broadwayleague.com/index.php?url_identifier=touring-broadway-statistics (accessed 7 January 2014). These figures for touring productions do not include non-Equity tours or Las Vegas productions.

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United States and to much of the rest of the world.”8 Since the 1970s capitalist commodification and cultural globalization have gradually elevated Broadway shows to exported cultural products. As well as through global tours, musicals have found homes in significant theater centers outside of New York, such as Toronto and London—the latter of which has a comparable attendance to Broadway, with professional theater productions averaging seasonal audiences of approximately 12,500,000 since 1996.9

Chicago likewise has benefitted from being an exported cultural product. The musical received a reversal of fortune in London’s West End similar to that of its Broadway legacy. With production designs and values similar to its original Broadway production, Chicago debuted in

London at the in April 1979 and ran for 603 performances. Then, with the production style of the Broadway revival, Chicago’s London revival opened at The Adelphi

Theatre on 18 November 1997. Akin to the Broadway revival’s successes, the London revival received wide acclaim and won two including Outstanding Musical

Production. This record-breaking production ran for fifteen years before closing on 1 September

2012, which made it the West End’s longest-running revival and longest-running American musical.10

Staged productions of Chicago’s Broadway revival have also achieved great accolades worldwide. Since 1996 this version has been performed in twelve languages. Also during that time, in addition to productions in the United States, , and England, Chicago has appeared (as part of global tours or long-running local productions) in twenty-four additional

8 Walsh and Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture, 2.

9 Ibid., 2–3 and 174–75; and “SOLT Annual Comparison Table,” Society of London Theatre, http://www.solt.co.uk (accessed 7 January 2014).

10 Ben Quinn, “Chicago to Close in West End after Fifteen Years,” , 13 July 2012; and Chicago: The Musical UK. http://www.chicagothemusical.co.uk (accessed 8 January 2014).

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nations or city-states: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, , , ,

Holland, Hong Kong, , Japan, , The , , , Singapore, South

Africa, , , , Thailand, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates.11 As a result of these numerous productions, Chicago’s revival has grossed more than $850 million worldwide from more than fifteen thousand performances, which have been seen by an estimated seventeen million people (which includes the Broadway production’s cumulative attendance of slightly more than seven million).12

Since the late 1970s, producer Martin Richards (who was co-producer of Chicago’s original Broadway production) wanted to adapt the musical into a movie, but there was a lack of excitement in Hollywood regarding the work’s potential on screen. But by the mid-1990s (just before Chicago’s concerts at Encores!), Hollywood’s attitude toward the property changed, and

Richards convinced Miramax Films to collaborate on the adaptation. In a fax dated 15 September

1995 from Richards to Harvey Weinstein (co-chairman of Miramax), Richards noted about the promising cultural era that “the time certainly feels right for this project.”13 Subsequently, the revival’s unforeseen success encouraged A-list movie actors to vie for Chicago’s film adaptation.14

11 Chicago: The Musical, http://www.chicagothemusical.com (accessed 8 January 2014).

12 Chicago: The Musical UK. http://www.chicagothemusical.co.uk (accessed 8 January 2014); and “Chicago Production Grosses,” Internet Broadway Database, http://ibdb.com/production.php?id=4804 (accessed 25 March 2014).

13 Box 95, Folder 37, Fred Ebb Papers, LPA Mss 2005-001, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York (hereafter FEP). Richards co-purchased Chicago’s film rights in 1976 with Alan Carr, who eventually backed out and sold the full rights to Richards in 1978. Also in the 15 September 1995 fax, Richards proposed opportunities for enhancing the work’s cynical tenor, such as suggesting that “the Matron should be more corrupt, always getting her ‘pound of flesh,’ or at least her ten percent.”

14 Ibid.

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In December 2002 the movie version of Chicago premiered, directed by , adapted by screenwriter , and starring Renée Zellweger (Roxie Hart), Catherine

Zeta-Jones (Velma Kelly), (Billy Flynn), John C. Reilly (Amos Hart), and Queen

Latifah (Matron Mama Morton).15 The film received wide acclaim from critics and audiences and grossed more than $170 million in the United States and $306 million worldwide.16 It won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture—the first movie musical to do so since 1968

(Oliver!).17 Since the late 1990s, with the successes of the revival’s various productions and the film adaptation, Chicago has gradually become one of the most identifiable musical-theater sources of American popular culture. Comparing the musical’s recent successes on stage and screen with its cynical outlook of the U.S. judicial system and celebrity worship reveals prevalent ideologies associated with American popular culture at the turn of the millennium.

Revising the American Dream: The Era of Anti-heroes

Initially, capitalism made possible the American Dream, which defined the potential for upward social mobility and unlimited success.18 But since the mid-twentieth century, an amalgam of countercultural subversions, corporate malfeasances, and government corruption has caused the disintegration of said Dream in the minds of many Americans, who consequently have become more accustomed to associating deviant behavior with the goal of achieving

15 Chicago was Marshall’s debut as a major motion picture director. He had achieved success as a Broadway choreographer in the 1990s, and he co-directed the 1998 Broadway revival of Cabaret with . Marshall’s first TV directing credit was the 1999 adaptation of Annie.

