Adelaide Festival Theatre. 8 Aug 2024
This revival of a revival of a revival of the classic Broadway musical, Chicago, is older than it ever intended to be.
It has whiskers. It is a 28 year old production and it’s tired, flat and lacklustre. It’s a leftover meal endlessly reheated. The beloved Fosse/Kander/Ebb musical is part Brecht, part vaudeville pastiche and all gritty style. Where once, as in the original production and in the celebrated 1981 Australian production (directed by Richard Wherrett and starring Nancye Hayes, Geraldine Turner, Terence Donovan and George Spartels) it was fresh, scintillating and dazzling in subversion. This production is a damp squib.
Chicago as performed by brilliant teenage tyros for Pelican Productions at the Thebarton Town Hall was vastly preferable to this dull, toothless production.
The show concerns celebrity criminals and the pertinence of that should not be lost in the age of Donald Trump, but it is.
This production has always been hard to look at. It’s boring black on boring black. Read cheap. The choreography is now more fussy than Fosse. Mercifully, we could say Anthony Warlow as the shyster lawyer, Billy Flynn, chews the scenery, if there was any scenery to chew. He is superb and at his inestimable best. This performance has style, wit and chutzpah to burn. Peter Rowsthorn kills as the sad sack Andy - or is it Amos? and gives a peerless and highly memorable performance. S. Valeri as sob sister Mary Sunshine seems to have swallowed Trevor Ashley and Asabi Goodman underwhelms as Matron ‘Mama’ Morton.
The very worst of this show is the central miscasting of Zoë Ventoura as Velma Kelly and the (usually excellent) Lucy Maunder as Roxie Hart. Ventoura seems never to really connect with the audience and she seems to have heavy feet. Maunder’s Roxie just doesn’t register.
Roxie has moxie and bite but Maunder plays her as a simpering, giggly Tammy Faye Bakker - with the eye-makeup to match. These are star parts but herein they sag.
The ensemble works hard but hard work ain’t enough. The onstage band, led by Anthony Barnhill is stunningly good.
Chicago is chockers with hilarious one-liners and lyrics. Scandalously, those great gags are thrown away and lyrics are sometimes inaudible in this paint-by-numbers production. Sad to say, but my companion and I both reached for the gun.
Peter Goers
When: 9 to 31 Aug
Where: Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
