The Case of Chicago Part 1 (2002)
We’re already halfway through the year, which means that it’s time once again to celebrate June Tunes! It’s been a couple years since we did a whole month of music-themed episodes, and since this is our last year of podcasting, we decided to bring it back.
It’s safe to say that in the late 90s, movie musicals weren’t as popular as they were in the 1940s and 50s. It had been decades since the likes of Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers danced across the screen, and there was a shared perception among Hollywood that modern audiences were no longer interested in the genre. In fact, some would go as far as to say that it was dead.
But in the early 2000s, movie musicals made a place for themselves in the American zeitgeist once more, and among them was one of the most successful and celebrated Broadway-to-film adaptations of all time: Chicago.
Based on a 1926 play by Maurine Dallas Watkins, Chicago is an endlessly entertaining satire that highlights the problem with celebrity worship and corruption in the criminal justice system. It’s packed with musical numbers inspired by vaudeville and the music of the jazz age, performed by an incredibly talented cast that seemed to fit their roles like a glove.
Come on, Cassettes, why don’t we paint the town and learn all about Chicago?!
The true story
In March of 1924, two Chicago cops found a man shot to death in a car belonging to a cabaret singer. The performer, Mrs. Belva Gaertner, was a divorcee and suspected of having affairs. At first, she denied knowing anything about the victim, 29-year-old Walter Law. But when police discovered that the murder weapon was hers, she said, “I don’t know. I was drunk.”
Reporter Maureen Dallas Watkins had been assigned the crime beat at the Chicago Tribune. According to Peter Kobel in Chicago: The Movie and Lyrics, Watkins spiced up the story, taking it from the police blotter and making it a front-page sensation. The reporting included sensational quotes from Gaertner like, “Gin and guns–either one is bead enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess.”
Watkins seemingly struck gold by using crime reporting as a means of entertainment. Even today, there is a huge market for true crime documentaries, books, podcasts, and more. Because of this, high profile criminals hold a certain level of celebrity, no matter how horrific the crime.
The Chicago Tribune assigned Maureen Dallas Watkins to Belva Gaertner. Just weeks after police found Walter Law in Gaertner’s car, Watkins was covering another murder. Mrs. Beulah Annan, a young married woman, allegedly shot her lover in her apartment and then proceeded to play a jazz record for two hours before calling her husband. She told him that she shot the man for “[trying] to make love” to her. Later on, her defense was that she and her lover, a man named Harry Kalstedt, had an argument. According to her, they both struggled for a gun, which went off, and he was killed.
Although Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan were the chief inspiration for the two main characters in Chicago, there were actually four women on “murderess row” in the Cook County jail that influenced the play. The other two women were Katherine “Kitty Malm” Baluk and Sabella Nitti.
Kitty Malm was found guilty of killing night watchmen Edward Lehman during a botched robbery, and sentenced to life in prison. She was given many nicknames by the press, like “The Wolf Girl,” “The Tiger Girl,” and “Go-to-hell Kitty.” The Chicago Tribune reported that she, “Packed a gat (a pistol) where most girls harbor their love letters.”
Sabella Nitti inspired the Hungarian immigrant character on Murderess Row in Chicago. She was an Italian immigrant and the prosecution painted her as a dangerous animal, evidenced by her looks. She was accused of killing her husband, but there was very little evidence. In some accounts, it seems that they never even positively identified her husband’s supposed body. Nitti spoke almost no English, so when the jury convicted her, she had very little understanding of what was happening. She was the first woman in Chicago’s history to be sentenced to death by hanging. A young attorney named Helen Cirese and a team of lawyers stepped in to help Sabella appeal her conviction. Cirese knew that appearance mattered more than anything to public opinion, and she brought in a hairdresser to give Sabella a makeover. Cirese helped her apply make-up, and she clandestinely provided the prisoner with extra food to fill out her thin frame. As she waited for the Illinois Supreme Court to review her case, Sabella learned more English and adopted American mannerisms. When the court eventually ordered a new trial, Sabella shocked the prosecution with her new look and demeanor, and Helen Cirese used this as proof that conventionally attractive women were getting preferential treatment by the justice system. Now with the public’s support, Nitti was released on bail. Her trial date was repeatedly pushed back until the charges were dropped.
