Luscious said: "I couldn't agree with you more, BWAY Baby! But, apparently, that's not what the majority of people on this board were looking for or expecting. They seem to have wanted a Broadway musical interpretation/recreationof the lives of Fosse and Verdon. Not the nitty gritty reality of their relationship or psyches. Maybe some of the babes will appreciate it more when they're older.
"
The posters who are complaining are hardly "babes". For the most part, they are people who remember the original and, in some cases, actually knew and worked with Fosse and Verdon.
Their complaints are not so much that this series isn't SMASH, but that it is a series about the working lives of two famous people that shows very little of the work they actually did. Last night offered TWO examples of Fosse's brilliance as he took two numbers that weren't working and made them highlights of CHICAGO. But we never really saw either number working as splendidly as it did in the original production.
"Nowadays", although it had been written as a solo finale for the bigger of the two stars, needed to be a duet because the truce reached by the two rivals (I'm talking about Roxie and Velma now, not the actresses) gives the audience a parody of the happy, romantic duets that close so many musicals, but without actually getting sappy about it. It is satirical and laugh-out-loud funny ("In 50 years or so"--CHICAGO opened within six months of the 50th anniversary of the play on which it was based--"it's gonna change, ya know" has only gotten funnier over the years) and yet also dramatically satisfying. We LOVE both performers; we want their characters to become friendly.
For whatever reason it was done, making Roxie into a puppet a la Charlie McCarthy in "Reached for the Gun" made it an electrifying, uproarious and wholly original show-stopping number. (I haven't seen the revival, but the original ended with Jerry Orbach drinking a glass of water while holding the last big note, a regular schtick in vaudeville and, by the 1970s, on TV.) Of course, last night we saw almost nothing of the revised number.
Still, THIS is the Bob Fosse who will always be a Broadway legend as a director as well as a choreographer. That he was also a wreck of a man with questionable personal habits is interesting, too, but without showing us the work, there's no real reason I should be interested in either of the series' title characters.
(It was a nice moment of variety when the African-American dancer told him, "No, you're the nicest choreographer in the business. You never yell or call us names." I can't vouch for the accuracy of that statement, but it did hint that maybe we haven't gotten the whole picture of his working life.)
? I know very little about the original production of Chicago, and the Playbill review didn't address that. 
