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Ah, Chicago. What a show. Saw it last night, for the second time, and for a globally successful piece of mass-media entertainment it's incredibly subversive.
Previously on this thread I wrote: Chicago, if anyone's not seen it on stage, is far superior to the film. It's Brechtian in its staging and reminded me of Caryl Churchill's work; the characters are living their lives and performing them as a floorshow both at once...
The stage is dominated by a riser, I think they call it; a big, sloping bandstand with a fake brick back wall. There's a full band on here and a central gap for the performers to enter. Other than that the stage is bare. The chorus sit on chairs down the sides of the riser, waiting for their parts much as they would backstage, and the front of the stage is left bare.
It occurred to me watching this last night: there's no fourth wall. No barrier between the audience and the show. The characters know they're performing and make frequent reference to it. Their lives are staged in the hope of stardom, and this is the story of those staged lives. All done without a moment of self-consciousness. During Roxie in the first half, the singer's giggling with delicious delight at being on stage and having the band play her song, having dancers at her beck and call. Billy Flynn, the lawyer, is knowingly false from his first number - you're introduced to him in full knowledge that he means the opposite of everything he says. Characters call for their exit music as they leave, and the songs about their big numbers are their big numbers.
I'm finding the whole thing hard to sum up. All this is done using a very limited palette, about 10 or so people playing all the parts and propelling the plot using the techniques of physical theatre. This isn't the musical-as-spectacular. The dancing all has that Fosse stylisation, snapping wrists and limp bodies and hidden faces. Certain songs that don't work at all in the movie are revelatory on stage. The Press Conference Rag, in which Roxie is a dummy on Flynn's lap, explains the double-deception of what's transpiring in music and dance far more concisely and completely than prose or acting could.
And the plot: killers are entertainment in Chicago. The public (via the press) want to know about the hair on the walls but need it packaged with hypocritical repentance. Lesbianism's just one more opportunistic hurdle on the way to the top in vaudeville. Roxie and Velma, at the end, two killers who got away with it, are allowed to identify as the American dream and everything that's good about it. They're cheered for it. By me, last night.
Any thoughts on how something this radical is allowed, uncommented, to be regarded as trash for the masses? Or alternatively, is that Spider-Man musical a travesty or what? |
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