Maureen Dallas Watkins quit her job at The Chicago Tribune shortly after covering the murderess row trials, and moved to New York. While she was there, she took a playwriting class and started adapting her journalism into a satire for the stage. The play was called Play Ball, but was renamed to Chicago. It pulled a lot of material from her actual reporting, turning Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annen into Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart, respectively. The lawyer Billy Flynn was based on Annan’s actual attorney, a man named W.W. O’Brien, with some of his lines reportedly coming from O’Brien’s actual defense. It premiered on Broadway in 1926 to great reviews.
The play was a comedic satire that pointed out current glaring failures in the criminal justice system, and the power of newspaper publicity.
Chicago was so popular that a silent film adaptation was released a year later in 1927. It would be adapted again in 1942, into a film starring Ginger Rogers. In this version, titled Roxie Hart, the main protagonist is actually innocent and takes the fall for a murder her husband commits.
Broadway actress and dancer Gwen Verdon had reportedly wanted to do a musical adaptation of Chicago, and her husband Bob Fosse attempted to secure the rights to the play from Maureen Dallas Watkins. Watkins refused. Some accounts say that she had become a born-again Christian later in life and no longer wanted to celebrate immorality. In the book All That Jazz: The Life and Times of the Musical Chicago, Ethan Mordden stated that Watkins was always a devout Christian and that her play wasn’t intended to celebrate anything. But after her death in 1969, Watkins’ estate sold Bob Fosse the rights to Chicago.
Bob Fosse was an accomplished dancer, choreographer, writer, and director. He was quite possibly the most influential person in the field of jazz dance in the 20th century. He won 8 Tony Awards for choreography in Broadway hits like Damn Yankees and Pippin, and he also took home the Best Director Oscar for the film adaptation of Cabaret in 1973, beating out Francis Ford Coppola who was nominated for directing The Godfather.
Fosse asked songwriting partners John Kander and Fred Ebb to write the songs for Chicago, while Fosse and Ebb co-wrote the book for the musical. The duo had previously written the songs for the massively successful Cabaret. They’re also famous for writing the title song for Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, which became the city’s unofficial theme song.
Together, Fosse and Ebb came up with the idea of presenting Watkins’ play as if it were performed on a vaudeville stage. The new musical used much of the original content, but expanded on the character of Velma Kelly.
The musical was met with bad reviews on its out-of-town run, as critics felt that the characters lacked heart. But Fosse held strong to his belief that the characters shouldn’t be too sympathetic, staying true to Watkins’ original intent for the story.
Chicago premiered on Broadway in 1975 to a positive reception. The extraordinarily energetic musical numbers and breathtaking (quite literally) choreography of Bob Fosse gave the musical enough “razzle dazzle” to run for two years and 936 performances. However, critics were still taken aback by the musical’s cynicism. It was nominated for eleven Tony Awards, but was completely shut out by A Chorus Line.
Martin Richards produced the musical during its original Broadway run. He expressed that the show was considered off-beat because of its subject matter, and that audiences and critics didn’t quite understand the purpose of the story. In the book Chicago: The Movie and Lyrics he’s quoted saying, “It took OJ Simpson for everyone to really understand Chicago. That’s because a lot of people had trouble figuring out what the heck was happening with yellow journalism, and murder trials, and people singing and dancing. But now there are all these bestselling books and made-for-TV movies based on real-life murders and murder trials being televised.”
Chicago returned to Broadway in 1996 and has remained there ever since. It is now the longest-running revival musical in Broadway history.
Summary
One night in Chicago at a cabaret theater, performer Velma Kelly gets publicly arrested for the murder of her husband and sister. About a month later, an aspiring actress named Roxie Hart shoots her lover when she discovers that he lied to her about helping her launch a career in show business. Both women end up on Murderess Row in the Cook County Jail, a cell block run by Matron Mama Morton. Roxie quickly learns by watching and listening to Velma Kelly that she must enlist the help of con-man lawyer Billy Flynn in order to get the press and the jury to favor her. Her faithful husband Amos pays Roxie’s legal fees, and Flynn works his magic to paint Roxie Hart as a helpless young beauty who killed her lover in self-defense. Meanwhile, Velma Kelly is desperately trying to gain favor with Roxie, who has become a celebrity for her crime.
The entire story plays out on a vaudeville stage, complete with singing, dancing, bright lights, fourth-wall breaking, and all that jazz.
