Chicago
Each number is built like a single act from a 1920s vaudeville bill, and the songs turn a mirror back on the press and the public who stage murder and trial as a show.
At a glance 🔭💭
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The creators ⏳🌊
- ComposerJohn Kander
The composer who wrote Cabaret with Fred Ebb, he captured in each number of this show a different idiom of 1920s vaudeville with precision.
- LyricsFred Ebb
He wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the book with Fosse, and conceived the idea of modeling each role on a vaudeville star.
- DirectorBob Fosse
He directed and choreographed, shaping the entire stage into a single vaudeville show.
- LeadGwen Verdon
She first proposed turning the original play into a musical, and played Roxie Hart in the premiere.
- LeadChita Rivera
In the original production she played Velma Kelly and opened the show with “All That Jazz.”
- LeadJerry Orbach
As the lawyer Billy Flynn in the original production, she created a sly, smooth-talking showman.
I. A musical vaudeville
(Source) The story began with a real case. In 1924, Chicago Tribune reporter Maureen Dallas Watkins covered the trials of two women who had shot men, and watched as the defendants became darlings of the press and walked free. In a playwriting class at Yale she turned the experience into a satire, which she brought to Broadway in 1926. Years later, the actress Gwen Verdon read the play and urged her husband, Bob Fosse, to make it into a musical. (Composer) The music was by John Kander, the lyrics by Fred Ebb. Born in Kansas City in 1927, Kander began his Broadway career as a rehearsal pianist and dance arranger. After meeting Ebb in 1962 he wrote “Cabaret” with him, and Fosse's direction of its film version led the way to this work. Kander is regarded as a composer who, rather than asserting a signature style, pinpoints exactly the period and idiom a show demands. (Form) The two gave the work the subtitle “a musical vaudeville.” According to Ebb, Roxie was modeled on the singer Helen Morgan, Velma on the nightclub hostess Texas Guinan, the lawyer Billy Flynn on the bandleader Ted Lewis, and the prison matron Mama Morton on Sophie Tucker. Each number was built like a self-contained vaudeville act. (Opening) Early in rehearsals Fosse collapsed with heart trouble, delaying the production by several months. The show opened on June 3, 1975, at the 46th Street Theatre and ran for 936 performances. That year's Tony Awards were swept by “A Chorus Line,” also covered in this series.
II. A night of jazz
(Opening) As the curtain rises, the emcee announces that he will show the audience a story of murder, greed, and corruption. The first number belongs to Velma Kelly. While Velma, a vaudeville singer jailed for shooting her husband and her sister, sings an invitation to surrender to the city's night, Roxie Hart, at one side of the stage, shoots the lover who is about to leave her. (Accompaniment) Beneath the song runs an accompaniment figure that repeats the same few bars over and over. Above that figure, circling in the low register, the melody settles in lazily, so that the whole city seems to revel while sinking into a kind of languor. The show's basic mood is set right here. (Husband) Roxie's husband, Amos, goes to the police offering to take the blame in her place. Roxie sings a sweet love song about him. Flowing softly like a Helen Morgan–style lament, the song changes texture the moment Amos learns the truth and reverses his statement. The same song turns from a tender confession into a sneer. (Device) These two songs lay out the grammar of the work. A character's actual situation and the song performed onstage move independently, and the audience laughs at the gap between them. Song becomes not a place to confess what one truly feels but a place for a performance put on for others.
The opening number, in which Roxie's murder unfolds while Velma sings of the city's night, sets the mood for the entire work.
- An accompaniment figure that repeats the same few bars over and over (a vamp) underpins the whole song. The rowdy yet languid Chicago night of the 1920s is built from this repetition.
- While the song plays, Roxie's shooting takes place at one side of the stage. This layering of a cheerful show and a crime in a single frame first reveals the work's mode of storytelling.
- Chita Rivera sang it as Velma in the original production, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the 2002 film. Zeta-Jones won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role.
- In the latter half the brass join in one after another and the sound swells, as if a small club act were ballooning into a big show.