16 “Box Office/Business for Chicago,” Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299658/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus (accessed 2 January 2014). The film’s budget was approximately $45 million.

17 Chicago also won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Zeta-Jones), Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound Mixing. The film received seven other Academy Award nominations: Best Director (Marshall), Best Actress (Zellweger), Best Supporting Actor (Reilly), Best Supporting Actress (Latifah), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song (“I Move On” by Kander and Ebb).

18 Walsh and Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture, 129.

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prosperity by any means necessary.19 To accommodate this shifting societal perspective, portrayals of deviance and violence in American popular culture gradually have become commonplace, while simultaneously praise for heroic values noticeably has receded. Pop culture scholar Marshall Fishwick contextualizes this cultural trend since the emergence of the

Information Age: “In America we have all but forgotten many earlier heroes. We find that those we have trusted and admired have feet of clay. The heroic vision has given way to scandal mongering, media hype, and elevated celebrities who pass across the heaven like shooting stars, then disappear into eternal darkness.”20 Fishwick acknowledges that America’s “anti-hero era” had no precise beginning, but instead grew out of certain subcultures since the 1960s before attaining full prominence by the 1990s, when public perspective “exchanged the heroic halo for handcuffs.”21

James Livingston suggests that violence and criminality have become “as American as apple pie,” with their frequent representations occurring in the nation’s mass media and the entertainment industry, which feed the public’s appetite for such deviant elements.22 Livingston explicates the resulting ambiguity between criminality and heroism:

It’s hard to distinguish between criminals and heroes because they both break the rules and point us beyond the status quo, and they’re always urging us to expect more. . . . They’re like the revolutionaries of the college textbooks—Max Weber’s “charismatic” leaders—but they’re more rotted in everyday routine, in what we call “practice.” They’re more visible, more approachable, more likable than, say, Lenin, Mao, Castro, or Che, because they don’t want to change the world, they want to change the rules.23

19 James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 69–70.

20 Marshall Fishwick, Probing Popular Culture: On and Off the Internet (New York: The Haworth Press, 2004), 87.

21 Ibid., 87–89.

22 Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out, 69.

23 Ibid.

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Since the founding of Hollywood, movies have utilized criminals as subjects. Formerly, however, these deviant characters were portrayed one dimensionally as threats to societal integrity, such as with early Golden Age gangsters played by Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy

Cagney, and Paul Muni. But mid- to late-twentieth-century American films exploited the ambiguity between heroism and criminality. Livingston notes that this phenomenon is especially true of horror and gangster genres, such as with The Omen (1976) and Poltergeist (1982) for the former and trilogy (1972, 1974, and 1990) and Scarface (1983) for the latter.

Quentin Tarantino’s films, such as (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), also display the intersection between law and lawlessness.24 Livingston explains how these films portray the testing of one’s loyalty to family or community: “Strict devotion to family makes a man violent, paranoid, and finally unable to fulfill his obligations to loved ones. If all you inhabit or care for is your family, both these genres keep telling us, you are the most dangerous man alive.”25

Also reflective of the American public’s views of deviance, crime dramas have been a cornerstone of network television since the mid-twentieth century. B. Keith Crew’s survey of

1980s crime dramas—notably Miami Vice (1984–1989) and (1981–1987)— illustrates how these shows were indicative of the contemporaneous societal perspective and conservative policies that promoted swift punitiveness and stringent law enforcement of criminals.26 But the wide popularity of The Sopranos (1999–2007) demonstrated a shift in the

24 Ibid., 64–65.

25 Ibid., 64.

26 B. Keith Crew, “Acting Like Cops: The Social Reality of Crime and Law on TV Police Dramas,” in Marginal Conventions: Popular Culture, Mass Media, and Social Deviance, ed. Clinton R. Sanders (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1990), 131–42. Crew distinguishes the two shows by noting that Miami Vice used a conventional format in which crimes were resolved within single episodes, while Hill Street Blues deviated from this formula by having multiple concurrent storylines, often lasting three or four episodes, and occasionally leaving some crimes unresolved.

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public’s perception of criminality. In contrast to previous television crime dramas, The Sopranos characterized certain gangsters as heroic . Thus, since the late twentieth century, film and television have demonstrated a somewhat antisocial cultural perspective, which Livingston describes: “If you are father to yourself, you don’t have a father except yourself: you don’t have a past to observe or honor or, more importantly, to learn from. But when you’re on your own in the fundamental sense, as Americans like to be, you lean toward radical visions of the future and radical resolutions of problems inherited from the past.”27

Also regarding this emerging antisocial attitude, cultural psychologists C. Nathan

DeWall, Richard S. Pond, Jr., W. Keith Campbell, and Jean M. Twenge correlate changes in

American popular song lyrics between 1980 and 2007 to the American public’s shifting psychological characteristics. Their combined study surveyed the most popular songs from this period in order to ascertain the use pronouns in the songs’ lyrics. These psychologists remark how pronoun usage indicates how one distinguishes between self and other: first-person singular usage (“I”) reveals one’s attitudes to be antisocial (potentially self-focused, disconnected, and/or angry) while first-person plural usage (“we”) denotes a more communal outlook. Their study demonstrates how, during the surveyed period, reticent language suggesting antisocial behavior increased in popular songs while the setting of lyrics that expressed positive social interactions decreased. Thus, whereas mid-twentieth-century ideals nurtured a heightened sense of community, late-twentieth-century cultural sentiments catered to an emerging narcissistic generation.28

27 Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out, 65.

