Culture Slut: Why Chicago will Always Be Famous
Words: Misha MN
Make it stand out
What“Give 'em the old razzle dazzle, razzle dazzle' em, how can they see with sequins in their eyes?”
These lines from Chicago carry as much impact now as they did when the musical was written in 1975 by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Whether it's celebrities distracting us from their misdemeanours, governments burying bad policies behind cultural events, or politicians glossing over war crimes, the court of public opinion is notoriously fickle. What wins out in the end is not always what should; Justice will always take a backseat to glamorous juvenescence. “Give ‘em the old flim flam flummox, fool and fracture ‘em, how can they hear the truth above the roar?” Star power can be weaponised against the masses, and in our recent political history, I think we can all name a few people that fit this bill.
Three things in this world are guaranteed, life, death and taxes, and attached to those taxes are politics. These issues are eternal and run through some of the greatest works of fiction the human race has produced in the last few centuries; Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Kander and Ebb’s Chicago. Chicago is as relevant now as when it was first written. It holds up a mirror to how we as a society react when glamour and celebrity intersect with crime and violence. It is one of our clearest examples of how morality can be so easily skewed once an individual starts to manipulate their public image. “Give ‘em the old three ring circus, stun and stagger ‘em. When you are in trouble, go into your dance. Though you are stiffer than a girder, they’ll let you get away with murder. Razzle dazzle ‘em and you’ve got a romance.”
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Chicago began life as a play written by Maurine Dallas Watkins back in 1924 when she was working as a newspaper crime reporter. The play was a satire of the murder cases that were like catnip to the Chicago public, taking inspiration from real trials to create the story we know and love today. Roxie Hart shoots her former lover and is taken to prison, where she forms relationships and rivalries, before taking on a celebrity lawyer who gets her acquitted based on the star persona he creates around her. It is a masterclass in image creation, something that Hollywood was also famously obsessed with. It is no surprise that the play inspired several film adaptations in early cinema, including a Cecil B. DeMille silent film in 1927, and a Ginger Rogers movie called Roxie Hart in 1942. In 1960, actress and dancer Gwen Verdon brought the play to Bob Fosse and suggested he create a musical adaptation. He tried for years, but Watkins repeatedly denied him the rights. After her death in 1969, her estate finally sold to Fosse and he collaborated with Kander and Ebb to create the iconic stage show in 1975.
Fosse, Kander and Ebb had collaborated before on the wildly successful 1972 film adaptation of Cabaret, which had also previously been a 1960s musical, a 1950s play (I Am A Camera), and a 1930s book (Goodbye To Berlin). The stars were aligning for this new production. The three took the implied parallels of show business and the justice system of the play and emphasised the duality by casting each of the main characters as a different vaudeville performer archetype, borrowing heavily from legends like Sophie Tucker, Texas Guinan and Ted Lewis. The show became meta, commenting on the story as entertainment whilst also acknowledging itself as that very entertainment on stage, postmodernist vaudeville with some absurdist twists that would even impact the post punk New Wave cabaret of the late 70s and 80s. The production embraced the glamour and misdirection of its subject matter, even famously having a female character, reporter Mary Sunshine, stand up towards the end of the show and reveal herself as a countertenor drag queen, a moment that was sadly lost in the 2002 film (but she was played by Christine Baranski, and she’s almost a drag queen, so you win some and lose some I guess).
Big film musicals fell hugely out of favour with cinema critics towards the end of the twentieth century, opting instead for more gritty and realistic stories about anti-heroes and existentialism. But with the new millennium came a reappraisal of old taste with the one-two punch of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge in 2001, and Rob Marshall’s Chicago in 2002. Moulin Rouge was a wildly eccentric fever dream, a mashup of pop songs, melodrama and fantastical sets, and it was hugely successful. It gave us Nicole Kidman at the height of her romantic powers and it also warmed the audience for a possible reintroduction to musical cinema. They acquired covers of big, well known songs; pop princess Kylie Minogue made a memorable cameo, and with its surrealist setting, they made the idea of musicals cool again. Next up, it was Chicago’s turn.
