After nearly three years of elapsed time, and two completely missed seasons, I finally made my way to Stratford on Canada Day to see the Festival's headline production of the Kander/Ebb/Fosse musical, Chicago. It's the first all-new production of Chicago that has been permitted anywhere in the world since the 1996 Broadway revival (still running) and the 2003 film.
Right up front, potential viewers who aren't familiar with the show, either on stage or in the film version from 2003, need to know that this is not a light-hearted, feel-good summer entertainment. Chicago is one of the most deeply cynical theatre pieces I've ever seen. Although it's all presented in supposedly a light-weight and entertaining way, this show is loaded up with murder, adultery, violence, lying, cheating, graft, deception, and corruption.
One of the most striking aspects of the show is the sheer polish and glitz of the production, which itself becomes the biggest lie of all. Real-life vaudeville was almost never this perfect, this precise, this energetic, and most certainly not this visually attractive -- except, perhaps, at a dozen or so front-line theatres spread across the whole of North America.
This staging of Chicago takes the spectacle and showiness of a set piece like the five-minute grand finale in A Chorus Line and blows it up to spread over a full two acts. The very spectacle becomes wearisome after a while, as does the rapid-fire, snap-snap speed of the entire production.
There are almost no characters in the show, only caricatures. None of the people on stage ever get enough time to really let the audience see inside their selves, behind the carefully tailored and polished façades -- because we have to keep moving to the next big production number, folks! When Roxie finally does get the chance, in the song Nowadays, it's too late in the show and we've become so accustomed to the total superficiality that its all too easy to dismiss this as just another put-on attitude.
It doesn't help matters in any way that the script requires many scenes to be introduced by emcee-style spoken introductions from one or another of the chorus members. The audience is constantly reminded that none of what we are seeing is real, that each scene is another show-within-the-show. Combine that with the slick comedic payoffs of a key song, Cell Block Tango, and the whole piece -- funny as it often is -- becomes the ultimate in Brechtian detachment. Contrary to what Donna Feore says in her programme note, it seems to me that we are not meant to sympathize or identify with any of the characters because we can't tell who any of them really are in any case.
That's all the sadder, because the story of the show is actually rooted in two real-life murder cases in Chicago in the 1920s. I can't help feeling that theatre would be far better served by having a playwright delve deeper into the real lives behind the deliberately manipulative false fronts which those two women put up in the press and in court.
Since the Stratford Festival and director-choreographer Donna Feore have opted to produce this splashy, showy, false-front confection, let's get down to the actual performance.
The Festival Theatre's semi-octagonal thrust stage is covered with a larger circular platform. The back wall consists of row upon row of brilliant golden lights, which can be turned on or off in varied patterns. There are a couple of wall segments which can pivot open as doors. Two open-framed spiral staircases lead up to a curving walkway which connects doors at right and left. The stairs and walkway are framed out of what looks like stainless steel, partly suggesting a lighting gantry. The ends of the walkway similarly lead to black doors into the backstage. The standard doors at stage left and right are there, also framed with gantries. A larger segment of the back wall cam open at ground level to permit the few but suggestive set pieces to be wheeled in.
The show is, quite rightly, costumed and set in the 1920s. The constant recourse to flashy, sequined, dance clothes for the women (most of whom are murderers, after all) lacks variety of approach, although it seems that their costumes are different for every single number. Not so the male chorus, who have to do far more of Feore's signature high-stakes dancing, but seem to spend much of the show doing it while dressed in the trench coats and snap-brimmed fedoras of the journalist pack, or the suits which lurk under those trench coats.
The entire look of the show constantly tells us that this is theatrical, that none of what we are seeing is real. It's the multiple rows of blazing lights, more than anything else, that create the atmosphere of the entire show being one huge grand finale.
Tasked with such handicaps, I certainly have to admire the work of the company onstage, who are always one step away from being upstaged by the designers.
Chicago has not one but two female leads. Chelsea Preston plays the trapped innocence of Roxie Hart on the early stages of the show more convincingly than the hardened media hound in the second act. Vocally, her best moments were in the second-act song, Nowadays.
Jennifer Rider-Shaw brought a believable sneer of disdain as the hardened Velma Kelly. The huge contrast with Roxie's innocent air at the outset of the show laid the groundwork for the two to become the average of both characters in their duet number at the end.
My favourite character in the entire performance was the jail matron, Mama Morton, as played by Sandra Caldwell. In some ways, she's the most truthful person on the stage during the jail scenes, glorying in her own graft and corruption rather than trying to dress it up. Her performance of When You're Good to Mama was a stand-out vocal highlight of the show, complete with a hint of an Ethel Merman growl creeping in towards the end.
Dan Chameroy, a long-time Stratford veteran, owned the stage as lawyer Billy Flynn, riding roughshod over anyone who dared to interrupt his beautifully polished speeches. His performance was the ultimate all polish and no substance element of the production, as it should be.
The only other really believable person in the show is the perennial schmuck and sad sack, Amos Hart (Rosie's husband) as played by Steve Ross. Even without clown makeup, he's the sad vaudeville clown to the life, always desperately hoping for someone to love him, to like him, even just to notice him. Ross displayed impeccable timing in the moments when he said or did the right thing -- and then just gave up and exited, since the expected response simply didn't happen. In a sense, he gave the most authentically vaudevillian performance of the entire show, since hundreds of bad comedians in real-life vaudeville constantly got run over just as life runs over Amos. Think of the old shtick of the shepherd's crook yanking the comic off stage, or of Fozzie Bear in the Muppet Show, and you get the idea.
The ensemble of women in the Cell Block Tango all did full justice to the comedy in their spoken descriptions of their respective murder scenes. Don't ask me who told which story, but my favourite line here was the perfectly timed payoff of "And then he ran into my knife -- ten times," followed immediately by the perfectly executed ten spins and flop on the floor by the male chorus member standing in for that vignette as her husband.
Huge kudos to the chorus for the precision and immense energy and gusto they bring to Donna Feore's dance routines, as well as for the quality of their numerous little bit parts and the narrative introductions.
The level of imagination which director Donna Feore brought to her scene pictures was as noteworthy as choreographer Donna Feore's dance routines were becoming all too familiar. She's staged so many musicals for Stratford now that I catch myself, in the dance numbers, thinking, "Oh, yes, I remember that bit from.... She used that sequence in.... Yes, that's the same trick she had in...." If only for that reason, perhaps it's getting near time that Stratford considered handing a musical to another director and choreographer with a different sense of style. Mind you, there are precious few theatres anywhere in the world with an apron stage like the one in Stratford's Festival Theatre, and even fewer that will let a musical make use of such a stage -- and Feore is a master of staging vivid and high-energy numbers in this oddly-shaped and limited space.
There's no doubt that Chicago is as polished and energetic a musical show as the Stratford Festival has ever mounted, but I still came away deeply dissatisfied. In the end, I found the experience depressing, unable to relate to any of the characters, and certainly unable to sympathize with any of them. That's a fault built right into the entire structure of book, lyrics, and music, at the foundation level. I'd be very happy never to see another performance of this monumentally cynical piece of superficial emptiness.
Chicago continues onstage at the Stratford Festival Theatre until October 30.
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