KANDER: I remember when we wrote "Razzle Dazzle," before we took it in and played it for Bob, you said with absolute confidence, "Try adding a couple of finger snaps to it. Bobby will love that." We added them, and then we took it in and played it for Bob, and as soon as he heard the finger snaps, he loved the song. -- Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz by John Kander Fred Ebb, Greg Lawrence Jerry Orbach: "In Razzle Da

Jerry Orbach and Gwen Verdon 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. “They Both Reached for the Gun” recalls vaudeville's requisite ventriloquist specialty acts, while pointing out how celebrities are just puppets that can be made to

Jerry Orbach. Bottom right Susan Stroman 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

Photo by Martha Swope, 1975. NYPL Interview by Michael Kantor for PBS, 2003 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: Chicag