Sarah on theater

If you’ve been waiting for a reason to see this (or revisit it), now’s probably the time. Baldwin-Hurder-Newell-Mutu is about as strong a top four as you’re going to see in a replacement cast for really any show, let alone in a long-running production, let alone in Chicago, which has famously relied on an opposite strategy in recent years. You gotta get people in the door somehow, right? Whereas most long-runners tend to be gonzo spectacles like Phantom or Wicked, Chicago is a minimalist production of a show best known for understated choreography. It’s inexpensive to operate, but thirty years is a long time in this business, and some creative audience engineering has been necessary to keep the house full for so long.

Chicago at the Ambassador has a unique operational model that’s facilitated by 1.) the ensemble-forward nature of the show—though it’s very dance-oriented, several of the lead roles, especially Roxie and the Matron and Billy, don’t rank among its more demanding choreographic tracks—and 2.) a deep bench of veteran performers on standby to fill in the gaps whenever necessary. Folks like Bianca Marroquin, Raymond Bokhour, Ryan Lowe, and James T. Lane have been playing roles in this production off and on for two decades. They’re very technically sound and their flexibility enables the producers to continuously stunt-cast the lead roles with performers of mixed musical theater literacy—sometimes Broadway names doing little tours of duty, but, often, notoriously, reality TV personalities—with the ensemble dragging the show across the threshold of minimum viable watchability. Consequently, Chicago is often overlooked by frequent theatergoers, who, beyond finding it a little old-hat to begin with, are suspicious (and not always fairly!) that the performers won’t be up to snuff. The show stays in business, in short, by openly embracing a position as a novelty tourist draw.

That brings us to now, and it would’ve been awfully fun to have been a fly on the wall as this was materializing. Chicago has—for just the next few weeks—assembled an enviable cast of contemporary stars fitting its history as a permanently installed Encores! production. Broadway stalwart Kate Baldwin brings her honeyed, Golden-Age warmth—here dripping with irony as the murderess Roxie Hart—to a vaudeville concept for the second time this year after Love Life. (Her third, if you count an appearance in the Hello Dolly concert.) Robyn Hurder, who has a case as the best active dancer on Broadway, returns to Velma Kelly after top billing in Smash and a torch-passing reprisal at the 50th anniversary Chorus Line of Cassie, the other classically difficult dance role in the modern canon. (She’s widely considered reference-grade at both.) You really couldn’t pick a better Mama Morton than Alex Newell, a Tony winner and specialist in blowing out the back wall of the theater for one song a night. (See also Bat Boy, Once on This Island.) And Tam Mutu’s brooding good looks and crisp baritone map to a delightfully amoral Billy Flynn after his leading turns in the original casts of Doctor Zhivago and Moulin Rouge! Members of the bench, meanwhile, are re-deployed as high-end role players rather than thankless life preservers, which significantly rebalances the evening for the better. Top to bottom, it’s probably the most decorated replacement cast they’ve had—one for the geeks—and no safe bet they’ll ever have another like it.

But is Encores!-Chicago worth seeing on the merits? (How much shall I harp on a thirty-year-old show?) Yeah, it’s good. Really good. Don’t overthink it; six Tonys and a thirty-year run didn’t come from nowhere. Sit front mezz and take in that sweet Reinking-cum-Fosse choreo. This is the modern blueprint for the stripped-down revival, and few shows better justify that treatment. They dance in small, fluid, restrained motions, suggestive, sensual, subtle, all about the negative space. The wrist isn’t merely limp—water is dripping from the fingertips. Prison bars are simple shadows in the spotlights. In Chicago, Chicago is the brazenly corrupt center of the universe, but it’s also just a Brechtian façade. There’s no justice, no morality, no baby, no verdict, nothing but vaudevillian performance. Velma’s dance partner is nobody. Everyone is a ruthless self-promoter, and getting too elaborate with sets or costumes would distract from their ability to make their pitch. Kander & Ebb’s score is campy and catchy and cynical and altogether classic. At points, the singing and the dancing fade away entirely. The band plays on.