"Chicago" Review

• Stage version gets an expert, stunning revival - but beware, it's much darker than the movie
  Friday, September 12, 2003
  BY CHRISTOPHER POTTER
  News Arts Writer

  What can one say about a musical that's audaciously staged, brilliantly sung and danced, boasts a lead cast to die for, and is so morally rank it sent me out of Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre wishing I could find a shower?

  Behold "Chicago," revived with such flair by Ann Arbor Civic Theatre that I can't imagine a Broadway cast outclassing the performers I watched last night.

  Yet "Chicago" the stage show is a very different animal from "Chicago" the Oscar-winning movie. The latter slips the bonds of its footlight moorings and raises its protagonists to a likable if not lovable level. Not so Bob Fosse's 1975 musical, adhered to in rigorous and perhaps fatally good faith by AACT director Wendy Sielaff.

  Set in the 1920s and performed in abstract black and white, "Chicago" is a neo-Brechtian vaudeville whose players assume the roles of characters sans '20s sets or costumes. Mostly clad in skimpy black garb, Sielaff's singer/hoofers cavort on a double-tiered set of grimy-gray stairways and catwalk, while music director Zachary Ryan's orchestral ensemble holds forth on stage underneath the catwalk.

  The chorus is always on view, while each principal is formally introduced by a master of ceremonies before taking the stage ("Ladies and Gentlemen: Miss Velma Kelly in an Act of Desperation!").

  True to Brecht's dim view of civilization, "Chicago" - co-authored by Fosse and lyricist Fred Ebb with music by John Kander - betrays not a lick of love for the human race.

  Here nothing is done out of charity and or for anyone save Number One. Chanteuse Velma (played by January D. Provenzola) and housewife Roxie Hart (Kathy Waugh), both murderesses of passion, spend the show striving to one-up each other in the eyes of an adoring, sensation-seeking public. Roxie's nebbish husband Amos (Anthony J. Provenzola), the lone character with a pretense to a conscience, is a wimp whose ineffectuality provides much of what passes for humor.

  Suave, amoral lawyer Billy Flynn (Glenn Bugala) has never lost a case because he's a master at pressing a jury's emotional buttons while remaining aloof from clients Roxie and Velma. Jail matron Mama Morton (amazing Ava Rodgers) isn't the prison predator she seems meant to be, but plays the game of life strictly for the money. For Roxie and Velma it's strictly for the notoriety, even at risk of execution.

  It's clear now that Fosse was onto a dark strain in the American psyche. But what does this burlesque of humanity's swinish side accomplish? Slick and mercurial as the male/female dancers co-choreographers Tawny Dabney and Jen White put through high kicks and erotic gyrations (a la Fosse), "Chicago" celebrates the worst in you and in me. For all its razzle-dazzle it's an appalling, spirit-killing show, laid bare in its opening number, "All That Jazz": The world turns on sex and mendacity.

  Even as razor-sharp a duo as Waugh and January Provenzola - a dynamite pair of singer/dancer thespians I'd put up against Ann Reinking and Chita Rivera - are subtly limited by the show's attitude. Bugala cuts a fine, strutting Billy, but can't carry his heart of stone. Even the awesome Rodgers is trapped by Mama Morton's glib selfishness. Which is why acting honors fall to Tony Provenzola, whose Amos is the squeaky epitome of a well-intentioned loser - in "Chicago" the prototype of a good man's fate. Says who?

  "Chicago" continues at 8 p.m. tonight-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre in the University of Michigan League, 911 N. University Ave. For tickets call 763-TKTS. For information call (734) 971-2228.