Chicago: Singing, dancing dames who’d sell their mothers to be front-page news

It’s that scene with the chairs that gets me every time. Upon each chair, a gorgeous woman clad in black performs something that strongly resembles a strutting, pouting, slightly sexualised and powerfully in-control cabaret routine that might be mistaken for the entertainment at a high-class strip club. 

It has that edge, some sauciness that holds you in suspense, makes you yearn for something you never knew existed.

You get S&M vibes, can almost hear the leather strap tightening, feel the stiletto pressing down on some bastard’s face, or hear the click as a set of handcuffs locks around a wrist and some Lothario in need of punishment is secured to a bedpost.

The stylishness of it, the razzle-dazzle if you will, leans away from triple-X fantasy, though, and slides quickly into punchy storytelling.

The number is “Cell Block Tango”, and it’s definitely not a strip show, of course, more akin to performance art, a combustibly sexy and compulsively watchable showstopper in which “six merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail” reveal their darkly funny true-crime tales, sing about how they came to be in the slammer, their life-ending actions hilariously blurring the line between justifiable homicide and scandalous revenge. 

It’s not a whodunit, but a “why we did it and what went down”. And it’s all done with gymnastic swagger and incredible voices, the tight choreography and precision singing transforming each woman’s lethal backstory into a form of madcap genius: Who’d have imagined that crimes of passion could look and sound quite so sexy? 

By the time we meet this line-up of sassy killers, the audience has already thrilled to the show’s inimitable opener, “All That Jazz”, and it has more than warmed, ready for a riotously wicked and endlessly entertaining night of unbridled fun, ageless tunes, and some of showbiz’s most timeless dance routines. 

The cast, decked out in variations on a jazzy, all-in-black theme, along with an 11-piece orchestra and a conductor who is occasionally woven into the unfolding story, takes over the stage, fills the auditorium with an energy and charge that for two ecstatic hours feels like the perfect dose of sophisticated, grown-up entertainment.

It’s a healthy spectacle, for sure, but there’s also more to it than mere crowd-pleasing charm.

Chicago, a 50-year-old musical that never seems to get old and never loses its razzle-dazzle radiance, is also a perfect — if also perfectly anodyne — reflection of very real worries that exist in our slightly preposterous off-stage world. As much as it’s a production that buoys us from our seats with its tantalising music and thrusting hips, its enchanting physicality and screwball storytelling, it’s actually a pretty hard-hitting look at a corrupt and broken society.

If it feels rooted in the exaggerated reality of a slightly comic-book America rife with crime, that’s because its real-world setting — Chicago in the 1920s — produced precisely the sort of stories of nefarious women getting away with murder that we like to think are too far-fetched to be true.

And yet, it was in fact an era so corrupt and false that its all-male juries frequently let women off the hook simply because of their looks. Or perhaps because they convinced themselves that attractive women — wives, daughters, mothers — were incapable of murder.

Chicago’s women-behind-bars-seeking-fame-and-attention storyline is rooted in a 1920s play based on the true stories of two such killers, their crimes of passion treated as fodder for audiences evidently keen on the more corruptible quirks of human nature.

Then, fifty-odd years ago, the creators of Chicago saw fit to scrounge about in the psychology of a public fascinated with morally dubious characters and make a full-scale song-and-dance production of it. Together with choreographer and director Bob Fosse, who wrote the book, the songwriting duo John Kander (composer) and Fred Ebb (lyricist) wrangled the minutiae of criminal pathology, notoriety-seeking killers, a corrupt legal system, two-faced journalists and public gullibility into a meaty concoction suffused with delectable characters and showstopper tunes that have proven impervious to the passage of time. 

Few stage shows have had quite the same unbreakable longevity or the capacity to rouse audiences in quite the same way. There’s an enduring satisfaction, some magic in it that is deeply alluring.

In fact, seen against the backdrop of our current moment, it still feels like something revolutionary. The difference is, while Chicago parodies an American public falling for the charms and slick fast-talk of a dodgy lawyer and a pair of diabolical dames, today’s America twice voted a quick-talking reality TV show host into the highest office in the land.  

Whether ironically or prophetically, Chicago is as much about criminal sensationalism as it is about a sensation-seeking public falling head over heels for whichever version of the truth is most attention grabbing.

The musical’s real raison d’être, of course, is delivering a non-stop supply of toned-and-tucked and faultlessly executed entertainment. And it is precisely that masterfully tight package that South African audiences are getting right now, the show’s latest season having recently opened in Cape Town. 

From the golden-voiced dazzler, Jonathan Roxmouth, whose bastard lawyer routine reminded me of the kind of shifty smarminess that is the reason Americans have who they currently have in the Oval Office. He may play a sleazeball, but Roxmouth’s portrayal of the cunning, money-grubbing Billy Flynn is cut through with a musicality that gets you every time.

On stage, too, also with considerable dazzle and a profound capacity to unlock multiple layers of quirk and candour, is the triple-threat actor Samantha Peo, who is marvellous as the vivacious Velma Kelly. The other scheming murderess, Roxie Hart, is played by Kiruna-Lind Devar who — despite her sweet smiles and cutesy public displays of sympathy-garnering emotions — you’d imagine selling her own mother for a slice of fame. 

Around these two Machiavellian jailbirds circle a string of characters, none of whom  is ever less than intriguing. Powerhouse performances prevail, whether it’s the goofily cuckolded simpleton played by Dean de Klerk (whose rendition of “Mister Cellophane” produces one of the show’s seminal lump-in-the-throat moments) or Tankiso Mamabolo’s prison matron who uses her tightly controlled, erotically charged solo number (“When You’re Good to Mama”) to reveal the nuances of prison power dynamics.

What really makes this production, though, is that everyone in it is wholeheartedly involved, switched on and working it to the max from beginning to end. 

That goes as much for the marvellously talented and hard-working ensemble chorus as it does for the musicians. What you get is a show without a single dull moment. Every bit of storytelling, no matter how subtle or fleeting, is there to be seen and is made to count for something. 

And it’s much more than merely a sexy bit of vaudevillian cleverness dressed up with a compelling story. Despite the fun and the glitz and glamour, there’s a mirror up there on stage, and what it reflects isn’t necessarily pretty. Whether it’s the unjust treatment of foreigners who end up in American prisons, or the flagrant politicisation of the courts, its hardcore social questions matter even more today than they did in the 1920s, or in 1975, when Chicago first opened on Broadway, where it ran for more than two years. 

Fosse, who directed that original production, was more than just a choreographic innovator who gave us the fluidity of the “Fosse Amoeba”, the turned-in knees and feet, the sideways shuffling, rolled shoulders, finger snaps and splayed jazz hands. He gave the musical world food for thought, too, believing that there must be some profoundly serious motivation for characters to sing and dance: “The time to sing is when your emotional level is too high to just speak any more,” he said. “And the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you ‘feel’.”

Chicago is the perfect vehicle for that philosophy, which is why it transcends its status as entertainment, and why it has retained its stature as a piece of art that continues to enthral and dazzle. And, in moments, shake us to the core. DM

Chicago is playing at the Artscape Opera House in Cape Town until 28 September. It will transfer to Montecasino’s Teatro in Johannesburg on 3 October and play there through 16 November.