Chicago 50 - No. 10 - The Broadway Play (1926)

Lauryn Johnson
Nov 7
3 min read

"Maurine Watkins started writing Chicago, subtitled 'A Satirical Comedy in Three Acts,' as a project for a writing class she was taking at Yale University. The play opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on December 20, 1926. It was called 'an overnight hit' in New York, where it ran for 127 performances. In an era when theaters tended to turn over shows far more quickly, that was enough to be considered a substantial hit. The show earned as much as $20,000 a week--or more than $370,000 in today's dollars. Maurine herself appeared in the one-hundredth performance of her play on March 26, 1927, as a reporter in one of the courtroom scenes.

"Read the play today and you'll be struck both by the accuracy of how Maurine depicted the way people in Chicago spoke and the specificity of her descriptive detail. Maurine acquired a reporter's ear and eye. Much of her dialogue was punctuated by dashes and sentences left unfinished. If there is such a thing as vampish dialogue to be understood, then it surely came from this play.

"Maurine caught many of the so-called feminine details that male writers would have missed. Her Act One was set in the bedroom of 'a cheap modern flat on Chicago's South Side' where you could find 'a large vanity dresser equipped with imitation ivory toilet articles, bottle with atomizers, perfumes, powder, rouge, eyebrow pencils and lipstick.' To the left stood a Victrola, playing 'wild rhythmic jazz.'

Maurine also detailed her characters with the same precision. Amos Hart was described as Roxie's 'meal-ticket husband' and 'an awkward creature of thirty-five with low forehead, snug nose and weak chin', and as 'a man who wears a melancholy air.'

"By Act Two, the action has moved from poor Amos' place to the women's ward of the Cook County Jail, a place that Maurine knew well from her work for the Tribune. She described a row of cells at the back of the room and, at its center, a long table with chairs, where the jail's matrons and its in-favor prisoners could hang out together and make plans for their own media coverage. There's even a lady bootlegger in the play who shows up every Thursday for the pleasure of the prisoners.

"Among Roxie's new friends are Velma Kelly, a fellow murderess whom Maurine turned into both a friend and a rival, and 'Crazy Liz', another killer woman working on an insanity defense, even though Maurine made clear that she could be plenty lucid.

"Chicago painted a picture of a corrupt city with a criminal justice system dominated by payoffs, bribery and the timeless notion of you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. In Maurine's telling, here was a system propped up by all manner of different people with agendas. The young women wanted to walk free, and they learned to exploit their sexuality. Their guards wanted cash and sex. The local politicians wanted sympathetic headlines. The lawyers wanted publicity and even more cash. And the Chicago media, operating in an era with many competing newspapers all fighting tooth and nail for the same stories, wanted sensational scoops.

"In Act Three, Maurine took her readers to the courtroom itself, building on all she had described about the characters and adding the tension of an impending verdict. The play ended with big smiles for the cameras. This is, after all, Chicago.

"In the years that followed, Maurine denied permission to most anyone who wanted to adapt her play-some people thought that she had felt some later-in-life remorse for treating these heinous Chicago murderers in so glib and comedic a fashion. And it was only after her death in 1969 that Chicago was turned into a musical. But in short measure, Chicago the Musical —with a book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse, music by John Kander and lyrics by Ebb - greatly exceeded the fame and influence of the play that was its source. Over time it came to be known as the quintessential Fosse musical, the most famous work of the Chicago-born choreographer known for his hyperspecific movement vocabulary of turned-in knees, angled, attitudinal body parts, muscular twitches, sideways shuffling and jazzy, animated hands.

"Novelist Rupert Hughes praised Maurine's work as "the most profound and powerful satire (American theater) has ever known. Best of all it is a satire by a woman on the folly of men in their false homage to woman, their silly efforts to protect her while she dupes them."

--He Had It Coming: Four Murerous Women and the Reporter Who Immortalized Their Stories by Kori Rumore and Marianne Mather