Chicago 50 - No. 21 - Chita Rivera as Velma Kelly

"I always thought that I could have made a good criminal defense lawyer. (I'm addicted to watching crime shows on TV.) Velma in Chicago was just the type of person I would have wanted to have as a client. People often asked me if I ever wanted to play Roxie, her rival in the Cook County jail. The short answer is ‘no.' Roxie's cute and conniving, and though I got the chance to play her a couple of times, she will always belong to Gwen. Velma is my kind of girl because she's a fighter, feral and tough. She's not afraid to go as low as she needs to in order to get as high as she wants. The more desperate she became, the more fun it was to play her.

"When I first read the script, I thought, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ I could have been a Velma. You might be scratching your head on that one. How could I relate to a woman who shoots her husband and her sister in a double homicide when she finds them in bed together? It was easy. For Dolores, even easier. I know that I've simply been dealt a better hand of cards to play than the Velmas of the world. Besides, I bought in to her alibi: ‘They had it coming!’ Audiences, for the most part, managed to see that, too, not just for Velma but for all the ‘chickies in the pen,’ as Mama Morton put it. At one performance, when Roxie shot her harassing boyfriend, one woman in the audience shouted out, ‘Shoot him again!’ And this was before the Me Too movement.

"I liked Velma because she was a straight shooter, so to speak, blunt and practical. To give you a flavor, one of my favorite scenes in the musical is when the female inmates are playing a game of cards. One by one, they cheat. June sneaks a card from under her chair. Liz pulls one out from her wig. Annie has one hidden in her cleavage. All this time, Velma is smoking a cigarette. Finally she exhales a puff and deftly extracts the card that's been in her mouth all along.

"Velma's such a wonderful con that when she and matron Mama Morton sing, Whatever happened to fine morals / and good values / and fine breeding? you're in on the joke. She's a killer bemoaning the sad state of affairs. Velma leaped off the page and into my imagination almost immediately. I could see her doing what she was being asked to do. To me, that's always a very good sign."

--Chita: A Memoir by Chita Rivera

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"Velma is the link in Chicago among the plot, the structure of the show, and its central theme of people performing their lives. She is a former vaudeville performer in the story as well as acting as a kind of host. She takes on the role of host at the beginning of each act by quoting famous lines from Texas Guinan. She killed her own vaudeville act by killing her sister, paralleling the death of vaudeville itself in the late 1920s. She's the only one who performs a vaudeville style song, “I Can't Do It Alone,” while knowing that that's what she's doing. None of the other characters know that they're doing vaudeville acts; that's merely the style of storytelling the authors chose. Her song “When Velma Takes the Stand,” is also a song about performing. Roxie is a housewife, Billy Flynn is a lawyer, Mary Sunshine is a reporter, but Velma is a vaudeville performer. And by positioning her as our hostess, starting out each act not only quoting Texas Guinan but also singing the first song of each act, Fosse eases us into the convention of all the songs being full-front, “performed” vaudeville-style numbers. In the non-musical play Chicago, Velma is only a minor character." --Scott Miller