Chicago 50 - No. 22 - Jerry Orbach as Billy Flynn
- Lauryn Johnson
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Jerry Orbach: I played Billy Flynn, the lawyer, and I gave him a certain kind of world-weary insouciance. He was very, very tough, very cold, calculating, but could be very charming.
Michael Kantor: How was Chicago untraditional, would you say? You know, you were in a bunch, you saw so many traditional musicals. Wasn't there a sort of almost cynical view that Fosse brought to it?
Jerry Orbach: Chicago had a style of black humor, of world-weary decadence, almost like cabaret, which was also Fosse. It kind of harked back to Three Penny Opera, which was the first thing I did in New York. That kind of very sophisticated, you know, don't believe in anything. Which was very unusual for the time and kind of ahead of its time. [...] It opened at a time when I don't think the public was really ready for it. It's almost like what happened with Follies, except Chicago ran a couple of years. It had a very nice run, maybe three years. But it's like with FOLLIES, people went in expecting to see Vaudeville, a happy thing. And it was very dark and about divorce and lost love and things. So they weren't quite ready for maybe.
Michael Kantor: What was the tone that Bob Fosse, when he first introduced, we're doing this show, what did he say about his vision? What was he trying to achieve?
Jerry Orbach: Well, the story is based on Roxie Hart, which was, you know, a movie with Ginger Rogers and Adolf Menjoy and a story of a murderess in Chicago who becomes a celebrity. We've seen so much of that, of criminals becoming celebrities in this day and age and, you know, the 15 minutes of fame. And that's basically what Fosse was trying to show. And also, it was, the rights were owned by Gwen Verdon, who was Bob's ex-wife, and it was kind of a present to her.
Michael Kantor: That's great. How do you think Fosse's approach to Chicago changed after he had this heart attack, right? There's this moment during rehearsal, then something just happens.
Jerry Orbach: Bob had his heart attack when we were in the first or second week of rehearsal. And then months and months later, we started up again. And I don't think he was a different person. I don't think he changed that much. He was still chain smoking. I mean, he showed it all in that movie that Roy Scheider did, All That Jazz. I don't say he had a death wish, but he just refused to change. You know, it's like a guy who you tell him smoking's going to kill you, Duke, you know, and they don't stop. But his attitudes were the same, I think. You know he loved, he loved writers. He loved Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner and Peter Stone and those guys. He loved educated people because he didn't have much formal education. He worshiped the written word.
Michael Kantor: It's wild to hear that about Fosse when you think of him as this style. You know the dancers talk about this little stylist and I mean in a way you're saying he's more of a conceptual thinker. You know with Bennett it is sort of showbiz razzmatazz that Fosse was interested in ideas and so on.
Jerry Orbach: Concepts, concepts and attitudes. Attitudes about life and sex and work and religion and everything.
Michael Kantor: The basic themes of Chicago. You mentioned how it's about a trial and so on, but put it in the biggest context. It's about how American culture is about show biz and all that sort of stuff and money and sex and how Fosse tapped into that. One big overarching look at the show. What Chicago really is.
Jerry Orbach: Chicago is about your 15 minutes of fame and about how it can come to anybody for any kind of reason that, you know, if an ax murderer is famous enough, they'll put them on stage and everybody will pay to come see them. It's an indictment of our pop culture, really.
Michael Kantor: John Kander and Fred Ebb's music, what in particular in Chicago made it so theatrical?
Jerry Orbach: Kander and Ebb are an incredible combination. Fred Ebb is witty and stylish and he knows humor and sophisticated. And John Kander can do any musical style you want, from kind of semi-
classical to pop to rock to, you know, vaudeville. So the two of them combine to make a perfect team for musicals because the song in a musical should be about the words. The melody shouldn't be intrusive. It should fit the words, and they just go together so beautifully before. For the musical form, and it furthers the plot. A song should take away two or three pages of dialog and replace it and move the action forward, which they do. They do. They don't just throw in a song just for fun. It always means something.
Michael Kantor: And Chicago had such a range of the various showbiz styles, just very quickly. Tell us about.
There's vaudeville in Chicago. There's personal kind of soliloquies, Roxie's thing of I'm gonna be a star thing. There are all kinds of different turns in it. There's a lot of, a lot harking back to vaudevilles and to burlesque, but always with that cynicism.
Michael Kantor: We saw some of the almost naked people. Did the audience react weird to that, or was that just part of the set of the costumes?
Jerry Orbach: No, the audience didn't mind the near nudity. I mean, you got to remember there had been Oh, Calcutta before that, my friend Jacques Levy did. And there were a lot of shocking things in the 60s.
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