28 Nathan C. DeWall, et al., “Tuning in to Psychological Change: Linguistic Markers of Psychological Traits and Emotions over Time in Popular U.S. Song Lyrics,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 5, no. 2 (2011): 1–8. This study’s sample consists of the ten most popular songs for each year of the survey, in accordance to Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts.

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Certain scholars have related the dialectic of communal versus antisocial expressions in

American popular culture to the rise of “concept musicals”—or as John Bush Jones has deemed them, “fragmented musicals,” which refers to their disjunct structures with musical numbers being isolated from scenes.29 Gaining prominence during the 1970s, “fragmented musicals” often have self-referential expressions, which catered to an emerging narcissistic culture. Having been discouraged by society’s direction in the 1960s and early 1970s, Americans concurrently grew introspective and self-absorbed. During the previous era, as Walsh and Platt explain, “The consensual ideology of the new postwar America and the harmonizing unity of American society that the [“integrated”] musical proposed and celebrated both disguised and suppressed the reality of the structural inequalities within.”30 But Walsh and Platt advance the narrative: “[In] the mid- to-late 1960s, however, cracks began appearing in the ‘reality’ of the world that the book musical had espoused and expressed as America. The American Dream it enacted became overshadowed and subject to a disabling interrogation of status.”31

These “cracks” in America’s social reality created an environment in which “fragmented” musicals could flourish. Jones suggests, “Fragmented musicals did not convey a sense of community; instead, they dramatized the splintered, inward-turning tendencies of the ‘Me

Generation.’”32 Such interpretation of self-absorption in “fragmented musicals” does not contradict the emerging neo-conservatist view of criminality during the 1970s–1980s, which

29 Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves, 269; Walsh and Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture, 117–18; and Mark Steyn, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 211.

30 Walsh and Platt describe the inequalities of postwar America to be those concerning race, gender, counterculturalisms, and foreign policies. Walsh and Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture, 118. Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life (1948) represents an early example of a Broadway “concept musical” that counteracted the consensual ideology espoused by postwar “integrated musicals.” Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2010), 391–92 and 520.

31 Walsh and Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture, 128.

32 Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves, 270.

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called for stringent punishment of criminals and suppression of deviant behavior. The notion of the “Me Generation” comports with the aspect of living in fear for one’s own interest, which prompted many of the conservative policies during the same period.

Despite fundamentally exemplifying a “fragmented” or “concept” musical with a narcissistic agenda, Chicago’s original production posed a threat to this era’s societal sense of well-being with its representation of judicial corruption and lenient law enforcement. By negotiating between linear and self-referential representations, the musical provided a social realist critique that challenged the traditional view of the American Dream. While employing a historical setting to denote authoritative credibility, the show equated the American justice system with the pursuit of stardom.33 In the musical murder becomes a pop-art form as well as a means to becoming famous.

With its themes Chicago integrated well with the 1990s mass media’s constant references to similar types of criminal behavior, which had developed an indifferent American popular culture by creating a majority of consumers that either accepted immorality or craved scandal.

The musical’s celebration of crime complemented late-twentieth-century murder trials that involved celebrities or garnered fame for the defendants, such as those concerning Claus von

Bülow, Lyle and Erik Menendez, Amy Fisher, and O. J. Simpson. Walsh and Platt specifically relate Chicago’s revival to a 1990s era when television trials became “a new entertainment in the living room, to make the process of justice—supported by the official argument that justice be not just done but seen to be done—an actual subversion of justice.”34 Walsh and Platt also describe how the show’s style contributes to this social critique of American justice and media:

33 Walsh and Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture, 128–30.

34 Ibid., 130.

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Chicago is also reflexive in its presentation of music drama. Its theme of American justice as just another branch of showbiz is established by creating a musical vaudeville with a Master of Ceremonies introducing each number as if it was a variety “turn.” The characters act out their lives in pursuit of the American Dream like theatrical performers engaged in song-and-dance acts. Again, theater provides the drama through its potential as . The American Dream is merely song-and-dance, but, even more than this, it is completely tacky, since it is vaudeville song-and-dance, and with this the critique is deepened.35

Thus, Chicago’s antisocial expression did not fully connect with prevalent societal ideologies until the 1990s, when anti-heroic sentiments and celebrity idolization fully saturated American public perspective.36