Making of
Although Rob Marshall had been a stage director for several years, Chicago was his film directorial debut. Some time in the late 1990s, Marshall met with executives for Miramax, a film and TV studio formerly owned by Harvey Weinstein. In the meeting, he pitched his idea for a film adaptation of Chicago.
When Marshall was fifteen years old, he saw Chicago on Broadway during its initial run. He had loved it ever since and was thrilled to make the movie.
From the very beginning, Marshall had the idea that the film had to take place in two worlds, one real and one imaginary. The story would be told from Roxie’s perspective, and each musical number was her interpretation of what was happening. It turned out that the executives at Miramax and producer Martin Richards (who produced the original show) had been thinking about adapting the musical into a film for years. But, they didn’t know how to bring the vaudeville format to the screen in a way that made sense. Marshall’s idea impressed them, and they had faith that he could make the film a success.
Marshall was worried that he would have a difficult time finding someone who could adapt a musical to the screen, as movie musicals generally weren’t doing well in theaters at the time. But he was thrilled to meet Bill Condon, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who was also a major fan of Chicago.
Condon had never written a musical before, but he loved musical theater. He was especially fond of the shows that premiered on Broadway in the early 1970s, like Cabaret. He loved that the songs in Chicago don’t move the plot forward, but instead are a commentary or reaction to what’s happening in the show. He was inspired by Bob Fosse’s idea to set the show up as a collection of acts, a format that drives home the point of the show: life is a vaudeville.
In the book Chicago the Movie and Lyrics, Condon says, “What made this so brilliant was that the form the musical took also expressed its basic point–that our institutions, especially our legal system, are just as tawdry as the cheapest act on the bill.”
While the stage musical is meant to take place solely on a vaudeville stage, with the “real” scenes being highly stylized, the film could not follow the same format. So, Condon had to make the character Roxie Hart more central to the story. The biggest challenge was to make her more accessible to the audience without softening her. Condon knew that turning Roxie into a lovable character would be a betrayal to fans of the musical.
Making the film take place in the real world made it more of a period piece than the original musical and 90s revival.
Chicago was filmed in Toronto on sets built specifically for the production. Central to the film is The Onyx Theater, the location where all of Roxie’s performance fantasies take place.
Production designer John Myhre did extensive research to create an accurate theater that would accommodate the dancers and their needs. He sat in on sessions where Rob Marshall and his choreographers planned out the musical numbers. He visited several New York theaters from the late 1920s, and studied the paintings of Reginald Marsh, a 1930s artist who was famous for depicting gritty scenes. Myhre designed the Onyx to have a small auditorium and a large stage, so it felt intimate but the productions were grand. He and Rob Marshall also created a backstory for the space, deciding that it was once a grand theater that had been shut down, only to reopen during prohibition as a place to buy bootleg alcohol.
Myhre and his team also built the jail and the courtroom sets in the film. The courtroom was specifically designed to be a ring, just like a circus. During one of the musical numbers, the set transforms from a courtroom into a circus tent. The set itself stayed the same, but with new decoration.
Myhre was also inspired by French photographer Brassai, specifically his photos of France at night in the 1930s. The exterior shots in Chicago feature dark cobblestone streets lit by powerful neon signs and spotlights. In one scene, we see Roxie and her lover Fred Casely cross the street in front of her apartment. The crew filmed the scene on a cobblestone street in Toronto. They placed 1920s-era cars and extras in period clothing on the road, and filled in everything else with visual effects for the final shot.
Costume designer Colleen Atwood felt like she was designing clothes for two different films while working on Chicago. First, there was the period clothing needed for the “real world” sequences. Then there were the flashy, extravagant costumes for the theater of Roxie’s mind.
Atwood looked at newsreels and newspapers from the 1920s to get a feel for how people on the street would have dressed. She considered the income of the characters and what they would have been able to afford. Many of the costumes worn by extras in the “real” segments of the film were rented or found, while the clothes worn by principal actors were generally designed by Atwood. There were a few vintage pieces that she found for Richard Gere and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Roxie’s “real world” clothes start out in a neutral palette. But in her fantasies, she wears vibrant colors that stand out. Everyone wears grander clothes in Roxie's imaginary musical numbers, except for her husband Amos.
Since we had so much to learn about Chicago, we decided to split the episode into two parts. Tune in next week as we dive even deeper into the actors, songs, and all that jazz! Until then, thanks for listening!