Chicago Tickets:35 recommendations
The Evening Standard
When it comes to sheer subversive pleasure – and how rarely it does – no theatrical night this year matches the delights of Chicago. This ravishing song and dance comedy about two young American women in 1929 getting away with murder, thanks to a lawyer so bent he can barely look anyone in the eye, is twenty-two years old. But how freshly its authors, John Kander and Fred Ebb capture a mood of Nineties cynicism about the way the world works, or doesn’t. How timely its witty view of the American legal system as ‘just the serious side of showbusiness’, with murder marketed as entertainment. Mooning romantics who like their musicals to trill on the way to happy endings for young lovers will, however, be put out. Kander and Ebb, creators of Cabaret and Kiss Of The Spiderwoman, hark back to a Jazz Age Chicago where love has been taken off the menu, hypocrisy is a girl’s best friend and it’s greed that gets you going places.
The Guardian
Barely have I heard such drum beating as prefaced the opening of Chicago, But, even if it is not the greatest musical ever, it is a highly intelligent, expertly choreographed revival of the 1975 Kander and Ebb show that, in Walter Bobbie’s production, suggests Brecht has finally reached Broadway. The show tells a simple story. Roxie Hart, a humble garage mechanic’s wife, shoots her lover and comes to realise that, in the Chicago of the 1920’s, murder is a passport to celebrity. Finding that fame is fleeting, however, she fakes prison pregnancy, treats her trial as if it were a giant audition and achieves the showbiz acclaim she desires.
