Admittedly, last night was my first Broadway Musical ever performed by no less than professional actors. I saw the student production of Fiddler on the Roof at the University of Rhode Island in 1999 and I could say based on only one comparison that students could only perform around 60 percent of what a professional actors can. But that is just my opinion. The stage at URI that time was a revolving one so that technically, the student production was even more lavish than that of Chicago. And yet, Chicago is miles away in impact because of superb performance by no less than a group of professional actors who sing, dance and act almost all their lives.
Since I have confessed that I have seen Chicago The Movie once at the theater and more than ten times in DVD, I would say that I know the dialog and songs in great detail. While I was watching the Broadway presentation, I could not help but compare it with the movie.
I would say that the first half of the musical resembled the movie in terms of dialog and approach. In fact, I have always anticipated correctly the punchlines. But the second part, after the break, the presentation of the musical totally departed from that of the movie. Assuming that the original script was the musical, understandably, movies have more leeways in giving more details and explicitly feed the audience with such details in storytelling and imagery. The Broadway musical, on the other hand, relied on stylization (if I may borrow the terms of Stageplay people) rather than on accurate imagery and setting.
The sequence of events were slightly improved in the movie version, perhaps to make the whole story easily grasped by the audience. An example of this would be the arrest of a daughter of a pineapple magnate in Hawaii which was shown a bit early in the stage presentation. At least four songs were not sung in the movie version such as 'Unimaginable' (titles are mine as I heard the presumably repeated word in the theme) sang by the character of Velma Kelly and then later duet with Roxy Heart. Another is the almost operatic song by the journalist Mary Sunshine which could be titled Something Good in Everyone. But the song that was not included in the movie which I find really good is the duet of Velma and Roxy that could be entitled I am My Own Best Friend. I instantly fell in love with that song. The very colorful and circus-like court hearing climax in the movie was really reduced to a very simple and no-frills approach on stage but not necessarily the impact. The theme song in the movie which was sang at the beginning. middle and end 'Isn't it grand, isn't it funny' (forgot the title) was not the theme song of the musical although it was sang in the finale.
The characters too, in my opinion, were slightly different in importance. Mama Morton was a little emphasized in the movie as well as that of Velma Kelly while these were deemphasized in the musical. The character of the journalist Mary Sunshine was given more meat by having a solo song and part of the stage surprise last night was the pulling off of the wig of Mary revealing the true gender - a male. This is presumably a modified surprise because it so happened that he is an alternate actor for that character. Who knows whether the other one is a she.
My friend Edwin, who treated me to this musical, tried to rank Chicago the Musical among the numerous musicals he has seen in Broadway which is many because he lives in New York. I refuse to listen and I think that for my first ever musical performed by professional actors, Chicago The Musical is the best. Don't laugh now.
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