A love song Roxie sings while her husband takes the blame for her; as the situation shifts, the song's meaning flips.
- It borrows the voice of the Helen Morgan–style lament of heartbreak and devotion (the torch song). Its sweetness is so far from Roxie's true feelings that it rings ironic from the start.
- When Amos reverses his statement, the same melody turns from a hymn to a grateful husband into resentment and scorn. The melody stays the same, but its meaning changes.
- The film brought out this reversal by cutting back and forth between Roxie's fantasy stage and the police station.
III. Tango in the cell block
(Prison) Roxie is locked in the women's block of the Cook County Jail. There she meets six women who have killed men, and one by one they step forward to explain why they had no choice. Each story is a brief monologue, and a tango rhythm links them. (Rhythm) The tango is a dance in which clipped beats alternate with gliding ones. Kander poured both passion and menace into this rhythm. The six excuses all differ, yet every one ends the same way: he had it coming. As the refrain accumulates, the confessions swell into a chorus. Of the six, an inmate from Hungary speaks almost no English and pleads her innocence only in her native tongue. This moment takes on a chilling weight later on. (Matron) The block is ruled by Mama Morton. Her song recalls the act of a big, imposing singer like Sophie Tucker, boldly proclaiming the principle of the deal: be good to me and I'll be good to you. In this jail, even kindness is bought and paid for. (Lawyer) Then Billy Flynn appears. Hiding the fact that he cares about nothing but money, he sings that love is all he ever thinks about. Onstage, dancers with fans surround him. The sly patter of a Ted Lewis–style bandleader is the idiom of this song.
A number in which the six women of the cell block take turns recounting their murders, with a tango rhythm linking monologue and chorus.
- The tango rhythm, with clipped beats alternating with gliding ones, carries both passion and menace. Though it is set in a jail, it feels like a dance hall.
- Each of the six tells a different story, yet every time the ending converges on the same conclusion. As that repetition builds, individual excuses become a collective chorus.
- Only the inmate from Hungary pleads her innocence in her native tongue. This moment reads as foreshadowing, a hint of where the story is headed.
- In the film it was remade with intense choreography using a dark stage and red fabric, becoming the most talked-about scene of the film version.
IV. Ventriloquism
(Press conference) Billy rewrites Roxie's case as a moving tale. Before the reporters, Roxie becomes a ventriloquist's dummy perched on his knee, merely mouthing the words while Billy speaks for her. The song pours out in breathless, rapid-fire words, and the reporters repeat back exactly what they've written down. Few scenes show so bluntly how the press is manufactured. (Fame) Having seized the front page, Roxie stands alone onstage and sings of her dream of stardom. Meanwhile Velma, pushed aside overnight, proposes that the two of them perform together. Their relationship first takes shape in a song declaring that she can't pull off the act alone, but Roxie refuses. (Act II) As interest cools, Roxie announces that she is pregnant and is back at the center of the press. The scene in which she gleefully sings about the baby pushes the work's cynicism further still. (Husband) Then Amos, the man no one sees, stands alone onstage. He sings that he is like transparent cellophane. The song is said to be modeled on the vaudeville comedian Bert Williams and his signature number “Nobody.” It is the quietest, loneliest moment in the middle of a noisy show.
The scene in which Billy sits Roxie before the reporters like a ventriloquist's dummy and rewrites the case.
- It takes the form of a song that spills out words at high speed (a patter song). As the reporters parrot back what they have written down, it renders in sound the process by which the press replicates a story.
- Roxie only moves her lips while Billy speaks for her. The satire of this number is that the song's protagonist has no voice of her own.
- Billy in the original production was Jerry Orbach. In the film he was played by Richard Gere.
A song sung alone by Amos, the husband no one notices, a lonely pause in the middle of a noisy show.
- The song is said to be modeled on the vaudeville comedian Bert Williams and his signature song “Nobody.” It recalls his stage persona, which hid sorrow behind clownish antics.
