Chicago 50 - No. 24 - All That Jazz
- Lauryn Johnson
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
"At the beginning of almost every performance of Chicago, when the stage manager called ‘Places, please,’ I took my position in an elevator in the basement below the playing area. It would whisk me, standing in a large cylindrical drum, up to center stage to begin the show. Before that, however, I paced the floor, giving myself a pep talk.
"Invariably, the stagehands asked, ‘Who you gonna be tonight, Chita?’ Of course, my first obligation was to be Velma Kelly, the merry murderess of Cook County jail. But Bob Fosse, our director and choreographer, along with the show's brilliant set designer, Tony Walton, had come up with a spectacular entrance for me. I entered alone onto the stage against a vaudevillian backdrop of dazzling neon. I felt the need to summon up in my imagination a glamorous star in order to carry it off.
"‘What do you think, boys?’ I replied. ‘Sophia Loren?’
"We played the mind game to include Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, and a host of others. You may laugh but, as Velma, it was up to me to seduce the audience into the world of the musical.
"Once the elevator reached stage level, the sliding doors of the drum opened to reveal me in a shaft of light, with my back to the audience and a finger cocked in the air. With my hips pulsating to John Kander's intoxicating vamp for my vamp, I oh-so-slowly turned around and waited for a second.
"Then I sashayed down to the very front of the stage. I looked at the audience with ‘murder’ in my eyes, as Bobby dictated, and invited them to ride with me into a vaudeville of decadence. Come on, babe, why don't we paint the town...
"Looking back, I don't suppose I really needed Sophia Loren or Elizabeth Taylor or their kind as a crutch. I had Freddy and John's dazzling songs, Bobby's erotic choreography, and the armor of Pat Zipprodt's flesh-revealing costume. I also had the confidence of someone who knew what was to come from an impressive cast: Gwen Verdon as Roxie Hart, my partner in crime; Jerry Orbach, as slick lawyer Billy Flynn; Barney Martin, as Roxie's beleaguered husband, Amos; and Mary McCarty as the matron, Mama Morton, ‘the countess of the clink.’ To top it off, there was an ensemble of dancers who were the best in the world. They had reached a pinnacle in their careers. Bob Fosse had picked them."
--Chita: A Memoir by Chita Rivera
Mary Texas Guinan, Vaudeville Inspiration for Velma
Fosse knew vaudeville. Though he wasn't born until 1927, when he came of age as a performer in his teens, the people he learned from were all vaudeville veterans, and many of the performers he shared the stage with in the sleazy burlesque theatres he worked were old washed-up vaudevillians. He danced old vaudeville numbers himself.
Almost every song in the show is modeled on an actual vaudeville act or star. In “All That Jazz,” Velma is playing Texas Guinan, inviting the audience in to drink and have a good time.
In Manhattan, a divorcée named Texas Guinan ran one of the most notorious and outrageous speakeasies. By 1928, she had had four out of five of her roving clubs raided and closed, but a fifth was still going strong. Perched atop a piano, Guinan entertained her patrons with dirty jokes and emceed performances by singers and dancers from 11:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. She became famous for her battle cry, “Curfew shall not ring tonight!” as she greeted her customers with a police whistle and a derisive, “Hello, Suckers!” (just like Velma does at the top of Act II of Chicago). And she wasn't kidding – at Guinan's club a bottle of bootleg scotch or champagne cost twenty-five dollars or more, equivalent to a week's salary for many people. Cover charges ranged from $5 to $25, and even plain water was two dollars a pitcher.
In Chicago, Velma 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.
Text from “Inside CHICAGO Background and Analysis” by Scott Miller
Comments