Sizzlin’ Swagger
By Tom Wachunas
Here’s a curious
prequel to the riotously titillating Players Guild Theatre presentation of Chicago, directed here by Jon Tisevich
and, by the way, now sold out for its entire run through April 22. Even as we of the audience are busy finding
our seats in the Guild’s downstairs arena space - and before a scripted word
was spoken, a song sung, or dance danced – ensemble performers are casually
stretching, bending, pacing, and posing inside the effectively stark set
designed by Joshua Erichsen. (We would later see them again in the same
scenario during the intermission.) Some of them look lost in thought. Some
whisper to each other furtively. Others peer out at us with a lascivious grin,
or a yearning glance, or a threatening stare.
It feels as though they’ve been living there
long before we arrived, caged in a cloudy light behind rows of thick chains hanging
down like prison bars from the ceiling. They seem poised to break out. And
break out they do, in a manner of speaking. These marvelously talented
performing artists, along with the sizzling offstage orchestra conducted by
Steve Parsons, go on to topple theatre’s proverbial fourth wall with all the
aplomb, polish, and panache you’d see and hear in a Broadway production.
This musical ode to
1920s Chicago is set against the backdrop of local tabloid headlines screaming
scandal and judicial system corruption. It’s a relentlessly biting look at
criminal celebrity wherein we meet Velma Kelly in the iconic introductory song,
“All That Jazz.” She’s a vaudeville
showgirl confined to the women’s block of Cook County jail, awaiting trial for murdering
her husband and sister after she found them together in bed. As we hear during
the gleeful writhing and stomping of “Cell Block Tango,” performed with several
other “merry murderesses”, they had it comin’.
Heidi Swinford is
devilishly commanding as Velma. With a strong, dynamic singing voice and dance
moves to match, she gives us a deftly composed portrait of conniving
desperation, driven by a viperous ego colored with gritty sarcasm. Things get
decidedly dicey when another vaudevillian murderer, Roxie Hart, shows up and
steals Velma’s thunder. An equally gifted singer - and electrifyingly lithe
dancer - Keitha Brown, as Roxie, delivers a compelling picture of giddy
complexity. For all of her fetching naïvete, she’s fiercely determined to
become a vaudeville star at any cost. It’s a pursuit she brings to light in a
riveting confessional soliloquy that accompanies her lusty, slinky chorus
number, “Roxie (the Name on Everyone’s Lips)”. How can anyone be so decidedly
childish and deliciously malicious at the same time? Fascinating.
Speaking of
malicious, Aaron Brown plays the debonair crooner and defense lawyer, Billy
Flynn, with memorable relish. He’s a smooth-talking shark, a money-mad,
narcissistic media manipulator. One of the evening’s most hilarious scenes
transpires in “We Both Reached For the Gun,” featuring the attorney as a
ventriloquist puppeteer happily pulling Roxie’s strings.
Other highly
noteworthy performances include Kathy Boyd as Matron ‘Mama” Morton. She’s the
earthy cell-block supervisor who glibly admonishes her residents, “In this
town, murder is a form of entertainment.” With a big heart and infectious
swagger in her voice, she promises reciprocal loyalty in her song, “When You’re
Good to Mama.”
Meanwhile, on the outside, Allen Cruz is
wholly endearing as Roxie’s gentle, neglected husband, Amos. His innocent
demeanor recalls the fumbling awkwardness of a young James Stewart. His
poignant and funny song bemoaning his social and marital invisibility, “Mr.
Cellophane,” is the evening’s most tender moment. And then there’s Micah Harvey
playing Mary Sunshine, a gushy gossip columnist in drag. Miss Sunshine goes
unabashedly overboard in her sympathy for Roxie. Harvey sings “A Little Bit of
Good” with all the gut-splitting earnestness of a dubiously-trained soprano
belting out an aria. It may be very bad opera, but it’s gloriously entertaining
nonetheless.
Throughout the evening, the choreography by Michael Lawrence
Akers is a character unto itself. Akers has successfully melded the jazzy
spirit of Bob Fosse with a unique, sensual intricacy that is at times ferocious.
While Chicago
treads salaciously along a border between satire and parody, somehow it doesn’t
feel right to think of it as mere farcical escapism or irrelevant fiction.
Maybe it’s a piquant metaphor. Real life these days seems more than ever driven
by insatiable social appetites for debauchery and scandal, or for the
rationalizing of our celebrities’ moral turpitude, or the self-congratulatory
pleasure we take in witnessing their demise. Is the audience for such things as
complicit as the perpetrators? Is Chicago,
after all, an indictment of all of us?
Yikes. Maybe I’m
overthinking. Then again, leave it to the supremely skilled artistry present in
this Players Guild Theatre production to offer something so thought-provoking
that it resonates long after we’ve gone home laughing.
PHOTOS, from top: 1. Keitha Brown as Roxie, Aaron Brown
as Billy Flynn (courtesy Players Guild/ Don Jones) 2. Heidi Swinford as Velma (left), Keitha Brown 3. Heidi Swinford and Keitha Brown 4. Photo courtesy Players Guild - Jon
Tisevich 5. Photo courtesy Players
Guild – Jon Tisevich
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