‘Chicago’ revival thaws MCA crowd with music

Orono may seem a long way from Broadway, but a riveting production Thursday night of the musical “Chicago” helped to make a cold December night feel a little warmer.

The setting was Prohibition in the 1920s. The place was the Windy City – Chicago. The Fred Ebb-John Kander musical, staged for a sell-out crowd at the Maine Center for the Arts, celebrates the time of hot jazz and cold-blooded killers.

The original “Chicago,” based on a 1926 melodrama by Maurine Dallas Watkins, was directed and choreographed by dance genius Bob Fosse. It opened on Broadway on June 3, 1975, with a cast that included Fosse’s wife and longtime collaborator Gwen Verdon, as well as Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach.

It ran for nearly 900 performances, but was overshadowed by the more popular “A Chorus Line.”

The musical was better appreciated when it was revived in 1997,

with choreography by Fosse’s former lover Ann Reinking. It earned six Tony Awards.

“Chicago,” a cynical parable like Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” is the story of a time and place, but it also tells the tales of two women who turn murderous after their men have done them wrong.

One is Velma Kelly (Heather Parcells), a vaudevillian who shot her sister after she caught her in bed with Velma’s husband. She introduces the audience to the seamy underside of Chicago in “All That Jazz” (later the name of Fosse’s autobiographical film).

The number also introduces chorus girl Roxie Hart (Tonya Wathen), who guns down her lover Fred Casely, who was leaving her. Hart convinces her adoring lump of a husband, Amos (Stewart Brown), to take the fall for her, but when he finds out about Roxie’s affair with Casely, he sends her off to the big house.

The scene shifts to Cook County Jail, where the action takes place for the rest of the 21/2-hour musical. The jail is ruled over by Matron “Mama” Morton (Maureen Veronica Illmensee), whose philosophy is summed up in her showcase song “If You’re Good to Mama (Mama Will be Good to You).”

For the remainder of the show, Velma and Roxie, sometimes with and sometimes despite their shyster lawyer, Billy Flynn (Alex Rotella), plot to use the rabid press to beat their raps and make triumphant vaudeville comebacks.

The cast, backed by a tight 10-piece accompaniment, shined on such showstoppers as “Cell Block Tango,” “Razzle Dazzle” and “We Both Reached for the Gun.”

“Chicago” is packed with Fosse’s trademark choreographic touches, including snapping fingers, tilted bowler hats, hip and shoulder rolls, swiveling hips and strutting. In Fosse’s musicals, dance not only is a thing of grace, but also of power.

The talented Parcells and Wathen in the lead roles were the engines that drove this exciting national touring company production. Still, character actors Brown, Illmensee, Rotella and Masail Elizalde as Mary Sunshine added zest to what was already an exhilarating evening.