The show also makes use of popular dances of the Roaring Twenties. Steve Ross (centre) as Amos with members of the company Stratford Festival 2022’s Chicago (Credit: David Hou)Ĭhicago has an appealing if not very original score written in the style of the 1920s. But I couldn’t help but wonder whether the Stratford Festival has lost sight of what makes it one of Canada’s greatest cultural institutions. Director Donna Feore has demonstrated her mastery of this idiom once again and the cast is superb from top to bottom. There is no question about the quality of this year’s Chicago production. But that is all gone now and instead we are offered relatively recent Broadway musicals such as this year’s Chicago and next season’s recently-announced rock musical Rent. Seeing this fine production of Pirates I was reminded that for many years the Stratford Festival offered exemplary G&S productions.
Talented young singers from all over the United States are featured in these performances and four or five operettas and musicals are presented every summer in an 8-week season. The OLO is a unique cooperative venture with the College of Wooster and it has been going since 1979. Among the highlights was a first-class performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. No matter.A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of driving through Amish country in southwestern Ohio, and attending performances by the Ohio Light Opera (OLO) in Wooster. While this “Chicago” has small updates throughout, at heart it remains a throwback to the work that Fosse (and Reinking) did years ago. Jennifer Fouché brings down the house with “When You’re Good to Mama.” And “We Both Reached for the Gun,” in which Billy Flynn treats Roxie like a ventriloquist’s dummy, is theatrical gold. The production is, in fact, studded with gorgeous performances. And she holds the spotlight, especially on “Cell Block Tango.” She’d be right at home as a Bond love interest (or villain). An athletic dancer with short-cropped hair, MacLeod is streamlined and all business. Her song “Roxie,” a fantasy about being surrounded by male performers, is a highlight.Ĭroman’s smooth performance has a counterpoint in MacLeod’s Velma. As an actor, dancer and singer, she’s lyrical and graceful, nailing her character’s many moods.
#Razzle dazzle chicago full
The principals are smooth and affecting in “Chicago.” Croman is by turns coquettish and full of guile as Roxie. Though he wins our sympathies, he never gets any redemption in the show. The single honest person is Roxie’s sappy mechanic of a husband (Paul Vogt), whom she uses and abuses throughout. And they share a defense attorney, Billy Flynn (Jeff McCarthy, looking Joe Biden-esque), a silver-tongued precursor to the Johnnie Cochrans of the world who orchestrate media coverage of sob stories to keep their his off the gallows. MacLeod), a jazz singer, have killed for passion. Clad mostly in clingy black sheer fabrics and leather - a kind of bondage-chic that “Chicago” shares with another Kander and Ebb musical, “Cabaret” - the actors take turns telling us the Jazz Age story of women murderers behind bars in Chicago.īoth Roxie Hart (Dylis Croman), a chorus girl, and Velma Kelly (Terra C. The staging is like a vaudeville show set in a courtroom, with Robert Billig’s brassy, energetic orchestra at center stage on risers, flanked by chairs where the performers sit between numbers.
And its depiction of a corrupt judicial system and a corruptible press are themes that resonate today. It made the subject of murder entertaining and fun. And why not? It’s worked so well that the “Chicago” franchise has become a billion-dollar industry. The touring show’s director, David Hyslop, and choreographer David Bushman have re-created Reinking’s re-creation of Fosse. Still, it sticks so close to the Brechtian vision that Bob Fosse had 43 years ago - an approach re-created by Fosse’s partner Ann Reinking in choreographing the 1996 revival that has essentially been touring for 22 years - it feels a touch antique. The show also harks back to the original meaning of the world “jazz”: It’s infused with sex. Far from it, this “Chicago” is a smooth and slick machine, studded with zestily entertaining showstoppers and a whole lot of pizazz. Not that the 1975 John Kander-Fred Ebb musical is some hermetically sealed diorama. Can a show hew so closely to its past glories that it becomes a gilded museum piece? That’s a question whipped up by the razzle-dazzle Broadway revival of “Chicago,” which bowed Tuesday at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis for a week’s run.
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