Killer Queens

If you're famous enough, and the public loves you enough, you just might get away with murder. That's the (only slightly) tongue-in-cheek moral of the Academy Award winning film musical Chicago. Set during the Prohibition era, Chicago tells the story of two jazz baby flappers (portrayed by Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones) and their skyrocketing fame as a sensation-hungry public follows the twists and turns of their respective murder cases. Inspired by the true-life events she covered while on staff at the Chicago Tribune in the 1920s, Maurine Dallas Watkins turned her daily stories into a play, Chicago, which eventually made it to Broadway and was then adapted for the silver screen twice (most notably 1942's Roxie Hart, starring Ginger Rogers). In 1975, John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse collaborated on a musical version which took Chicago to Broadway a second time — and then it went back to the cinema once again in 2002, proving that Chicago's themes on celebrity and the media circus remain forever contemporary. It is this most recent version of Chicago, with Zellweger and Zeta-Jones, that screens at 7:30 p.m. in the Moore Auditorium on the Webster University campus (470 East Lockwood Avenue; 314-968-7487 or www.webster.edu/filmseries) as part of the Webster University Film Series sub-series, I (heart) Musicals. Tickets are $5 to $6.
Tue., July 21, 2009