by ROBERT BRUSTEIN
New Republic -- Volume 216 Issue 1/2 Page 26
Perhaps the reason for these unexpected feelings of elation was that Chicago exhumes the musical's forgotten roots in our truly native artforms, namely vaudeville and burlesque, at the same time uncovering the musical's neglected affinities with the great music dramas of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Lahr protests that Chicago has been done on the cheap, that it is a "bare bones" reduction not much more elaborate than the concert version performed last spring as part of the City Center's "Encores!" series. But although some of the paying customers may complain about not being able to estimate how much was spent on whirring helicopters, falling chandeliers and the other expensive toys that customarily inflate the price of Broadway spectacles, that is precisely Chicago's strength. John Lee Beatty's setting--an unexpected departure for a designer normally identified with Circle Rep realism--is remarkable for its elegant metaphorical simplicity. It consists of a burnished gold picture frame (beautifully lit by Ken Billington) outlining a stage largely dominated by the orchestra in full view. The visible musicians form a traditional big band dominated by brass and woodwinds, and they are led by Rob Fisher in a variety of ragtime and jazz numbers, beginning with the rousing "All That Jazz" (a title Fosse borrowed for his semi-autobiographical film). The orchestra, in short, becomes virtually another actor in the play.
The old Berliner Ensemble production of The Threepenny Opera (directed by Erich Engel) placed the orchestra on stage in much the same way and for much the same reason--to reveal rather than conceal the source of the sound. Chicago imitates that production in exposing all the other mechanisms of the theater as well (lights, pulleys, winches, wings, etc.) . Indeed, the spirit of Brecht, who was also fascinated by the anarchic traffic and criminal classes of Chicago, hovers over the entire evening. Under Walter Bobbie's propulsive direction, non-illusionistic devices abound. The titles of songs are announced (often by the music director) and the whole cast often sits on stage watching the principals sing and dance. Similarly, the narrow playing space, which has been reduced to a rectangle no wider than ten or twelve feet, forces the performers into an extreme presentational style. The direct audience address not only lobs the songs, dances and wisecracks right into our laps, but effectively treats us as members of the cast, as if we were implicated in the felonies and double-crosses of the characters.
William Ivey Long's costumes, like Beatty's set, are entirely without color--black tuxedos, black derbies and fedoras, black miniskirts, black tights, black t-shirts and slacks, black wigs. The effect is one of crispness and elegance. Even the American flag hanging vertically over the courtroom is a muted shade of gray. The only trace of color, in fact, is a rainbow rain curtain near the end, which signals that the evening is over.
The traditional weakness of the modern American musical--and for this we have Rodgers and Hammerstein to thank--has been its inspirational book. Audiences in the past have been privileged to hear exquisite music and lyrics, to enjoy spirited choreography, to watch gifted performers. But almost invariably we have had to pay for these pleasures with stories of such stupefying triteness and characters of such cardboard nobility that all the joys evaporated. Almost alone among American musicals--I can think only of Pal Joey, Guys and Dolls, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and perhaps the quasi-Brechtian Cabaret (also by Kander and Ebb) that match it in literary quality--Chicago has a book equal to its other strengths. Like those musicals, it is both good-natured and hard-boiled. Indeed, there isn't a soft spot or a sour note in its metallic body. Just compare the homicidal revelations of Chicago's characters with the soupy encounter-group confessions of A Chorus Line, a musical that appeared in the same year as Chicago's first production (and effectively eclipsed it). It is as if the two musicals belonged to two different cultures and epochs.
Chicago chronicles and almost celebrates America's lost innocence. In a town so tough "they shoot the girls right out from under you," where each crime is ballyhooed by a band of ruthless jailhouse journalists right out of The Front Page, six women await their trials in a Chicago prison, accused of slaughtering their lovers in a variety of ways. A more ideologically minded writer might have treated this situation as an instance of minority victimization, a paradigm of the fate of women in a brutalized male society. But Chicago's "story of murder, greed, corruption, violence, and treachery--all the things we hold dear" (as the prologue describes it), doesn't distribute virtues and vices according to gender, ideology or identity groups. Apart from a falsely accused Hungarian woman who, lacking the language to defend herself, is the only person to be hanged, there isn't an innocent human creature on stage, including the matron of the prison, the reporters, the lawyers and the judge. When a character claims to have committed her crime "because none of us had enough love in our childhoods," it's an occasion for a horselaugh. What we have instead of loveless victims in disadvantaged backgrounds is "unrelenting determination and unmitigated ego." And instead of being ground up by a male-dominated judiciary system, the two central characters manage to beat their raps entirely, albeit with the aid of a mercenary silver-tongued lawyer, who could have "gotten Jesus off if he had $5,000."
Indeed, the women even manage to turn their crimes into celebrity careers, thus proving the prison matron's axiom that "in this town murder is a form of entertainment." Chicago recognizes the unacknowledged fact that celebrity is fast approaching profit as the animating motive of American life, and that show business is just another con game.
