ABSTRACT

This chapter explains the appeal of Chicago as a film property and identifies the many difficulties posed for director/choreographer Rob Marshall and screenplay writer Bill Condon by its transfer from stage to screen. Unusually, the original idea for the musical Chicago originated with its star Gwen Verdon. The surprising success of Marshall's Fellini-esque All That Jazz prompts the question of whether Bob Fosse's intended film of Chicago might not have resulted in a screen masterpiece that somehow managed to retain both the abrasive vulgarity and the dazzling wit of his stage production. Chicago was revived in 1996, on the heels of the O. J. Simpson case, and the show business metaphor really came into focus. The vaudeville show that constitutes a frame for the narrative is a metaphor for the fact that in a systematically mediatized society, everything is a performance.