Chicago 50 - No. 30 - All I Care About Is Love
- Lauryn Johnson
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read
Jerry Orbach: You know, "All I Care About is Love", which is a sort of classic hat and cane number with the girls with all the feathers. That’s Billy’s entrance. And he’s saying all he cares about is his love. He doesn’t want fancy cars or diamond rings or big cigars. And as he does it, he does a strip tease down to his shorts and t-shirt. And when I finished. I threw in Crosby imitations, Jolson imitations. A whistling chorus. It was total vaudeville. Finished on one knee with all I care about is love. And a la Fosse, kind of a cinematic dissolve, I walked in the boxer shorts and the t-shirt into my office, pulled on a pair of pants where a tailor was fitting me for a suit. So it dissolved seamlessly into my officer and the tailor fitting me. It was. That’s the kind of stuff that Fosse did on the stage.
Michael Kantor: Was it funny to strip to your underwear? What was the audience reaction as you did this number?
Jerry Orbach: It was great fun because here are all these gorgeous girls, these incredible bodies just writhing around and doing this fan number. And Billy's saying, "I don't care about it. I'm just interested in saving a poor girl who's accused of something." Totally against what he really is, which is the fun of it, you know, protesting so much that all he cares about is love, nothing else. Packard cars, big cigars, forget it. I hate that stuff, you. And then he says, have you got $5,000? I'll defend you if you have $5000. Her husband says, but she's innocent. He says, I didn't ask you, is she guilty or is she innocent? I asked you, have you got $5,000? So you see that Billy is totally without any kind of heart.
Fred Ebb: Well, it’s understanding Billy. He’s a phony, and he comes down and sings a phony song about a phoning emotion. And he doesn’t mean it for a minute, and you can tell. And a lot of girls are surrounding him, flicking fans, and it’s kind of stupid. And he’s just a very enjoyable character. The truth is, Billy’s truth, "that's vaudeville, honey, and you’re a phony celebrity", and that celebrities are, in fact, killers today. More people on the street would be likely to tell you who Al Capone was than they could tell you who the Secretary of State is. And I think that’s really the message of the piece, that we have phony royalty here. And, uh… And know any better you know Great Britain has a Queen and uh… Somebody to really uh… Be reverent about. We don’t. So we tend to pick odd celebrities and very often they’re murderers and killers. People are familiar with them, more than they’re familiar with who the vice president is or, you know, as I said, the secretary of state. I don’t know. But it seemed to me that was important too
Michael Kantor: What is the song, All I Care About, is Love About? How does that work within the show?
John Kander: Well, it’s a song which says one thing and really means the opposite. It’s a monumentally hypocritical statement. Sung by a very, very successful man who has who has taken advantage of everybody’s bad luck for his entire career. Lots of time. I think that’s something which is really contemporary in effect. Every time I read pretentious or soporifically tender quotes from people in great power. I always think of that moment.
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 he danced old vaudeville numbers himself. Almost every song in the show is modeled on an actual vaudeville act or star.
Billy's “All I Care About is Love” is in imitation of band leader Ted Lewis, who would begin his act by saying “Is everybody here? Is everybody ready?” But when the chorus girls appear to dance around him with giant feathered fans, the song also becomes a tribute to the famous fan dancer Sally Rand.
Sally Rand (1904–1979) was an American burlesque performer best known for popularizing the fan dance and bubble dance during the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Born Helen Gould Beck in Elkton, Missouri, she worked as a chorus girl and silent-film actress before adopting the stage name “Sally Rand,” reportedly given to her by director Cecil B. DeMille. Her fan dance used large ostrich-feather fans to create the illusion of nudity, which led to repeated arrests for indecency even though she remained covered. Rand toured nationally for decades, appeared in films and nightclubs, and operated the Music Box theater in San Francisco. Her acts became defining features of American burlesque and made her one of the most recognizable performers of her era.
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