Broadway's Chicago grew out of two real 1924 murder trials
Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly were not invented. They were modelled on Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two women acquitted of murder in Chicago in 1924, whose trials a young Tribune reporter turned into a hit play. Fifty years later Bob Fosse made it a musical that still runs on Broadway.
Maurine Dallas Watkins covered the courthouse for the Chicago Tribune at a time when the city was gripped by women accused of killing husbands or lovers. All-male Cook County juries had acquitted so many of them that a legend grew up: an attractive woman could not be convicted in Chicago. The Tribune leaned towards the prosecution, while the rival Hearst papers ran sympathetic pieces by so-called sob-sisters, and either way the defendants became celebrities.
Annan, 23, was accused of shooting Harry Kalsted on April 3, 1924, reportedly after playing the record Hula Lou for two hours before phoning her husband. Albert Annan, a mechanic, went broke paying for her defence, and she left him the day after she was freed; he became Amos Hart. Gaertner, a cabaret singer, was tied to the death of Walter Law, found in her car on March 12, 1924. Two lawyers merged into Billy Flynn. Separate juries cleared both women within days.
Watkins's 1926 play ran on Broadway for 172 performances and was filmed twice, the second time as Roxie Hart with Ginger Rogers, whose character was made innocent to satisfy Hollywood rules. In the 1960s Gwen Verdon suggested a musical to her husband Fosse, but Watkins kept refusing to sell; historian Kevin Boyd Grubb suspects she had come to regret glamorising the acquittals. Her estate sold the rights after she died in 1969. John Kander and Fred Ebb built each song on a vaudeville act, underlining the link the show draws between justice and show business.
Fosse directed and choreographed the June 1975 original, which played 936 performances at the 46th Street Theatre, while London's first staging in 1979 managed 600. The 1996 revival is another matter: it passed Cats on November 23, 2014, with its 7,486th show, trailing only The Phantom of the Opera, and holds the Broadway record for a musical revival. The 2002 film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Source: Chicago (musical)
