Theater History and Mysteries

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It took 6 steps to get to the version of Chicago that we know today.  There was the original play in 1927, written by Maurine Watkins, and the silent film that came out within a year the play.  The musical launched in 1975, was revived in the 1990s, and won the Oscars in the film version of 2002.

But stuck right in the middle of that is the 1942 movie starring Ginger Rogers, and the name of the show is Roxie Hart.  And…are you ready for this?....it is NOT a musical.

Why in the heck would you make a movie version of Chicago, put Ginger Rogers in it, and NOT make it a musical?  If you’re like me, you’re also asking, “how come I never heard about this before?”  

Is it the same plot?  Was the show any good?  What did Maurine Watkins think of it?

And speaking of that…what DID Maurine Watkins do with the last 30 years of her life?  Today, we’ll explore the questions about the movie and the straight up mysteries around the last third of Maurine Watkins life in this episode of THM.

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The musical Chicago is based on an actual case.  It inspired at least 6 different large-scale entertainment industry productions.  You know the broad strokes – Roxy Hart shoots her lover, goes to trial, is backed by an adoring but doormat of a husband, meets other inmates who are equally heartless and all crave fame, as way to win their cases, and gets off when her slick and sleazy lawyer comes up with a fabrication about reaching for a gun that bamboozles a too gullible jury.

This our 3rd episode, and we already know that … that’s not exactly what happened.

But throughout these episodes we are going to keep pursuing the central questions: What does the show mean?  Is the show right – about crime, publicity, Chicago, and society?  Why does the show have such lasting popularity, and what does it say about us that it does?

Today, we will look at the first two of those major productions to figure out how those actual events were portrayed…and they could not be more different.  We’ll cover what’s in the play, how it was different from actual events, the major mystery around the silent movie which is who really directed it, and start to piece together what that says about theater and life.

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The musical Chicago is based on an actual case.  And not in a distant, this trial inspired a story that’s been retold so many times that who knows, kind of way.  A real, actual killing that in many details is exactly like the musical, and in fact was covered by a reporter named Maurine Watkins, who interviewed the real-life Roxy Hart in the actual Cook County jail, then covered the trial, and wrote articles about them all the way through it.

What happened at that trial?  How similar was it to the story that has now captivated literally millions of show enthusiasts?  Did the killer dance to Jazz music over the corpse of her slain lover while children played outside the window?  Was this the kind of crazy, free flowing criminal behavior all too typical of the Jazz age and everything that it stood for?  Did slick and opportunistic lawyers act like puppet masters whipping up public sympathy for a glamorous defendant?

OR…did the prosecution cook up its own fictitious version of events and try to railroad a lower-class and generally marginalized woman, only to find it all blow up in their face when the press and couple of good lawyers pointed out the multiple flaws of the case?

We are trying to find out with the production of Chicago tells us about Theater and Life and answer some core questions: What does the actual trial and its depiction in the plays, movies, and musicals tell us about justice?  And what does our collective fascination with this story tell about us and America?

Settle in to your balcony seats…this one is a doozy.  We’ll answer at least some of those questions on this episode of Theater History & Mysteries.

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Chicago the musical is the longest running revival in Broadway history, second only to Phantom as the longest running show ever, winner of the 2002 Oscar, rare crossover of broadway hit and movie hit,  is at the century anniversary of its first Broadway run, which was a play and not a musical.  Not a lot of shows go on for 100 years.

There are two big questions for the show: Is it pro- or anti-crime?  Is it rightabout women killing men & getting off?

Today we'll look at the real crimes, the real women, the real victims, and the real spouses who inspired the show, and the author of that 1927 play, Maurine Watkins.

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Lin Manuel Miranda’s mega hit, the musical Hamilton, has got hiphop in it.  Ya can’t miss that, it’s what makes the show distinctive, and most Broadway shows don’t even come close to trying to do it.  Loren Kajikawa put it this way: “Hamilton's engagement with hip hop's history, culture, and aesthetics forms an undeniable part of the musical's appeal. Hamilton deserves to be called a "hip hop musical"

But that raises some questions…some of the traditional themes of hip hop music aren’t exactly  empowering for women.  Or anyone.  There’s also a fair tendency to celebrate violence, especially gun violence.  Is that inherently a part of the hiphop genre, or a sideshow, or is it all merely a metaphor, or is it just true of some songs and not others, or what?

There’s clearly a cultural element to hiphop…but what is it?  Where did hiphop come from, and what does it mean?

And when all those questions are answered it all adds up to one big question for the show Hamiton: What does using the hiphop style of music add, take away, confound, or enhance about the show?  Does it make the show work, detract from it, or not really matter at all?  And…when you listen really closely…IS most of the music really hiphop?

Get your gin, get your juice, sit back, and let’s get our music history on in this episode of Theater History and Mysteries.

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There are 2 questions at the heart of hamilton -- what makes the show work, and what makes Lin-Manuel MIranda tick.  Those might be two sides of the same coin.  Along the way there are some important choices – how women are portrayed, how slavery is handled, what’s up with multiracial casting. 

Lin-Manuel MIranda wanted the show to be a story about America then told by America now – and America now has some issues going on.  Race is a thing.  Charlottesville saw 6,000 white nationalists openly marching.  The death of George Floyd.  ICE raids, with the Supreme Court ruling that racial profiling in ICE raids is constitutional, and ruling that protections long ingrained in the voting rights act are no longer necessary.