- The slow, plodding rhythm sounds like the footsteps of a man worn down. Set against the show's flashier numbers, Amos's transparency stands out all the more.
- Barney Martin sang it in the original production. John C. Reilly, who played the role in the film, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
- It is often staged so that he exits without applause when the song ends. The song's point, that no one notices him to the very last, is thus completed on the stage itself.
V. Sleight of hand in the courtroom
(Trial) As Roxie awaits trial, Billy teaches her that a courtroom is nothing but a circus. Dazzle people's eyes with a flashy show, and the truth doesn't matter. The number in which he sings this secret begins low, almost hushed, and gradually turns the courtroom onstage into a big top. (Testimony) In court, Roxie performs from the script Billy has written for her. Even the gesture of baring a bit of knee is calculated testimony. Velma watches, seething, as Roxie lifts wholesale the very tricks she had meant to use in her own case. (Class) Mama Morton and Velma sing a duet lamenting that class has vanished from the world. Coming from a murder defendant and a bribe-taking prison matron who pine for decorum and manners, the song is all the funnier for wearing the shape of a genteel old tune. It was filmed for the 2002 movie but cut in the final edit. (Verdict) At the moment of the verdict, the music takes an abrupt turn. The triumphant mood that had just begun to swell is cut off by news of another crime, and the spotlight shifts elsewhere in an instant. How it ends is best discovered in the theater. Still, it is worth knowing that in this scene the music shows how easily the star of the show can change.
In this number, Billy teaches Roxie how to win her trial, insisting that a courtroom is no different from a circus.
- It begins low and soft, almost hushed, and raises the stakes little by little. Its way of bewitching in a whisper rather than a shout is itself the art of misdirection Billy is talking about.
- Onstage, the jurors and reporters move more and more like a circus troupe as the courtroom turns into a show. The film kept this idea intact and made the courtroom a circus tent.
- The song that states the work's theme most directly, its title borrows an American idiom in use since the 1880s, meaning to beguile people with showy surface glitter.
VI. Nowadays
(Finale) In the final scene, Roxie sings that this is simply how the world is nowadays. The melody sways lightly like a 1920s pop tune, and that very lightness makes it all the more bitter. The song soon leads into an unexpected act, and the show comes to a close exactly as the emcee promised at the start. What that act is remains a pleasure to discover for yourself. (Reception) At its premiere the show was faulted as too cynical, and that same year it was overshadowed by “A Chorus Line.” It earned Tony nominations in several categories but won nothing. In the summer of 1975, when Verdon was briefly out for throat surgery, Liza Minnelli stepped onto the stage as a stand-in. (Revival) The verdict was overturned in 1996. New York City Center's Encores! series staged the work in concert form with minimal scenery, and in November of that year the production moved to Broadway's Richard Rodgers Theatre, where it won six Tony Awards. This production, with the band seated right on the black stage, is still running today and has become the longest-running revival in Broadway history. (Film) Rob Marshall's 2002 film recast the numbers as fantasy stages unfolding in Roxie's head, moving back and forth between stage and reality, and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. For audiences in the era when the revival was in full swing, a story in which image and public opinion stand in for the truth felt closer to home than it had in 1975.
A finale in which, after everything is over, Roxie sings that this is simply how the world is nowadays, so that the show remains a show to the very end.
- The melody sways lightly like a 1920s pop tune. Its breezy, shrug-it-off attitude is precisely what leaves behind the bitterness of the whole story.
- The song flows naturally into the final act that follows. What that act is, you'd do best to see for yourself.
- In the film, Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones sing it together to close the movie.
