The American musical has been reborn over the past couple of years in a much darker but flamboyant incarnation.  Films like Dancer in The Dark, Hedwig and The Angry Inch and namely Moulin Rouge have infused given this genre an edgier infusion of life in comparison to the lighthearted faire of Hollywood’s heyday.  Singin In The Rain, South Pacific, Oklahoma, State Fair were all joyous, fun-loving celebrations of life and its pleasures but now, things have turned and become more serious. With Chicago, director Rob Marshall has taken this long-running Broadway success story, capitalized on the ground that these recent successes have laid and turned it into an explosion of color, life, song, sensuality and energy.  While the tone of the story most closely resembles Dancer, it also focuses on the media’s glorification of criminals and may seem to take a rather lighthearted stance on such serious faire.  But Marshall’s production combined with the dialogue, the music and the sheer emotional intensity of the vision make this a truly stimulating and all encompassing sensory stimulation

Writer Bill Condon, working off the original Broadway play and screenplay,  and director Rob Marshall have realized what other musical to cinema translations have learned, that simplicity usually breeds success. Roxie Hart is an aspiring actress who when the movie opens, is viewing the sultry act of one Velma Kelly.  Kelly is formerly a member of a sister act, but as we learn, has done away with her sibling in an angry, but forgotten act of lustful envy.   During Kelly’s seductive, signature number “All That Jazz” we see a montage of Roxie and her lover.  In an angry rage, Roxie does him in and in turn is imprisoned right along side Kelly in the prison run by the manipulative, opportunistic Matron Mama Morton.  While awaiting trial, Roxie meets Velma’s celebrity attorney, Billy Flynn who has never lost a case and he takes Roxie’s case ahead of Velma’s and subsequent pulls her into infamy.  Back in this era, criminals and such were lauded and treated as media darlings, so Flynn uses this to his advantage by building Roxie’s image up in the media, and thusly push Velma to the back pages, making her rather angry and envious.  The story is nowhere near as complex as I have made it here.  We have a crime, we have imprisonment, we have a trial, and we have numerous memorable musical numbers (The Cell Block Tango, When You’re Good to Mama and Razzle Dazzle) just to name a few, and in between, we have just enough transitional dialogue to make a commentary on society’s obsession with its bad side, and gives us an endlessly entertaining visual experience.  The closest film I can relate it to is 2000’s Dancer in The Dark, where a woman’s dark journey into blindness and crime, is offset with lavish musical numbers.  Chicago’s tone isn’t near as dark, but it parallels the film in just enough ways to tie them together, both as masterpieces in a slightly parallel genre