Vintage Chicago Tribune: Roxie Hart's evolution — from Beulah Annan to Broadway and the big screen

Chicago Tribune

5 days ago

'Chicago The Musical' debuted on Broadway 50 years ago. Directed by Chicago native Bob Fosse and starring Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach, the tale of an unfaithful wife who murders her lover then works the judicial system to secure her freedom was set against the backdrop of Prohibition and the Jazz Age.
Though critics — including the Tribune's Don Kirk — largely panned the production, its story has staying power. A 1996 revival has more than 11,000 performances on The White Way, according to Playbill. That makes 'Chicago' the second-longest running show on Broadway after 'The Phantom of the Opera' (13,981 performances) and the longest active show.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Murder, mayhem and 'all that jazz' — the real women who inspired Oscar winner 'Chicago'The musical's story was based on actual events that happened in — you guessed it — Chicago in the early 1920s. Its plot, written by short-time Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, was ripped from the headlines, many of her own for the paper. And Roxie Hart, the name of its lead character, was probably inspired by a 'dashing beauty' of the same name from Centralia, Illinois. Hart appeared before a packed courtroom in Watkins' hometown of Crawfordsville, Indiana, to testify during a 1914 murder trial.
Here's a look back at the woman who inspired 'Chicago' and those who have portrayed the scandalous seductress on stage and screen. To learn more about how 'Chicago' went from Murderess Row to Broadway and then on to movies, order: 'He Had It Coming: Four Murderous Women and the Reporter Who Immortalized Their Stories.'
The life of Beulah Annan has been the basis for every portrayal of Hart. Already twice wed and a mother by the age of 24, Annan was satisfied by neither.
Through her job at a Chicago laundry, Annan met Harry Kalstedt. Walks together quickly progressed to day-drinking in her apartment while her mechanic husband, Albert, was at work. A drunken disagreement on April 3, 1924, led Annan to shoot Kalstedt with her husband's revolver. She sat with the body for hours as her phonograph wailed the jazzy tune 'Hula Lou' on repeat. Ironically, the first phone call Annan made was to her husband: 'I've shot a man, Albert. He tried to make love to me.'
When her husband arrived home, he found Annan covered in blood and called the police.
Watkins picked up the investigation of Annan for Kalstedt's murder and it remained front-page news.
'They say she's the prettiest woman ever accused of murder in Chicago — young, slender, with bobbed auburn hair; wide set, appealing blue eyes; tip-tilted nose; translucent skin, faintly very faintly, rouged, an ingenuous smile; refined features, intelligent expression — an 'awfully nice girl' and more than usually pretty,' Watkins wrote.
During the inquest, Annan's lawyer W.W. O'Brien claimed, 'Both went for the gun!' Annan said if she didn't shoot Kalstedt, then he would have shot her.
After her trial was continued several times, Annan made an announcement — she was pregnant. The claim moved her case to the front of the line. But many wondered — could a beautiful woman expecting a baby get a fair trial?
'The verdict is in your hands and you must decide whether you will permit a woman to commit a crime and let her go because she is good-looking,' prosecutor William McLaughlin told the jury. 'You must decide whether you want to let another pretty woman go out and say, 'I got away with it!''
'And they did,' Watkins wrote.
Less than two hours into deliberations, the all-male jury came to a not-guilty consensus on the third ballot.
Husband Albert Annan, who stood by his wife during the trial, was overcome with joy and gratitude.
'I knew my wife would come through all right!' he said proudly.
Beulah Annan then thanked each member of the jury individually and posed for a photo with them.
Watkins used the trial's twists to write a three-act play, 'A Brave Little Woman,' the first she would write while attending the new Yale School of Drama in 1926. When it debuted on Broadway later that year it was called 'Chicago.'
Larrimore was not supposed to be the first actress to portray Hart on stage. She replaced Jeanne Eagels who, according to the Tribune, made rehearsals difficult. That didn't stopped Eagels from sitting in the front row during a performance, where she supposedly 'made faces' at her successor.
