Chicago
So I wasn’t surprised a few years later when Fosse’s musical Chicago turned his hometown into a symbol of sleaze and sin–an all-American version of the decadent Berlin he’d depicted in his film Cabaret. The notion hadn’t originated with him, to be sure; produced on Broadway in 1975, Fosse’s Chicago was based on a 1926 play of the same name written by former Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins and inspired by real-life murder cases she’d covered. (Watkins’s specialty was personal profiles of female killers–“sob sister” journalism that milked juicy stories with a canny blend of sentiment and irony; she could have been a model for the reporter Rosalind Russell played in His Girl Friday.) But Watkins’s comedy–about an adulteress who kills her boyfriend and then beats the rap with the help of a clever lawyer–was very much a product of its time, a satire on the rowdy lifestyles and sensationalistic press of the Windy City in the Roaring Twenties. Fosse expanded Watkins’s specifics into a much larger statement, a portrait of America as a cesspool of decadence and depravity, filled with heavy-handed commentary about how little had changed in 50 years. It wasn’t just the murderer, Roxie Hart, whom Fosse put on trial; it was the audience itself. The charges: venality, gullibility, and amorality. The evidence: the fact that the audience was enjoying the very show that was accusing them–falling for the old “Razzle Dazzle,” as one song calls it, and fulfilling Roxie’s view of them as “suckers.”
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But despite its clever concept and impressive music and dancing, Chicago remains an oddly unsatisfying work. Fosse’s attempt to turn Roxie’s story into a metaphor for society fails to convince; the show’s cynicism reflects Fosse’s own personal conflicts rather than a credible social or ethical assessment. (It wasn’t for several more years that a wiser and older Fosse was able to confront this, in his harrowingly self-revealing film All That Jazz, a fictionalized account of the mental and physical health problems he suffered during rehearsals for Chicago.)