The Trump administration is waging war on DEI, and removing the names of highly qualified people of color from major historical sites.  In the Netherlands, two panels depicting black soliders liberating cities after WW2 have been taken down; there are other and even more egregious examples closer to home at the Arlington cemetery.

Women’s rights are an issue; abortion bans are proliferating and intrude deeply into basic health care, the right to vote itself is being called into question with proposed legislation that would massively reduce the ability of women to vote in the first place, and in a way that much more drastically impacts men than women.

Representation in entertainment is an issue.  70% of the Broadway audience is white, as are the majority of the performers.

Racial exclusion and the marginalization of women are not solved problems, and our current political climate brings all of that more sharply into focus.

Into all of this walks the musical Hamilton and the person of Lin-Manuel MIranda.  He'll have to make choices about all of it – race, gender, music, colonialism, representation, Broadway itself, and he will get hit on all sides.

So far, we have had dedicated episodes to each of these topics, but today we’ll look at the guy, Lin-Manuel MIranda, what he put into the show, what worked, and how his celebrity has spilled into other politics.  Are the haters right?  Did his efforts at creating new spaces and new ideas result in a net step backwards?  Is he a hiphop sellout, is he another rich kid who made good on the back of a family fortune while capitalizing on the ethos of the streets?

Those are some heavy topics, but Lin-Manuel MIranda didn’t shy away from them.  Alexander Hamilton didn’t shy away from them either.  And neither will we.  Let’s sort ‘me all out together on this episode of THM.

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Philippa Soo plays the role of Eliza in the Broadway mega-hit Hamilton.  And I gotta say, the more you read about Phillipa Soo the more that you like her.  She’s talented, she’s been in a bunch of stuff, she adopted a dog on her birthday, got to throw out a first pitch at Yankee stadium.

All accounts, she’s a fierce performer on the stage and a compassionate human off of it.  One very cool connection is this: She formed the Eliza Project, named after her character in Hamilton, and the purpose of that is to support the Grahman Windham organization.  They have 19 centers that engage in community enrichment; the point is to transform communities as a way of preventing all the problems before they need treatment.  Provide services to children, youth, and families facing “some of life’s most difficult obstacles.”

The organization can trace its history 220 years back in it original incantation as the Orphan Asylum Society of the City of New York, an orphanage in Greenwich Village.  THe founders were Isabella Graham, Joanna Behune, Sara Hoffman and…Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton.

Clearly, Phillipa Soo finds a connection with the character she plays, and part of that connection is clearly gender.  Both are women in Hamilton.

Today, we’ll review the women in Hamilton and learn more about who they are in the show, how they are in history, and get to the inevitable question of whether their portrayal in the show is a net step forward, or a net step back.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda was not the first person to pursue multi-racial casting to make a political point.  Heather S. Nathans of Tufts university shares the history:

“On March 5, 1858, around the first anniversary of the Dred Scott decision and on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, African American abolitionist William Cooper Nell re-staged the massacre as a tableau vivant at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Nell did it to commemorate the Scott decision and to protest the recent ruling by local Boston authorities who refused to declare Crispus Attucks the first victim of the Revolution. Nell’s restaging of the massacre used all black performers to protest their systematic erasure from the history of the Revolution. It also forecast a day when actors of color might rise up and claim their true rights and privileges.” 

Nathans makes a direct connection to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton; the quote continues:  “In that, Nell resembles Miranda, who has said that one of the reasons he became a playwright was because there were no parts for him. Both men literally and figuratively wrote themselves into the archive and the repertoire.”

But, whereas Nell’s staging was all about slavery, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was not.  It was more about…Hamilton.

And that might be the central question for Hamilton.  By casting historically white people with actors of color, Miranda has put race front and center of the production about a founder.  But, as we have explored in our past episodes, the show doesn’t entirely avoid race questions, but they are hardly a central point of the plot and, by design, no part of the character development.

What happens when you make race a key feature of the casting but you then don’t take on central questions of race, including slavery.  Does that work?  Is it cool to play Geo Wash with a black man?  Alex Ham with a Puerto Rican/NewYorikan?  Does it make the show better or worse, and is it s net step forward for racial progress or not?

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Hamilton, the musical, is a show about the founders of the United States, who were mostly white men, and to a much lesser extent white women, and it is played by people who are definitely not matched to the race of the historical figures.  Like, that is the most conspicuous part of the show.  The one thing that you can’t miss about Hamilton is that the cast is predominantly are actors of color playing historical figures who were undeniably white.  Chris Jackson, Leslie Odom Jr., and Daveed Diggs, all Black men, play Washington, Burr and Lafayette, all white men.  Lin Manual Miranda plays the title role of Alexander Hamilton, and according to wikipeida “He is of predominantly Puerto Rican descent and also has distant Mexican, English, and African American ancestry.“

Once it became clear this show was going into syndication, Miranda quipped: “That’ll be the note that goes with the school productions: If this show ends up looking like the actual founding fathers, you messed up.”

LMM has claimed, “This is a story about America then, told by America now, and we want to eliminate any distance—our story should look the way our country looks.“

There are people who love this approach, there are people who really do not, and there are, strangely, a number of people who almost don’t seem to notice.  We’ll do a deep dive into all these points of view, and explore the nature of history, the nature of art, and figure out what the race options are in Broadway.com’s open casting drop-down menu, in this episode of THM.

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