Femme Fatale Endings

In the aforementioned depictions of deviant behavior in popular television and cinematic crime dramas, the criminal aggressors are typically male. This paradigm is especially true in gangster films, which have reinforced criminal stereotypes in American audiences’ minds since the onset of Hollywood’s Golden Age—from the portrayals of Scarface and Little Caesar in the

1930s, through mid-twentieth-century film noir, to ’s The Godfather trilogy and the various works of beginning in the 1970s. As journalist George De

Stefano notes, “Mafiosi act out the yearning of the law-abiding to flout society’s conventions, to be an .”37 But in reality the prominence of the American Mafia and other similar crime organizations declined in the late twentieth century as a result of the 1980s stringent law enforcement, the enacting of the RICO statute, internecine wars among crime factions, and the

35 Ibid., 131.

36 Merrill Goozner, “Cynical Chicago the Dark Musical about Justice Miscarried Has Found Its Time,” Chicago Tribune, 10 November 1996; Laurie Winer, “The New Chicago Finds Its Time to Shine in Sour ’90s,” Los Angeles Times, 15 November 1996; and Ethan Mordden, “Celebrating America’s Love of Show Biz,” New York Times, 13 April 1997.

37 George De Stefano, An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America (New York: Faber and Faber, 2007), 10.

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increasing disorganization of unlawful institutions. But such criminal organizations are still very much alive in American popular culture and perpetuate the criminal archetype as being

“hypermacho.”38

Chicago contradicts this masculine archetype by utilizing anti-heroine protagonists. The musical certainly displays male deviant behavior, notably lawyer Billy Flynn’s manipulation of the law and Fred Casely’s manipulation of women. But these offenses are not as serious as the murders by Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. In this manner the musical corresponds to the late- twentieth-century emergence of liberal feminism in American pop culture. Regarding popular literature, feminist scholars have critiqued the genre of romance novels, because of the latter’s employment of unrealistic fantasies that often propagate gender stereotypes.39 Feminist ideals more closely align with the genre of female crime thrillers, which has burgeoned since the 1980s.

As Yvonne Tasker explains, “These works are hailed quite specifically for their radical potential, for their ability both to subvert a genre that is both masculine and reactionary, and to provide

‘strong positive heroines’ that offer themselves as figures of identification for the radical reader.”40 This genre’s “strong positive heroines” primarily denotes women functioning as the investigators of crime or deviant behavior, such as in Janet Evanovich’s bounty hunter series featuring Stephanie Plum, which began in 1994. This also has occurred in other forms of pop culture, such as in the television crime drama Cagney & Lacey (1981–1988), starring Sharon

Gless and as two New York City police detectives.

38 Ibid., 3–10, 350, and 357–58.

39 Ien Ang, “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. John Storey (New York: Prentice Hall, 1998), 522–31.

40 Yvonne Tasker, “Feminist Crime Writing: The Politics of Genre,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. John Storey (New York: Prentice Hall, 1998), 328.

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In contrast to these positive characterizations, Chicago’s anti-heroines resemble femmes fatales. A scholar of the representation of women in literature and film, Zsófia Anna Tóth offers a definition of this label:

The femme fatale is that iconic female image which is connected to the figure of the female transgressor and criminal in literary and filmic works as well as cultural representations. The femme fatale is primarily linked to tragedy and tragic desire and “her” fall is inevitable traditionally. A prototypical femme fatale is endowed with extremely attractive physicality as well as sharp intelligence. She is generally beautiful, pretty, (often strikingly) clever and intelligent, very deceitful, manipulative, and greatly ambitious. She is usually willing to do anything to achieve her goals and entirely disregards everybody else’s interests and feelings.41

Tóth posits that depictions of the archetypal femme fatale in mid-twentieth-century American culture were resultant from “the palpable product and expression of male fears and also of erotic fantasies,” and therefore femmes fatales functioned both as threatening and subordinate to their masculine counterparts.42

The femme fatale artistic persona has achieved exalted pop culture status since the late twentieth century. The issue of artist persona is a significant field of determining horizontal classifications within popular culture studies, because such characterizations are reflective of and influential on societal conventions. Pop culture and gender scholar Patti Lynne Donze undertook an empirical study to identify the most prevalent artist personae in contemporary American popular music, while differentiating among them by noting gender, sexual orientation, and race.

She monitored U.S. radio broadcasts of popular music from June 2002 to October 2004, and sampled more than twenty-five hundred artists who were actively promoted and thus deemed the most representative of popular culture at that time. The sample illustrated an approximate five-

41 Zsófia Anna Tóth, Merry Murderers: The Farcical (Re)Figuration of the Femme Fatale in Maurine Dallas Watkins’ Chicago (1927) and Its Various Adaptations (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 7.

