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| je suis disponible en français !! |
yo !!
as i told you before, on sunday i went to see Chicago on Broadway...
...and it was awesome !
first i had a great seat : in the orchestra !!
i was in the third row, on the right, with no one in front of me.
i was so close i could see all the little details you're not supposed to : the little flesh-coloured mics on the actors' jaws, the beads of sweat on the dancers' faces after complicated dance moves, or the fact that the opera soprano singer who was playing the journalist was actually a drag queen.
for those who don't know it at all, Chicago tells the story of Roxie Hart, a woman from the Chicago of the 1920's, who dreams to become a singer. she is sent to prison for the murder of her lover, and there meets other murderesses, including the famous singer Velma. with the help of the jail keeper Mama, she hires the best lawyer in town : to try and avoid her a death sentence, he turns her into a celebrity...
here's the trailer to the movie adaptation of the musical [x]
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| movie adaptation poster |
the actress acting Velma reminded me of a french singer, Patricia Kaas, in terms of body and voice, it was funny ; Mama was fabulously sassy (proof here[x]).
Roxie was played by the understudy of the regular actress, and she was great.
but the best part was the dancers
let's be honest here : since the actors have barely any clothes on, they all have perfect bodies.
girls look like models and dance in their underwear, while boys all have six-packs showing with their open shirts or see-through tops, and all wear very very very tight pants that leave nothing to the imagination.
i kinda wanted to steal one
and since they're all professional dancers, they know how to move.
the dancing was just breathtaking, extremely sexy but classy enough to avoid being vulgar, and very graceful. already had someone doing an aerial only 2 meters away from you ? it's quite impressive
i was so close to the stage that at one point one of the dancers who was holding a pose met and hold my gaze, and winked at me before resuming his dance move
THE number i was waiting for, though, was of course the Cell Block Tango
click here [x] for the movie version
it's a song full of dark humour, in which 6 prisoners tell the story of how they killed their husbands
i loved what they did in the movie with the male dancers playing the husbands, and the red ribbons. they really made it into a huge number, the climax of the movie
here, it was very different from the movie of course. the camera bring a freedom in terms of changing the settings, that you just can't do on stage. no flashbacks, no flourish, a way simpler set design, with just the six women singing about their husbands' murders
but the stage also brings a proximity with the audience, and the laughters from the audience were interwoven with the singing
"i fixed him his drink. some guys just can't hold their arsenic"
"he ran into my knife. he ran into my knife ten times !"
we laugh at their cheekiness and false good excuses, and a complicity appears between audience and murderesses
in a nutshell : it rocked !!
the only downside : i wanted to give them a standing ovation, but nobody stood up, and i didn't dare being the only one getting up
and no stage door meeting !! no one was waiting for the actors ! i was the only one hanging out outside the theatre. i saw one or two actors coming out, but i didn't go to talk to them, since nothing was organized and they were on their way
it was quite funny to see : they were coming out of the door in jeans and tee-shirt, and left on foot or bike, incognito in the crowd
one minute they were in a costume, on stage, the center of all attention, and the next, they are back to being random people in the New York crowd
here [x] is the trailer for the musical, with extracts from various casts
a must-see !!
ps : the title comes from the opening number, All that jazz, and is my favourite line of the whole show "no i'm no one's wife, but oh i love my life !"