Some commentators have observed that Americans have been prepared to accept this kind of cynicism on the commercial stage as a result of such recent travesties of justice as the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the consequent self-promotion of everyone associated with it. That may be. But surely the appeal of Chicago has something to do with its remorseless good nature. Not since John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (on which The Threepenny Opera was based) has a musical work managed to chronicle the weaknesses of humankind with such engaging sangfroid and sardonic shrugs.
Chicago revolves around two "killer chorines"--Velma Kelly (Bebe Neuwirth), who exults in her criminal headlines ("Baby, you can't buy that kind of publicity"), and Roxie Hart (Ann Reinking), who shoots her boyfriend and tries to pin the crime on her wimpy husband, Amos. The competition between these two long-legged beauties over who gets the most public attention is the meat of the plot. And when Roxie, sitting on the lap of her oily lawyer Billy Finn, mouthing his words like a jerky ventriloquist's dummy, pretends to be pregnant, Velma protests that she's stealing all her best courtroom bits ("Whatever happened to class"). Reinking, who also brilliantly recreated the Fosse-style choreography--the spider walk, the tipped derby, the hiked shoulder, the bent knees, the arched back--has been criticized for looking too ripe for the role of Roxie. She even concedes, in what may be a newly interpolated line, that "I'm older than I ever intended to be." But aside from the fact that Reinking gives a wonderfully comic performance-- her hoarse whiskey voice oozes sentiment, then breaks it with a callow aside--her somewhat ravaged features make for a truly poignant connection with her rival, the dynamic young Neuwirth. That implied mother-daughter relationship reaches a powerful crescendo when, having decided at the end to combine their talents as a vaudeville twosome, they finally join together to sing and dance the "Hot Honey Rag," tipping their derbies, stretching their endless legs and sashaying into Fosse heaven.
The sustaining element of this musical is surprise, whether in plot, staging, music or acting. We're told that "things aren't always what they appear to be," and indeed they're not, whether the venal lawyer Billy Finn (James Naughton, looking and crooning like a young Dean Martin) is mendaciously singing "I don't care about expensive things (all I care about is love)" or the sob-sister journalist (D. Sabella) is taking off her wig, following a series of coloratura arias and revealing that she is a man, or the hapless Amos (Joel Grey in a winningly understated performance) is walking on stage for his bow and being denied his exit music. But the biggest surprise of all is how Chicago has been able to make such a deep social incision into the flabby flesh of our court system, our newspapers and our sentimental moral anatomy (Roxie, lying and murdering her way to stardom, is called a "living exemplar of what a wonderful country this is") and still emerge as a successful musical. Could it be that we are finally prepared to accept the truth about some of our motives and values through the medium of mass entertainment? Whatever the case, I left the theater exhilarated, not only curiously moved by the high quality of the professionalism but also filled with unaccustomed feelings of hope--about the future of the American musical, about the future of the American theater, even a little bit about the future of the nation.
It is doubtful that T.S. Eliot ever intended The Waste Land for the stage, though one of his works from that period, the fragment "Sweeney Agonistes," was written in the form of a play. (He never finished it because he found its rhythms "too fast" for speaking.) Still, The Waste Land, in my opinion, is the finest dramatic monologue since Browning's "My Last Duchess," and even richer in character, action and atmosphere. So it was entirely appropriate for Deborah Warner to prepare the fragments Eliot shored against his ruin for theatrical presentation starring her great alter ego and collaborator, the actress Fiona Shaw.
Produced by Jedediah Wheeler and the site-specific theater company En Garde Arts, Inc., The Waste Land (originally staged in Brussels in 1995) was held up for viewing here until Warner could locate the perfect venue for its grimy urban message. She chose the peeling Liberty Theatre on 42nd Street, a rundown, ramshackle building formerly used for porno movies. Inside, the patched, peeling theater with its broken seats seemed exactly right for Eliot's vision of the decline of Western civilization. How could Deborah Warner have anticipated that, while she was turning The Waste Land into theater, the 42nd Street wasteland was itself being turned into Disneyland?
Appearing before us as a theatrical wraith, gaunt and tall, her hair close-cropped, her eyes blazing, Shaw enacts the various sections of the poem in a variety of characters and accents, making it a work of high tragedy and low comedy. The theater is dark, lit only by a series of bare-bulb ghost lights placed around the stage, and Shaw's shadow looms large against the cyclorama, forcing us to strain our eyes in order to follow the transitions of her interpretation. At least three moments will long linger in my memory: Shaw's disgust and loathing over the sexual encounter in "The Fire Sermon;" her raucous rendering of the pub scene in "A Game of Chess" and the way she pronounced "`Jug Jug' to dirty ears" as if it were an obscenity; and her totally exhausted "Shantih shantih shantih" at the conclusion of "What the Thunder Said." The Warner-Shaw Waste Land was a generous helping of poetic reality, which made the busy mercantilism of the unreal city all the more scarifyingly prosaic when, blinking and spent, we wended our way into the brightly lit street.