42 Ibid., 11.

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to-one ratio in terms of male to female artists (which potentially demonstrates the continual male bias in the American industry). Donze’s study identifies sixteen distinct artist personae, which includes ten masculine types (soul singer, leader, romantic singer-songwriter, thug, anti-hero, absurd extremist, sophisticated singer-songwriter, emotype, summer party jammer, and other) and six feminine types (femme fatale, model of femininity, princess, chanteuse singer-songwriter, underground feminist, and other).43

Donze identifies the femme fatale class as one of the most prominent and highly sexualized of female artist personae:

These women are aggressive and boisterous. . . . Femmes fatales are hard-edged, colorful, and alluring and sexually naughty with a lot of attitude and confrontation. Their lyrics tend to be critical and often focus on explicit sexuality, sexual violence, sexism, or gendered power relationships. Examples include Lil Kim, Joan Jett, Donnas, Da Brat, , Eve, Missy Elliott, , and Pink. Femmes fatales are a unique class because sexuality is presented in multiple ways. They are presented as sexual objects, but at the same time sing songs that challenge that very objectification. This class combines two main ways sexuality is presented through these personas—as invitation for heterosexual coupling and as a means to express rebellion.44

Thus, while being a dangerous threat to societal ethics, the femme fatale persona also possesses attractive attributes, which entices an audience’s support while they simultaneously are conflicted with the implications of deviance.

Femme fatale characters have become a mainstay in movies with popular actresses portraying them. This archetype thrived in the 1940s with the vamps of film noir, such as

Barbara Stanwyck’s turn as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944)—but, as Tóth notes, such mid-twentieth-century depictions of “fallen women” often seemed “rather simplistic and

43 Patti Lynne Donze, “Popular Music, Identity, and Sexualization: A Latent Class Analysis of Artist Types,” Poetics 39, no. 1 (2011): 44–63. Donze’s classifications are based on those from AllMusic, an authoritative and comprehensive online database for pop music with a standardized list of industry descriptors.

44 Ibid., 60–61.

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one-sided.”45 ’s Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) served a major turning point as a mainstream illustration of an aggressively violent woman, but this example also is a case of suppressed femininity as Bonnie often functions as the subordinate to Clyde Barrow

().46 In the late twentieth century, more independent and complex femmes fatales became common in American cinema—such as with in Body Heat (1981) and

Prizzi’s Honor (1985), and in Thelma & Louise (1991), Sharon

Stone in Basic Instinct (1992), in To Die For (1995), and Rebecca Romijn in

Femme Fatale (2002).

Following this Hollywood trend, Chicago’s 2002 film adaptation headlines star actresses

(Zellweger and Zeta-Jones) as the musical’s Merry Murderesses, whom audiences and critics celebrated for their femme fatale qualities.47 Tóth notes, however, that Chicago presents a unique blend of tragic and comic elements with its anti-heroines:

The combination of this (originally) tragic figure and the comic results in a very specific occurrence: the comic-grotesque performance and masquerade of femininity embedded in the events of the carnival. This unique figure, the (carnivalesque-)farcical femme fatale, can manage only the trespassing of all boundaries and limitations without having to pay . Chicago, in its numerous versions, presents to us this unique occurrence in all her glory.48

Thus, Chicago’s Merry Murderesses (which Tóth also recognizes as a “paradoxical alliteration”) demonstrate androgynous characteristics in order to subvert certain feminine stereotypes and undermine masculine law and order.49

45 Tóth, Merry Murderers, 7–8.

46 Ibid., 8.

47 Jami Bernard, “Rethinking Razzmatazz: Cynical Chicago Both Follows and Breaks with Hollywood’s Venerable Musical Traditions,” , 22 December 2002.

48 Tóth, Merry Murderers, 1.

49 Ibid., 2–5 and 157.

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Chicago’s Hollywood Success

The 1990s proved to be a troublesome decade for movie musicals, with films such as the adaptation of (1996) and ’s Everyone Says I Love You (1996) achieving only moderate success at the box office. But Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Chicago (2002) broke this trend with their critical acclaim; although the latter greatly outshone its predecessor in terms of financial gains.50 Chicago became the cinematic darling during the 2003 awards season. As

Robert Bucksbaum, President of Reel Source, a box-office polling firm, suggested, “There is no movie that appeals to Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] members more than

Chicago.”51

Its film adaptation had broad appeal to both young and old audiences, as evident from statistics documented by Reel Source. During the movie’s initial release, 92% of moviegoers age thirty-five years or older said that they would recommend it to a friend, while 96.5% of patrons younger than thirty-five years said the same. From its first month in movie theaters, Chicago earned approximately $16,000 per-screen average, which is double the industry’s grade of excellent set at $8,000. Miramax imposed a strategy with Chicago that limited the initial release to a less than average number of theaters (304 in 96 cities) in order to create an industry buzz to

50 Peter Marks, “Chicago, Issued a Hip Hollywood Zip Code: Like Moulin Rouge before It, Musical Takes an Unorthodox Leap to the Screen,” Washington Post, 22 December 2002. While Moulin Rouge! grossed approximately $57 million domestically and $179 million worldwide, Chicago grossed approximately $170 million domestically and $306 million worldwide. “Box Office/Business for Moulin Rouge!,” Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203009/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus (accessed 2 January 2014); and “Box Office/Business for Chicago,” Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299658/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus (accessed 2 January 2014).