When the show arrived in Chicago in September 1927, Larrimore was still the lead actress in the production. The Tribune described her as 'vivid and immensely funny.' The story was praised as 'a hearty and favorious romp that makes rich sport of the yellow newspapers. the criminal lawyers, the judges and the juries, and all the bunk and blah that go with the killing of a man by a pretty woman.' Chicago audiences also loved it — the show played for nine weeks.
An advertisement for the first screen version of 'Chicago' — produced by Cecil B. DeMille — described the 1928 silent film as 'more melodramatic and much funnier than the stage play.'
The Tribune reviewer (who filed under the pseudonym Mae Tinee), however, said 'they have slaughtered Maurine Watkins' play.
'The clever, satiric, diabolically human, uproariously funny play that could so well have been made into just such a picture has had all its fine parts ironed out. It has been fluted and tucked and dyed (including Hart's hair which became blonde for the first time) a la DeMille and the result is just a fussy, ordinary melodrama that is rather funny in spots.'
Depite the disdain, Haver's work in the film was praised as 'believable.'
Yet again, Watkins' tale was rewritten for the screen — in 1942's 'Roxie Hart,' it was told as a retrospective.
'The public always expects a newspaperman to do a lot of drinking,' reporter Homer Howard (played by George Montgomery) said before toasting to Hart (played by Ginger Rogers) at a tavern (with William Frawley of 'I Love Lucy' fame serving as bartender). He then told the story of the beautiful murderess — who's become a showgirl in this iteration.
Though the movie is just 75 minutes long (and available on YouTube), the Tribune reviewer said it 'would have been nice if the director had known just when to end his epic.'
Still, Rogers' portrayal of Hart — 'who had yearned for her picture in the paper more than anything else in life' — was called 'deft.'
The first musical version of Watkins' play opened on Broadway on June 3, 1975, with Gwen Verdon as Hart and Chita Rivera as Velma Kelly. Verdon, who had to bow out of the production because of illness and was replaced by Liza Minnelli, claimed it had been her idea to adapt the play into a musical. The vaudeville-esque show ran for 936 performances over almost two years.
Tribune critic Don Kirk didn't like it. 'Oddly enough, the combined efforts of some of Broadway's brightest talents somehow fail to get it all together. … They call the show, 'Chicago,' but one gets the clear impression they never thought of visiting the place to savor its peculiar ambience and seriously attempt to recapture it in music and words.'
The show's lukewarm reception could have also been in part to a blockbuster show which opened the same year — 'A Chorus Line,' which captured many awards.
But in short measure, Tribune critic Chris Jones wrote, ''Chicago The Musical' — with a book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse, music by John Kander and lyrics by Ebb — greatly exceeded the fame and influence of the play that was its source.
'Over time it came to be known as the quintessential Fosse musical, the most famous work of the Chicago-born choreographer known for his hyperspecific movement vocabulary of turned-in knees, angled, attitudinal body parts, muscular twitches, sideways shuffling and jazzy, animated hands.'
The 'more cynical, darker show,' as Tribune critic Merrill Goozner described it, was given a 'black box setting' with actors and dancers wearing basic — but barely there — black costumes. Slinky dances accompanied fast-paced music from the orchestra, which was seated on a raked bandstand in the background. 'All That Jazz,' 'Razzle Dazzle' and the 'Cell Block Tango' were pumped out with vigor, Tribune critic Richard Christiansen wrote.
Column: How Ann Reinking choreographed not just 'Chicago,' but captured the essence of the city itselfReinking, Fosse's muse and confidant, played Hart in the revival. It debuted Nov. 13, 1996, at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York. Among the show's numerous Tony Awards, Reinking won one for her choreography.
Turns out, the star of 'Bridget Jones's Diary' could sing and dance — perhaps not as naturally as her more experienced co-star Catherine Zeta-Jones (who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Velma Kelly) — but better than anyone might have expected.
'This is a honorable, and largely successful, film version of a deliberately dishonorable Broadway show, based in turn on Maurine Dallas Watkins' disreputable and popular 1926 play about a cheap tart who gets away with murder,' Tribune critic Michael Phillips wrote in 2002.
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