The Randy Report: Review: CHICAGO at San Diego Music Theatre

Photo: Ken Jacques

I just spent the last few weeks staging the musical CHICAGO at San Diego Music Theater, which opened Saturday night. I'm very proud of the cast who were all uber-fantastic to work with.

Readers have emailed me asking how it all went. Here's the review from San Diego's major newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune. Nice mention for me (thanks Union-Tribune) but the credit really goes to the fabu cast:

With its just-opened production of the sharply comic Kander & Ebb musical, San Diego Musical Theatre delivers all that. It’s the kind of polished, propulsive staging that’ll remind you why “Chicago” keeps running endlessly on Broadway.

Ron Kellum directs a versatile (and conspicuously fit) cast led by Kyra Da Costa as the alpha jailbird Velma Kelly and Emma Radwick as the upstart “merry murderess” Roxie Hart. Both bring comic chops and solid vocals to the roles of the antiheroines who wind up competing for dubious celebrity in the crime-fixated Windy City of the 1920s.

Robert J. Townsend steps in smartly as the defense lawyer Billy Flynn, giving this debonair character a nice bite of the cynical. The show’s smaller but still piquant roles also find good matches in Ria Carey as the jail honcho Matron “Mama” Morton (although she could stand to vamp it up a bit more); Jason James as Roxie’s seriously meek husband, Amos; and A. Saunders, who played the gossip scribe Mary Sunshine on Broadway and reprises the role here.

Musical director/conductor and SDMT regular Don Le Master leads a tight 13-piece band that brings loads of saucy personality to such memorable numbers as “All That Jazz,” “Razzle Dazzle” and (especially) “Cell Block Tango.” And choreographer Randy Slovacek stays true to the style and spirit of the late, great Bob Fosse without seeming slavish.

The show's setting, the Birch North Park Theatre, is a bit of a mixed blessing. The feel of the place fits the piece: "Chicago" is set in 1929, the same year the ornate theater opened as a vaudeville and movie house, as SDMT co-executive director Gary Lewis pointed out before Saturday's opening-night performance.

But the house's shallow rake means sight lines can be dicey when the ever-limber "Chicago" dancers get down low on the stage floor.

Still, it's more than worth a little neck-craning to see that ensemble at work, including such standouts as Jennifer Simpson (Go-to-Hell Kitty), Chuck Saculla (Roxie's doomed squeeze Fred Casely) and Katie Whalley, who has an amusing turn as an inmate explaining her "creative differences" with her promiscuous boyfriend. ("He saw himself as alive. I saw him as dead.")

Matthew Novotny's lighting evokes a certain sepia-toned seediness, and Janet Pitcher's excellent costumes - black on black on black, with boatloads of bowlers and a spangle here and there - match the musical's tone of sexy, dark satire.

Kudos for this show? To borrow from “Tango”: They have it comin’.