51 As quoted in Claudia Puig, “Chicago Catching Fire: Older Moviegoers Love the Sizzle as Studio Slowly Whets Audience Appetite,” USA Today, 9 January 2003.

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entice more viewers. After approximately a month lapsed, when public demand for the movie increased, Miramax expanded the film’s coverage to 800 theaters in 200 cities.52

Critics roundly praised Chicago’s movie version, although some distinguished its expressive style from the stage production. Manhola Dargis’s review of the film noted how the musical initially had been criticized for its “darkly cynical attitude toward the media and celebrity,” but now it seemed “quaintly earnest” in the scandal mongering new millennium.53

However, Manhola qualified her critique by adding, “There isn’t much Fosse in evidence in this

Chicago, which means there’s little raunch and next to no heat, and Marshall has an exasperatingly impatient filmmaking style”—referring to Marshall’s penchant for constant visual motion and quick edits.54 Other critics offered similar sentiments about the film lacking Fosse’s general style.55

But the majority of critics and audiences reveled in the film’s expression of opulence and decadence. For example, Desson Howe found the movie entertaining for its portrayal of “the heyday of gangsterism, smoky jazz clubs, and police-blotter infamy.”56 Elvis Mitchell remarked that “it’s rare to find a picture as exuberant, as shallow—and as exuberant about its shallowness—as the director Rob Marshall’s film adaptation of the Broadway musical Chicago,”

52 Puig, “Chicago Catching Fire.” Puig cited data from Reel Source for audience statistics and from the Nielsen EDI box-office tracking firm for Chicago’s per-screen averages.

53 Manhola Dargis, “It’s Not Fosse’s Town, but Chicago Still Has a Kick,” Los Angeles Times, 27 December 2002.

54 Ibid.

55 Terry Teachout, “It’s a Noisy Hall with a Nightly Brawl, but No Fosse,” New York Times, 22 December 2002; and Michael Wilmington, “Chicago Sings. . . but without Fosse, It Ain’t Quite All That Jazz,” Chicago Tribune, 27 December 2002.

56 Desson Howe, “Jazzed on Chicago,” Washington Post, 27 December 2002.

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which effectively exploited “America’s thrill-hungry, low-attention-span press and public.”57

Jack Mathews had similar comments regarding the public’s reception, noting, “The original story’s cynicism about crime, the media, and the cult of celebrity has sharpened over time, thanks to our growing obsession with low-end melodrama and the haste with which bad news now travels.”58

In Chicago’s film version, the most opulent and decadent moments are contained within musical numbers, which are mounted as big-budget affairs, as if taken directly from a Broadway production (albeit certainly not the minimal production of Chicago’s revival). Between these over-the-top numbers, the narrative advances through more realistic scenes. Knapp refers to this movie musical technique of augmenting the numbers as the “Musically Enhanced Reality Mode”

(hereafter MERM), which breaks away from a movie’s natural diegesis in order to create a new

“heightened sense of reality” through musical numbers.59

Chicago’s film adaptation distinctly separates between moments of diegesis and MERM, which in many ways is an extension of the show’s classification as a “concept musical,” because the musical numbers are isolated from the spoken dialogue. This technique highlights the cynical treatment of American justice and showbiz within each musical number. Knapp explains the resulting effect:

Chicago finds little in its characters worth salvaging beyond their aptitude for MERM, which represents the only path toward redemption in its world, with that redemption conceived only in material terms. In its way, Chicago places great store in beauty and

57 Elvis Mitchell, “Chicago, Bare Legs and All, Makes It to Film,” New York Times, 27 December 2002.

58 Jack Mathews, “All That Jazz with Lots of Pizzazz on Big Screen, Chicago Is a Razzle-dazzle Cinematic Show-stopper,” New York Daily News, 23 December 2002.

59 Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 67–68.

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freedom, but has no place for the other two Bohemian virtues [truth and love], and uses the razzle-dazzle of MERM to counter truth rather than pursue it.60

In order to connect the musical numbers’ sentiments of cynicism and amorality with the audience, the movie creates a shared perspective between the viewers and the lead character,

Roxie Hart. Consequently, the audience participates in Roxie’s experiences, which Knapp describes: “In Chicago, the idea that jazz and its associated lifestyles have warped Roxie, so that these societal ills and not she herself should be held accountable, is put forth cynically, as a way to evoke public sympathy but not as a real explanation.”61

In the aforementioned 1995 fax from Richards to Weinstein, he assented to the notion of portraying the musical numbers through Roxie’s “movie musical” point of view: “I like utilizing a ‘movie musical fantasy’ concept for the songs in the script—Roxie can be told by Billy early in the script to start thinking of her life as a movie. . . a big musical movie. Her musical fantasies can take her (and us) anywhere.”62 The film’s opening image of a close-up of Roxie’s eyes immediately makes this association between her and moviegoers, suggesting that the audience is simultaneously waking to the montage at a jazz nightclub (Overture/“All That Jazz”).

