Chicago, the Kander and Ebb musical I’ve tried to like but that always strikes me as a more or less empty string of pastiches, is having its most interesting outing for years as part of the Lincoln Center festival where, for the next week, it will be performed in Japanese and entirely by women.
The theatre company, Takarazuka, is one of Japan’s oldest and most popular, a single sex troupe with a fanatical following, founded over 100 years ago and currently selling around two and a half million tickets a year.
Traditionally, the company is known for Moulin Rouge-type floor shows, all feathers and sequins and, for those women playing men, slicked back Teddy Boy hair – and so this production of Chicago is something of a departure. Styled along classic Bob Fosse lines, the cast appears in bowler hats, fishnets and tights, all sleek and pared down and aligning effortlessly with the troupe’s idea of androgyny.
There is something delicious about watching a show like Takarazuka, which approaches questions of gender playfully and with no distinct ideology, in a New York audience where words like “heteronormative” are never far from anyone’s lips. One member of Takarazuka told the New York Times this week that the company is in the business of “selling dreams”, but that is not what the crowd at Lincoln Center wanted to hear. “Are they commenting on gender?” said a woman behind me, sounding puzzled and slightly irritated. “They seem not to be.”
What were they doing? Well, offering a spirited if overly faithful rendition of a worn-out old classic. The voices weren’t that strong, which, oddly, played in the show’s favor. At this point in the history of Broadway shows, there is nothing worse than the one-note shout-singing of a woman choking the life from a torch song. That no member of Takarazuka would get further than the second round of American Idol is a point distinctly in its favor.
Instead, the singing style was ragged, more joyful and more alive. As in every production of the show, the two real stars were not Velma Kelly (Yoka Wao) and Roxie Hart (Hikaru Asami), although both played their parts with admirable fervor, but rather that rough old bird Mama Morton, played wonderfully by Jun Hatsukaze, and Billy Flynn. The male leads in Chicago, Flynn and Roxie’s abject husband Amos, are too highly stylized to present much in the way of a challenge to the actors, but having women in the roles did energize the type. The veteran Takarazuka star Saori Mine was practically serpentine in her depiction of Flynn, keeping him just the right side of camp, and, if you want to go this way, making a discreet point about the performative aspect of gender, on top of the show’s intended target, celebrity.
Amos, meanwhile, played by Chihiro Isono, was the oaf he always is, but there was some extra level of pathos – his mouth hanging open, his shuffling gait – that I hadn’t seen in previous renditions and felt obliquely connected to his being played by a woman.
It is hard to say what all this amounted to. Having women in these roles made the show brighter, snappier, sexier, more interesting. It was still, however, Chicago, and for all the novelty of the Takarazuka approach, it dragged at times.
For the encore, the troupe did a few numbers more representative of its traditional fare – a can-can line, a wacky rendition of the Police’s Roxanne, in which a woman in evening wear was wooed by a woman dressed as a man, and a blowsy version of Sinatra’s That’s Life. In less enlightened times, it was the kind of thing Clive James used to trawl foreign satellite channels for to mock on his late-night show. On stage at Lincoln Center, where a little kitsch goes a long way, it felt like a silly, fun antidote to the times.
