CHICAGO THEN AND NOW By Peter Filichia
CHICAGO’s hitting the 11,000-performance mark last month inspired me.
I pulled out the Bob Fosse-Fred Ebb script from August 3, 1973 – 22 months before the show came to Broadway. Let’s all see how the John Kander and Ebb score changed or was enhanced during that span, which included a tryout in Philadelphia.
“All That Jazz” and “Funny Honey” are word-for-word what wound up on the still-available 1975 original cast album (with no less than Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach). And while the actual singing sections of “Cell Block Tango” are precisely the same, the spoken sections in between went through some changes.
Liz cautioned Bernie not to pop that gum one more time, but she left it at that; she didn’t say that she had fired two warning shots into his head. We were to infer what she did, which wasn’t nearly as effective or funny.
Annie acknowledged her Mormon husband, but instead of serving him an arsenic-laced drink, she shot him six times – once for each of his wives Ruth, Rachel, Rebecca, Naomi and Esther, as well as one for herself.
Perhaps Fosse and Ebb dropped that litany of names because they wanted to save the names for Mona, whose husband Alvin, we were told, went out nightly to find himself and instead found Ruth, Gladys, Rosemary and Irving.
Not here, though, where Mona’s story is much more dire. She and Alvin were partners in a game of bridge, and after she played the wrong card, he slapped her – which made her pick up a sculpture and bean him to death.
But here Lipschitz is not Alvin’s last name; it refers to famed sculptor Jacques Lipschitz who had sold them a $3,000 sculpture. That’s $54,000 in today’s money, so Fosse and Ebb’s original impulse may have been to state that not just riffraff but even wives of the very rich could kill.
(However, we’d eventually get that through socialite Kitty, wouldn’t we?)
June didn’t say, “He ran into my knife ten times.” Instead, she said that he (not yet named Wilbur) had the knife – one, as she showed with her hands, that was very long. The two subsequent times she described it, she made it substantially longer. That was the joke before June explained that she’d wrestled it away from him.
Perhaps Fosse and Ebb decided to not have them both reach for the knife because it was too similar to “They Both Reached for the Gun.”
As for Velma, she originally suspected that she and her sister (not yet named Veronica) were being cheated out of monies by their manager. Velma wanted to confront him, but her sister said she’d do it. Two hours later, Velma got suspicious, went to his office, broke down the door – and you can infer the rest.
And Hunyak? Her speech in Hungarian that is now 41 words long once weighed in at 120. That’s a lot of Hungarian to expect an audience to endure.
“When You’re Good to Mama” hasn’t yet been written, and Ms. Morton had no solo at this point. Instead, we met Henry Glassman, a theatrical agent.
He was played by David Rounds, until the character was dropped in Philadelphia. Rounds landed the following year in THE BAKER’S WIFE – until his character was dropped during tryouts, too. At last, in 1980, he got a fat part in MORNING’S AT SEVEN and won a Tony.
(Sometimes there’s God so slowly.)
Henry was interested in making Roxie rich and famous so that he could get his “Ten Percent,” which got dropped when Rounds was. In the song, he’s unapologetic about his profession: “They say I got the soul of a piranha, but I ate lobster thermidor last night – and what did you have?”
One thing that Amos wasn’t having: Roxie’s excuses. Originally there was a “Barbershop Quartette” commenting on his attitude: “Though your mouth forms an ‘O,’ as it starts to say ‘No,’ in the end, will it bend into ‘Yes’?”
(Yes.)
So, Amos’ll pay for Billy Flynn, the best lawyer in town. Although at the Ambassador Theatre you can hear “B-I-double-L-Y,” Ebb originally told us what each letter represented: Bully, Ideas, Legal Lion and Yellow Bellies. The last, of course, did not apply to Mr. Flynn himself, but to the other bullies that he would often beat into submission.
Time for the press conference and Mary Sunshine. At this point, she isn’t insisting that there’s “A Little Bit of Good” in everyone, but that she has “Rose Colored Glasses.” As she was to sing, “Though it’s rumored there are those with somber colored woes, those woes are always tinted for me.”
(And that’s enough to show you why that song was dropped…)
“They Both Reached for the Gun” had a different beginning, where Roxie shot off her mouth before Billy became a ventriloquist. The reporters didn’t ask such questions as “Where’d you come from?” for Roxie told them, “I was brought up in a convent and I nearly became a nun.” She elaborated on that, although, when pressed, couldn’t think of the convent’s name.
(Billy made up one, though.)
Every lyric we know of “Roxie” is in this script, but there’s no patter beforehand. Instead, there are 28 lines of lyrics starting with “Well, tickle me pink; well, fiddle-dee-dee. Marie of Romania has nothin’ on me.”
The Barbershop Quartette returned to agree in a song called “Pansy Eyes,” a term that one newspaper used to describe Roxie. “Put a rose in your cheeks and force your two lips to smile, p-p-p-pansy eyes.”
(If you can figure out why Ebb had the Quartette stutter, do let me know.)
Now for another song that remained word-for-word: Velma’s “I Can’t Do It Alone.” And after Kitty is arrested, Roxie realizes that she is “My Own Best Friend.”
What’s interesting is that here it’s a solo, but we’ve all known it as a duet with Velma… except when Liza Minnelli came in for five weeks after Verdon had suffered an injury. Unlike Velma’s earlier pronouncement in song, Minnelli felt that she could do it alone – and did.
(Rivera once told me that she decided to be a good sport about it… but then added that it was yet another time in her career when she was a good sport, and those times were adding up to the point where she questioned her largesse.)
This current revival of CHICAGO that started previews before Bill Clinton was elected to a second term retained the duet. So, whether you listen to Ann Reinking and Bebe Neuwirth on the cast album or attend the show now and see Bianca Marroquin and Kimberly Marable, you’ll get two voices just before Act One ends.
And Act Two of this script? I’ll save that next week. To paraphrase a lyricist that many people even prefer to Fred Ebb, Tuesday may be your good news day.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new day-by-day wall calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY – 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