Subsequently, the film’s numbers are visualized through Roxie’s perspective. But the responsibility of carrying the musically enhanced reality is occasionally shared by another character, such as when Roxie and Billy Flynn contrive a hoax for the press (“We Both Reached for the Gun”). Roxie meta-diegetically joins Velma during her desperate solo turn (“I Can’t Do It

Alone”), for which Roxie is the sole disinterested audience member. And by ignoring her

60 Ibid., 103. Knapp’s study compares the presentation of said Bohemian virtues in Chicago and Moulin Rouge!.

61 Ibid., 114.

62 Box 95, Folder 37, FEP. Evidence is not available that would indicate who originated the idea of having the film’s musical numbers told through Roxie’s perspective.

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husband, Amos, as she is escorted into a police wagon, Roxie triggers his pathetic “Mr.

Cellophane.”63

The filmmakers’ decision to utilize Roxie’s imagination as the source for the musical numbers superseded some of the work’s content. Most notably, Marshall filmed the song

“Class,” between Mama Morton and Velma, but eventually cut it, which he explains:

[“Class”] was very painful to have to cut. . . . But ultimately we found that it was dishonest to our concept—the fact that it doesn’t come from Roxie’s imagination. . . . [Also,] it’s not a Vaudeville song. The truth is that it is a book song, where they actually sing to each other. It’s the only one in the entire show that is a book song. Everything else is a presentational Vaudeville song. So we kept trying to turn this into a Vaudeville number. . . . [But] it just was forcing something. So we shot it ultimately as a book song, as it was originally intended. But . . . in the context of this movie, it felt very stagey.64

This deleted scene utilizes some aspects of MERM to distance it from the diegesis, such as enhanced cabaret lighting and the use of Mama Morton changing the radio station to prompt the song’s instrumental introduction. But without Roxie, it works against the film’s conceptual cohesion.

Through these various cinematic strategies, the film creates a connection between the characters’ deviant behavior and the audience, who vicariously function as accomplices to the

Merry Murderesses’ acquittals. But American public perspective has not encountered any difficulty with being voyeuristically complicit in such criminal activities. In this post-millennial age, U.S. society has substituted the traditional view of heroism with media hype and celebrity

63 Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, 110–14. The film portrays the other characters’ turns, such as Matron Mama Morton’s “When You’re Good to Mama,” the Merry Murderesses’ “Cell Block Tango,” and Billy’s “All I Care About” and “Razzle Dazzle,” as being seen through Roxie’s imagination, either in total or at the beginning to trigger the song.

64 “‘Class’ with Commentary by Director Rob Marshall and Screenwriter Bill Condon,” in Chicago, diamond edition DVD, directed by Rob Marshall (Burbank, CA: Miramax and Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2014).

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idolization, as evinced by mass media and reality TV programming.65 Thus, in contrast to

Chicago’s effect on the neo-conservative decade of the 1970s, its infamous criminals do not compromise millennial American values of narcissism and the cult of fame.

65 Fishwick, Probing Popular Culture, 87–89.

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Conclusion

Through processes of mutual reinforcement, products of popular culture closely correlate with generational transformations in societal psychology.1 Consequently, such cultural products serve as important artifacts to sociological studies. The changing societal perspectives between the 1970s and 1990s correspond with the reversal in prominence between 1975 Broadway rivals,

Chicago and A Chorus Line. The latter’s espousal of strong communal interaction agreed with the U.S. public’s attitude in the 1970s, when the show began its then record-breaking run of

6,137 performances, which lasted through the predominantly conservative 1980s. But A Chorus

Line’s 2006 revival, which ran for 759 performances, did not accord with the narcissistic tenor that had come to characterize twenty-first-century America. In contrast, Chicago’s stinging critique of American society left a bitter aftertaste in the 1970s, when the musical was still able to play 936 performances.2 But now achieving more than 7,200 performances since reopening in

1996, Chicago’s self-serving outlook has finally found its niches in U.S. and global popular culture.

In the 1990s America’s nostalgic climate (particularly on Broadway) combined with the public’s celebrity craving and scandal mongering provided ideal conditions for Chicago’s revival. Yet, this musical wore the brand of un-revivability until its Encores! performances in

1996, even though other 1970s original musicals had already been revived on Broadway in the

1 Nathan C. DeWall, et al., “Tuning in to Psychological Change: Linguistic Markers of Psychological Traits and Emotions over Time in Popular U.S. Song Lyrics,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 5, no. 2 (2011): 6.

2 Ethan Mordden, Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 173–75.

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1990s, such as Grease (1972, revived in 1994) and Company (1970, revived in 1995).3 But when

Chicago’s revival ultimately proved itself as a viable production, it became the antithesis of the extravagant super-productions that had become so popular on the Great White Way since the

1980s. Despite the unprecedented success of Chicago’s revival and its spartan style, Broadway producers have not demonstrated confidence in attempting this sort of minimalism with new book musicals, the most successful of which typically possess lavish production values, such as in The Producers (2001), Wicked (2003), and Monty Python’s (2005). Further insight concerning Broadway’s recent trends can be garnered from studying and comparing the successes of shows with different production values, as well as determining audiences’ receptions of revivals compared with original musicals and revisals. Specifically regarding

Chicago’s reception, more extensive studies of the musical’s treatment abroad would indicate how other cultures view the show’s cynical portrayal of the American justice system and the entertainment industry.

