Review of Chicago & Reo at St Joes Amphitheater
Chicago Review
1920s Chicago, a hotbed of jazz, sexual activity and murder. Velma Kelly, top showgirl, is sent to prison house for murder, and is closely followed past adulterous housewife Roxie Hart, who covets a glitzy lifestyle so much she takes refuge in a fantasy globe where everything
Chicago is no Moulin Rouge. Okay, so perhaps that's slightly unfair. Non every musical mail-MR is going to reinvent the bike, and Chicago - the start out of the blocks - sure as hell doesn't. But it is rousing, sassy and hugely entertaining - and that ought to exist enough to ensure that musicals stick effectually for a while yet. A film version of Chicago has been about inevitable since the show - which was originally directed by Bob Fosse in 1975 - was revived recently on Broadway and in the West Terminate, and information technology'southward like shooting fish in a barrel to meet why. Every musical ultimately lives and dies past the quality of its songs, and there Chicago holds all the aces. A pure musical, in that there's a song practically every two or iii minutes (indeed, the acerbic dialogue scenes are well-nigh rushed through with indecent haste), Chicago is packed with great tunes, from the opening All That Jazz, to All I Care Almost Is Honey, to John C. Reilly's plaintive Mr. Cellophane. Each of these subtly expands upon the motion-picture show's preoccupations with the American justice system (where glory talks and bullshit walks), female empowerment and the fickle nature of distinction, without chirapsia y'all over the head. That, for the well-nigh part, they're toe-tapping classics, doesn't hurt either. Yet good songs demand a good bandage. At first glance, Chicago's experimental line-up doesn't bode well. Happy to written report, though, everyone acquits themselves in style. The guys - Gere, very funny equally the impossibly suave lawyer; and John C. Reilly, breaking hearts as Roxie's put-upon married man ' croon with the best of them, but this is all most the original Spice Girls, Roxie and Velma. Catherine and Renée. Zeta-Jones may have started out in the West End, but the singing and dancing skills she unveils are yet surprising, strutting her stuff with the confidence of a woman who knows that she's now Hollywood royalty. Her homo-eating Velma fair burns upwards the screen, and to live with that Zellweger - very much the unproven Nicole Kidman of the equation - needs to be on her game. Thankfully, she is. Although defective the raw sexuality you might expect of Roxie, Zellweger instead concentrates on the character's vulnerability, using her little girl lost vocalization to great effect. And yes, she can belt out a tune, her singing phonation stronger than you might expect. Overall, there are problems, of class: it'south far likewise stagey, and for a film where the female cast spend 90 per cent of their time in bras and knickers, it's strangely unsexy. But it's first-timer Marshall who threatens to derail proceedings, his Television receiver background manifesting itself in his habit to stifling close-ups, uninventive camerawork and a strange adherence to the choreography of the stage bear witness. He does attempt to open out the play Dennis Potter-style, but where a bolder director might have slowly merged the fantasy and reality worlds, Marshall'south frenzied intercutting rapidly loses impact. Yet armed with that cast, those songs, and a upkeep large enough to remember glorious Technicolor MGM memories, even Ken Loach could make this fly. And Marshall is savvy enough to ensure this is a lavishly-mounted high time, simply waiting to be had.
Extremely enjoyable, although it says it all near the 2003 Oscars that this was a winner. Fans will be in hog heaven, while newcomers should exist gently beguiled. But anyone expecting a Moulin Rouge-style epiphany will be disappointed.
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