“Isn't It Swell... Nowadays?”: the Reception History of Chicago On
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
“Isn’t It Swell . Nowadays?”: The Reception History of Chicago on Stage and Screen A thesis submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati 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 Broadway 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 Chicago Tribune reporter of two 1924 murder cases, from which she generated a 1926 Broadway play. The 1975 Broadway production of Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville 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 John Kander’s music, Fred Ebb’s lyrics, and Ebb and Bob Fosse’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 smash 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 i changing attitudes towards crime, deviance, and celebrity worship—from reactionary conservatism of the 1970s to narcissistic consumerism of the 1990s, when audiences finally could identify with Chicago’s anti-heroic femmes fatales undermining law and order. ii Copyright 2014 © by Michael M. Kennedy. All rights reserved. iii 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-hero 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 New York 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 Library of Congress’s Performing Arts Reading Room, where I had access to the Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon Collection. During my research trip to Washington, DC, my close friends Adriane Fink and Zack Stachowski allowed me to stay at their respective homes, for which I am thankful. iv 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. v 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 Twentieth Century . 9 Confronting Revision: Revivals, Revisals, and Revues . 12 A Nostalgic Turn: Contextualizing Revision on Broadway . 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 vi Chapter 3. American Society’s Changing Perception of Crime and Deviance during the Late Twentieth Century . 57 Criminological Understandings of the United States . 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 Hollywood Success . 99 Conclusion . 105 Bibliography . 109 vii List of Tables Table 1.1. Longest-running Broadway musical revivals and their original productions . 13 viii List of Figures Figure 1.1. Musicals that opened on Broadway from the 1967–68 to 1996–97 seasons . 21 ix 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 Sweet Charity (1966) and Pippin (1972). Kander and Ebb’s forty-two-year collaboration represented the longest tenure between a composer and lyricist in Broadway’s history. Scholars have roundly praised several of Kander and Ebb’s works, such as Cabaret (1966), for furthering the “concept musical”—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: Yale University Press, 2009), 1–5. 2 Martin Gottfried, 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. 1 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 Chorus Line outshone it in every way, which included earning nine Tony Awards, the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and a record-breaking fifteen-year run. In 1996 a concert staging of Chicago opened as part of New York’s