The record-breaking run of Chicago’s Broadway revival currently has no end in sight.

With its production costs being significantly lower than most Broadway musicals because of minimal sets, costuming, and staging, the show only requires a relatively small stage crew. Thus, the production does not experience the typical financial pressures that other Broadway musicals endure. Garrett Eisler notes, “Even putting aside the exceptional $70 million case of Spider-

Man: Turn Off the Dark [2011], the current crop of new Broadway hits have all had initial capitalizations between $10 and $20 million—equal to the budget of a small Hollywood film.”4

3 The revivals for Grease (1994) and Company (1995) both received Tony Award nominations for Best Revival of a Musical.

4 Garrett Eisler, “Encores! and the Downsizing of the Classic American Musical,” Studies in Musical Theatre 5, no. 2 (2011): 134. Upon closing on 4 January 2014, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had failed to recoup its investment, despite taking in more than $200 million at the box office.

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In contrast, Barry and Fran Weissler produced Chicago’s Broadway revival at a capitalization of only $3 million.5

Further aiding the longevity of Chicago’s revival, its producers have frequently recruited celebrities to serve as replacement cast members, which encourages repeat business from

Broadway patrons. The production has utilized stars from various realms of the American entertainment industry (including film, television, and popular music) to serve as replacements.

Many of these stars had little or no Broadway theater experience prior to their respective engagements in Chicago, which has provided a vehicle for such entertainers to break into

Broadway. Celebrities who have portrayed Billy Flynn for the revival include ,

George , Louis Gossett, Jr., Billy Zane, Kevin Richardson, , ,

Huey Lewis, , Brian McKnight, and Billy Ray Cyrus. The production’s notable replacements for Roxie Hart include Marilu Henner, , , Brooke

Shields, Robin Givens, Lisa Rinna, , and . In almost all of these cases, noticeable increases in Chicago’s box-office sales occurred during periods when celebrity replacements performed.6 Following Bebe Neuwirth’s award-winning turn as the original Velma

Kelly for the revival, she returned to the production twice as a replacement at the producers’ behest: as Roxie from 31 December 2006 through 25 March 2007, and as Matron “Mama”

Morton from 14 January through 9 March 2014. These tactics demonstrate how contemporary

Broadway producers covet star personalities as much as or more than any other production element, which reinforces the notion that fame has become American society’s (and

Broadway’s) most celebrated virtue.

5 Ibid., 142.

6 Douglas Santana, “The Box Office Effects of Casting Celebrities as Replacement Actors on Broadway” (MA thesis, San Jose State University, 2009), 60–83; and Chicago: The Musical. http://www.chicagothemusical.com (accessed 8 January 2014).

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Remaining true to the work’s derisive message, Chicago ends with a cynical postscript.

In the song “Nowadays,” Roxie and Velma sing the following appraisal: “In fifty years or so, it’s gonna change, you know; but, oh, it’s heaven nowadays.”7 In his biography of Fosse, Sam

Wasson notes, “‘Nowadays’ is a beautiful song—resilient, not tart; wistful, not saccharine—and it’s composed of such rich romance, one could even believe, against the obvious truth, that Roxie and Velma really were as classy as they were pretending to be.”8 “Nowadays” references the musical’s 1920s setting—the opulent and decadent Jazz Age in which two real-life murderesses were acquitted in a similar manner to Chicago’s anti-heroines. Because the musical’s original production opened fifty years after the Jazz Age, this Brechtian song broke the fourth wall to ironically expose the hypocrisy and corruption of the 1970s U.S. media and justice system—an accusation that theater critics and audiences found alienating. The musical is now nearing its own fiftieth anniversary, at which point audiences may yet again reach a different evaluation of the work’s equating of pleasure and success to sex, murder, and corruption. But nowadays,

Americans find Chicago, and all its jazz, to be just swell.

7 John Kander, et al, Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville: Original , with Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera, , et al, recorded 17–22 June 1975 (Arista 07822-18952-2, 1996, compact disc).

8 Sam Wasson, Fosse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 418.

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Marks, Peter. “Chicago, Issued a Hip Hollywood Zip Code: Like Moulin Rouge before It, Musical Takes an Unorthodox Leap to the Screen.” Washington Post, 22 December 2002.

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Condon, Bill. Chicago. Diamond edition DVD. Directed by Rob Marshall. Burbank, CA: Miramax and Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2014.

———. Chicago. New York: Newmarket Press, 2003.

Ebb, Fred, et al. Broadway and Hollywood Legends: The Songwriters: Kander and Ebb, Alan Jay Lerner. DVD. Directed by Irv Lichtman. New York: Lance Entertainment, 2003.

Johnson, Nunnally. Roxie Hart. DVD. Directed by William A. Wellman. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2004.

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