8/17/2023 0 Comments Richard gere chicago razzle dazzle![]() ![]() ![]() Marshall’s team took the opportunity and ran with it, giving each musical number a unique look that differentiates it from the period grittiness of the book scenes: “Cell Block Tango” takes a wide-open space and fills it with a whole wall of jailed women dancing in individual jail cells, slashes of red fabric cutting across the black costumes and white lighting to dramatize the bloody murders of the song’s narrative “All I Care About” and “Razzle Dazzle” present a vaudeville carnival of ornate set and costume designs to buttress Billy Flynn’s flashy legal showmanship in “Roxie,” Zellweger isn’t only backed up by an ensemble of suited male dancers, but by versions of herself in a roomful of mirrors, a reflection of her narcissism. In one fell swoop, most of the problems with cinematic adaptations of stage musicals are solved – people aren’t just randomly breaking out into song and dance, they’re doing so inside the theater of the mind, which allows the filmmakers to open everything up so that it does not feel stage-bound. But director Rob Marshall – in his feature debut – hit upon a flawless conceit to make it work: All the musical numbers take place in Roxie’s mind, a reflection of her ambition to become a star. Subtitled “A Musical Vaudeville,” each of the show’s songs is presented as a different vaudeville act, something that works naturally in a theatrical setting but not in a cinematic one. The biggest problem with adapting Chicago to the screen is the musical’s structure. So when a sexy, minimalist revival of Chicago opened on Broadway in 1996 to critical acclaim and commercial success, the timing was just right for the long-stalled film adaptation of the show (originally meant to be directed by Bob Fosse before his death in 1987) to finally come to fruition. But at its heart, Evita is an Oscarbait-y biopic, traditional and somewhat staid it got some respect from critics, but excited almost no one. While the film didn’t make back its budget at the American box office, it did very well internationally, and the film’s soundtrack was a huge success on the Billboard charts, spawning a club remix of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” that cracked the top ten of the Hot 100. The only movie musical adaptation released theatrically in the whole of the 1990s was 1996’s Evita, starring Madonna in the title role. After that, stage musicals were relegated to filmed performances on PBS and television movies for a decade. The 1982 adaptations of Annie and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas were moderate box office successes but critical failures, 1985’s A Chorus Line (at the time the most successful Broadway musical in history) was a bomb, and 1986’s Little Shop of Horrors underperformed. The 1980s started off with a trio of original movie musicals that were legendary flops: The Apple, Can’t Stop the Music, and Xanadu, and it didn’t get much better from there. Hollywood had tried to make movie musicals successful throughout the 80s, but it was tough going after a great run in the 70s ( Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Tommy, Grease, The Wiz). Audiences were simply not accepting of people suddenly breaking into song unless they were in animated films. Movie musical adaptations of stage shows had fallen far out of favor by the turn of the millennium, killed by the wave of 90s cool that emphasized ironic detachment over surface-level glitz and glamour. If the movie musical was dead in the 1990s, and 2001’s Moulin Rouge! proved that original live-action movie musicals could still wow audiences, then Chicago proved that there was still life to be found in the old Broadway chestnuts, provided you knew where to look. ![]() Plenty of films have opened with a sequence that essentially instructs the audience on how to watch them, but Rob Marshall’s Chicago does so in a particularly brazen way, especially given its genre. It remains one of the most effective stylistic gambits in cinema history: Over the course of five cuts in about two seconds, we watch as Renee Zellweger’s Roxie Hart hungrily watches Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Velma Kelly perform “All That Jazz,” and get so wrapped up in it that she sees herself in the performance, belting out the big note at the end of a phrase.
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