Lesser-known stories
Gwen Verdon tried from the 1950s on to secure the rights to the source play, but its author, Maurine Dallas Watkins, never gave permission. Watkins is said to have turned deeply religious late in life and to have regretted portraying murder defendants as alluring. The rights were released by the family only after Watkins's death in 1969. That the work was born more than a decade late because of its own author's misgivings is rarely mentioned, overshadowed by the show's glittering performance history. Roxie and Velma had real-life models: Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, who each shot a man in Chicago in 1924. Both were acquitted, and Watkins's articles helped make them stars of the press. The cynicism onstage was no invented exaggeration but a record of what a reporter had witnessed firsthand. Today the show is remembered as a smash hit, but its 1975 premiere, in the shadow of that year's “A Chorus Line,” did not win a single Tony. The Chicago we know now is the stripped-down revival that began with the 1996 Encores! concert. That is also why few people remember the lavish staging of the original. The original cast recording was selected for the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2026. Long overshadowed by the fame of the revival and film albums, the original recording has belatedly been recognized as part of the nation's recorded heritage.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Vaudeville
(Etymology) From the French vaudeville, commonly explained as deriving from a term for the satirical songs of Normandy. (In film·musical-theater music) A variety show hugely popular in America from the late 19th century through the 1920s. Singers, comedians, dancers and acrobats come out one after another, each giving a short act. “Chicago” borrows this format, staging each scene like a show of its own. It's much like a school talent show, where each class puts on a song, a dance or a comedy bit in turn.
Number
(In film·musical-theater music) In a musical, a single song, or a scene combining song and dance, is called a number. The term comes from the practice of numbering each piece in the show's program. The numbers in “Chicago” often sing less of a character's inner feelings than of the performance put on for others. Just as you speak of track 1 and track 2 on an album, think of it as the unit for counting the songs in a show one by one. (Elsewhere) In everyday use, number simply means a figure or a numeral.
Vamp
(In film·musical-theater music) A few short bars of accompaniment repeated over and over before a song begins or beneath it. It can buy time until the singer comes in, or lay down the mood of the whole piece. The low, circling accompaniment of “All That Jazz” is a good example. It's like friends turning a jump rope steadily on the same beat while the person about to jump in watches for the right moment to enter. (Elsewhere) The English vamp is also used to mean a seductress who lures men.
Patter song
(Etymology) Patter is English for rapid chatter. (In film·musical-theater music) A song whose lyrics pour out very fast, almost spoken. The rhythm and wit of the words matter more than the melody, leaving the listener no room to catch a breath. The exchange between Billy and the reporters in “We Both Reached for the Gun” works this way. Think of getting tongue-tied trying to keep up with a fast rap.
Torch song
(Etymology) Torch means a flaming torch. In English, to carry a torch for someone is a figure of speech for nursing an unrequited love. (In film·musical-theater music) A slow, plaintive song of unrequited love or heartbreak. Singers such as Helen Morgan made the form famous in the 1920s and '30s. “Funny Honey” borrows this form, but because it doesn't match what Roxie really feels, it sounds ironic. The mood is like flunking a test and deliberately putting on a sad ballad to set the scene.
Tango
(In film·musical-theater music) A dance and music born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the late 19th century. Its hallmark is a rhythm in which clipped beats and gliding beats cross one another, holding passion and tension together. “Cell Block Tango” binds the confessions of six murder defendants to this rhythm. Picture walking in step with a partner in gym class, then stopping short and whipping around in a new direction, and you're close to the feel of tango.
Revival
(Etymology) The English revival means to come alive (vive) again (re). (In film·musical-theater music) Remounting a previously staged work with a new creative team and a new cast. Sometimes it stays faithful to the original, and sometimes the staging is changed drastically. With “Chicago,” the 1996 revival ran far longer than the original production and changed how the work was judged. It is much like a remaster that rereleases an old game with newly polished graphics and controls. (Elsewhere) In religion, a movement of spiritual renewal is called a revival.
Orchestration
(In film·musical-theater music) The work of deciding which instruments play which parts of the melodies and harmonies a composer has written, and laying them out in a score. The original orchestrations for “Chicago” were by Ralph Burns, who created the sound of a 1920s jazz band built around brass and reeds. The same song feels completely different played on a single piano versus by a full band. It's like deciding whether to turn the same ingredients into bibimbap or fried rice.