Chicago

Chicago is a musical satire about two women charged with murder in Jazz Age Chicago and the lawyer, reporters and jail matron who help turn them into celebrities. Its targets are a justice system that can be bought and a public that treats a killing as entertainment. John Kander wrote the music, Fred Ebb wrote the lyrics, and Ebb and Bob Fosse wrote the book. The source is the 1926 play Chicago by Maurine Dallas Watkins, a reporter who had covered real murder trials in the city.

The show at the Ambassador Theatre is not the original 1975 staging. It is the revival that opened on November 14, 1996, after starting life earlier that year as a pared-down concert performance, and it still keeps much of that bare look. In 1997 it won six Tony Awards, among them Best Revival of a Musical.

As of October 2026, Chicago is the longest-running show now playing on Broadway, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history and the longest-running musical revival the street has seen. Counting every performance, only The Phantom of the Opera has played more. In 2026 the revival is marking its 30th year on Broadway.

The action is set in Chicago in the late 1920s, and the evening unfolds as a string of vaudeville acts. Velma Kelly, a vaudeville performer, opens the show as a sort of master of ceremonies. Meanwhile, in a cutaway scene, Roxie Hart, a married woman who dreams of a stage career, shoots her lover, Fred Casely, when he tries to break things off.

Roxie talks her husband, Amos, into taking the blame by calling the dead man a burglar. The lie falls apart once the victim is identified, and Roxie lands in the women's block of the Cook County Jail. There she meets the other accused women, among them Velma, who is awaiting trial for killing her husband and her sister, and Matron Mama Morton, who does favors for anyone willing to pay.

Roxie hires Billy Flynn, Velma's lawyer, who has never lost a case and wins by making his clients famous. Amos can cover only half of the fee, so Billy sets out to close the gap by turning her case into a newspaper sensation, with help from Mary Sunshine, a soft-hearted columnist. At a press conference Billy answers every question while Roxie just moves her lips, like a ventriloquist's dummy. Soon she is the talk of the city, and a sidelined Velma proposes a double act. Roxie says no.

When a newer crime pushes her off the front page, Roxie announces that she is pregnant. In the second act the baby story wins the reporters back, Amos stays invisible to everyone, and Roxie grows so sure of her celebrity that she thinks she can manage without Billy. Events inside the jail make her think again, and everything builds toward a trial that Billy runs like a stage show.

Kander and Ebb wrote each number in the style of a traditional vaudeville act or a particular vaudeville star, so the score plays like a bill of variety turns. The original production was even titled Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville. Four of the leads have a specific model: Roxie's material draws on Helen Morgan, Velma's on Texas Guinan, Billy Flynn's on Ted Lewis and Mama Morton's on Sophie Tucker.

Some numbers to listen for:

• "All That Jazz" is Velma's opener, which frames the whole evening as a performance.
• "Cell Block Tango" introduces Roxie to the other accused women of the jail.
• "When You're Good to Mama" is the matron's number, where her terms for help become clear.
• "We Both Reached for the Gun" turns the press conference into a ventriloquist routine.
• "Mister Cellophane" belongs to Amos, the husband nobody notices.
• "Razzle Dazzle" is Billy's number as the trial becomes a show. Its finger snaps were Ebb's idea, added before the song was played for Fosse.

The Overture rewards attention too: it holds fragments of a finale that was cut from the score.

The staging is spare rather than realistic. The musicians are not hidden in a pit: they sit in the middle of the stage on a structure meant to suggest a jury box, and some scenes are played in front of it and on top of it. Chairs stand along both sides of that structure, and performers who are not in a scene wait there in full view. The bare set and simple costumes come straight from the 1996 concert version.

As of October 2026, Max von Essen plays Billy Flynn, Lissa deGuzman plays Velma Kelly, NaTasha Yvette Williams plays Matron Mama Morton and Red Concepción plays Amos Hart. Reece Weaver, known from the Netflix series America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, makes her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in an engagement scheduled through November 15, 2026.

The story began in the newspapers. In 1924 two Chicago women, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, were tried for murder in separate cases, and juries acquitted both within days of each other. Maurine Dallas Watkins reported on the trials for the Chicago Tribune and turned her columns into a play. Roxie is modeled on Annan, Velma on Gaertner, a cabaret singer, and Billy Flynn is a blend of two real lawyers. The play opened on Broadway on December 30, 1926, and ran 172 performances; it reached movie screens as a silent film in 1927 and again as Roxie Hart in 1942, with Ginger Rogers.

Gwen Verdon came across the play in the 1960s and suggested it to Fosse as a musical, but Watkins refused to sell the rights; her estate sold them after her death in 1969. Following a Philadelphia tryout at the Forrest Theatre in the spring of 1975, the musical opened on June 3, 1975, at the 46th Street Theatre, now called the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Verdon played Roxie, Chita Rivera played Velma and Jerry Orbach played Billy. Velma, a minor figure in the play, was enlarged so that Rivera and Verdon would be evenly matched. In the summer of 1975 Liza Minnelli stepped in as Roxie for about five weeks while Verdon recovered from throat surgery. The original closed on August 27, 1977, after 936 performances.

In 1992 Rob Marshall staged it for Long Beach Civic Light Opera, with choreography by Ann Reinking. In May 1996 New York's City Center presented a concert version directed by Walter Bobbie and choreographed by Reinking, starring Reinking, Bebe Neuwirth, James Naughton and Joel Grey. That fall the staging moved to Broadway: previews began on October 23, 1996, and the opening came on November 14, 1996, at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, the very house where the 1975 production had played. The revival is reported to have paid back its investment faster than any musical before it.

The production moved to the larger Shubert Theatre on February 12, 1997, and settled at the Ambassador Theatre on January 29, 2003. On November 23, 2014, its 7,486th performance took it past Cats into second place on the all-time Broadway list. It reached its 10,000th Broadway performance in June 2022, and as of October 2026 the count is above 11,000. On June 7, 2026, the 79th Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall marked the revival's 30th anniversary with a tribute featuring Queen Latifah.

The revival's London staging began at the Adelphi Theatre on November 18, 1997, and played for nearly 15 years across three West End houses; Chicago came back to London at the Phoenix Theatre on April 11, 2018. The revival has also had 10 North American national tours. The 1975 original Broadway cast recording entered the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2026. The 2002 film version, directed by Rob Marshall, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.