Chicago was a much more traditional musical interpretation than Moulin Rouge, which was mostly an exercise in cinematic excess. Chicago was a straight story accompanied by singing and dancing. The general public, so tightly clenched for so long, were only just starting to loosen up after the poppers-effect of Moulin Rouge, but the story had several other things that could endear it to the public. Firstly, its themes of murder, justice and show business have always been cinematic draws - and always will be - but the way in which Chicago presents them is particularly engaging. After decades of courtroom dramas and police procedural shows, the mainstream audience had an appreciative taste for Marshall’s musical antics. It gave the viewer a familiar setting which helped bridge the gap between themselves and the singing that seemed so antithetical to serious cinema.
“Performance is seen as the antithesis of authenticity. The expression of self must be introverted to a certain degree, the audience no longer trusts an externalised journey.”
The numbers themselves got restaged using a conceit that also opened them up much more to an audience unused to musicals - all of the songs take place in the imagination of the protagonist. The film has only two diegetic musical sequences, the first, where Roxie sees Velma Kelly perform at the club, and the last, where Roxie and Velma perform on stage together to an appreciative audience. Everything in between is shown to us through Roxie’s dissociative coping mechanisms to get her through her incarceration and trial. This might seem like a technical detail, but it allows the audience space between reality and unreality.
Colourful, theatrical musical numbers are intercut with dull grey sequences showing Roxie’s actual time in prison, the people she meets and how she relates to them. Mamma Morton, the prison matron who is easily bribed, sings a Sophie Tucker-esque number called When You're Good To Mama. Roxie’s overlooked husband Amos comes in with a sad ballad about being invisible dressed as a Charlie Chaplin trope. Lawyer Billy Flynn’s masterful closing argument in court is given in conjunction with a wildly skillful tap dance solo. The formula is set up and the audience has no problem following it, their hand is held without them even knowing it.
We now live in an era where musical theatre is considered a niche interest, something only for musical nerds and theatre kids. It’s cringe, if you will. New musicals - and I use the term “new” VERY loosely - have to hide the fact that they are musicals in their own trailers. Mean Girls, Wonka, and the like all presented themselves as straight dramas, only to spring their songs on audiences once they’ve bought their tickets and taken their seats. Musicals cannot be cool anymore because the appetite for them is non-existent. Musicals try too hard, they are too goofy, they seem unnatural.
Performance is seen as the antithesis of authenticity. The expression of self must be introverted to a certain degree, the audience no longer trusts an externalised journey. Our world is full of charismatic politicians and pundits whipping up the public into varying states of frenzy and violence purely with the power of their rhetoric. This public performance, the outward expression of self is now seen as inherently dishonest, that it must be a role they are performing, and so in order to be shown a performance of self that can be believed, it must be quiet, it must be solitary, it must be inwards.
Rob Marshall’s follow up musical, Nine (2009), was dreadful, but one scene showed an old school musical set designer complaining to her new director: “Le cinema today is in a crisis! Directors are so existentialists. The movies are not worth their entrance prices if no one sings a love song when he is kissed!” Gone are the days when Audrey Hepburn could throw herself round a Paris jazz club out of giddy rebellion in Funny Face (1957), or Marilyn Monroe could sing a snarky, scathing retort to her lover in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could show an entire relationship in a single dance, from shy flirting to passionate embrace, like in Top Hat (1935). One day, we may come back to a time when externalised, stylised emotion becomes celebrated again, but until then, we have only the classics to fall back on. “Razzle dazzle ‘em, show ‘em the first rate sorcerer you are! As long as you keep ‘em way off balance, how can they spot you’ve got no talents? Razzle dazzle ‘em and they’ll make you a star!”
