The genius of Bob Fosse is in full cry in this breathtaking remount of the 1975 musical Chicago, which the late, truly great American choreographer created with Fred Ebb and John Kander.
While this version is the smash hit 1996 revival directed by Walter Bobbie and choreographed by Ann Reinking, who starred in both versions of the show, you feel Fosse in every spiky, Picasso-esque pose, every angular modernist movement that makes Chicago more a dance show with music than the other way around.
All that jazz: A stunning Zoe Ventoura and the cast of Chicago.Credit: Jeff Busby
And in Zoe Ventoura and Lucy Maunder as Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart, the glamorous man-murdering duo defended by celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn (Anthony Warlow), we get a dazzling duelling duo who strut the Crown stage with such confidence and panache they need to think about returning with their own two-woman show.
Amazingly, the original 1975 production directed and co-written by Fosse was poorly received, dismissed as a bit too chilly and cynical in its attack on the American love of celebrity and a bit too enamoured of its Brechtian origins.
The celebrated revival was part of New York City Centre’s Encores! series, which pares classic musicals back to a minimum and puts the emphasis on the singing and the dancing (in this iteration there are a few chairs, a couple of ladders in the wings, the rope that ends the life of one of Roxie and Velma’s cellmates).
Lucy Maunder as Roxie Hart and Anthony Warlow as Billy Flynn in Chicago.Credit: Jeff Busby
In other words, the performances really pop, so much so it’s like watching a concert version of a traditional musical, replete with the orchestra front and centre, who are one part Jazz Age house band, one part jury for the murder trial.
Inspired by a 1926 play by one-time Chicago Tribune crime reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, Chicago tells the fictional tale of housewife and nightclub dancer Roxie Hart, who murders her lover Fred Casley and leans on her gormless husband Amos to take the blame.
Roxie winds up in the clink with a group of other bloodthirsty bombshells who have bumped off their husbands and boyfriends, including Ventoura’s equally glamorous showgirl Velma Kelly, their justifications for homicide showcased in the show-stopping Cellblock Tango sequence (“He ran into my knife 10 times”).
Into this murderous scenario slinks Warlow’s Flynn, the fast-talking, narrative-massaging smoothie who sees money to be made in turning the easy-on-the-eye Roxie into a celebrity for a public thirsty for this heady concoction of sex, showbiz and scandal.
Show-stealer Peter Rowsthorn as the gormless Amos.Credit: Jeff Busby
While the Perth-reared Ventoura and WAAPA graduate Maunder are a sight to “behold” — they latch onto Fosse’s signature sexy playfulness and make it their own — musical theatre veteran Warlow oozes low-key charisma as the silver-tongued Flynn, who commands the stage with such ease he would indeed have got Jesus Christ off the hook (Billy’s own joke, not mine).
Amusingly, the biggest applause was for a performer with limited singing and dancing skills, Kath and Kim’s Peter Rowsthorn, who milks the role of the loveable imbecile Amos to the hit, squeezing every last drop of comedy from a part that might well have faded into the background with so much talent on display.
And big-voiced, American-born Asabi Goodman nails it as the venal but utterly charming cellblock matron “Mama Morton”, injecting a welcome note of authenticity in a show set in one of the most iconic settings and eras in 20th US history.
While the entire cast really deliver those fierce, funny Kander and Ebb numbers I’ll long remember this production for the choreography and the dancing, with the chorus and, in particular, the eye-popping Ventoura executing those Reinking-honed Fosse full-bodied moves with such conviction and skill you could just sit back and watch.
Chicago is the second-longest running musical in Broadway history (after The Phantom of the Opera).
On the evidence of this astutely sexed-up version of the legendary 1996 revival — William Ivey Long’s black, bondage-style update of the earlier version’s more colourful costumes is striking and effective — it is little wonder that Chicago is still roaring so long after the sainted Fosse’s passing.
You should kill to get your hands on tickets.
Chicago is on at the Crown Theatre Perth until December 17.
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