The touring production of Chicago is currently in San Francisco, starring Huey Lewis once again as lawyer Billy Flynn. I was in the city yesterday for some appointments anyway, so I decided to go see it. (Mid-week balcony tickets are pretty cheap.) At first it was hard to just enjoy it for itself and not keep comparing it to the Broadway version I'd seen last year. In some ways I thought it compared unfavorably and I missed certain details, but in other ways I liked some of the differences. The biggest difference to get used to, though, was that apart from Huey all the other actors were different.
In a sense it's a shame that Huey gets all the attention on the marquee: it's really a show where the two women (Velma and Roxy) are the stars. They each have incredibly demanding parts, very physical, and the show makes or breaks with their performances. Still, Huey's fun to watch with his impish Billy Flynn. Huey's obviously very comfortable on the stage and he really throws himself into it, but I think he's still learning how to throw himself into it most effectively. He's a little too "Justine Bateman" in scenes where he has to confront Roxy and Amos, and I think it detracts from the command Flynn would naturally have as a lawyer.
(The "Justine Bateman" thing is a reference to a performance of The Crucible I once saw her in off-Broadway. She played the woman who instigates the witch hunt through her sociopathic jealousy. The reason why the character is able to get away with this is because she's subtle in her approach, and none of the other characters quite realize how she's manipulating the situation until it's too late. But Bateman played the character 100% angry, all the time. She just came out and snapped at people. Which breaks down the logic of the play, because if the character had really been like that no one would have taken her seriously and the witch hunt never would have happened.)
I also think Huey would have benefited if he'd been in that fabulous Copyright and Rhetoric class I took, for the same reason I benefited from it. One of the things we learned was how, and why, to slow down our delivery. To let each word properly hang for its full rhetorical power. For instance, in one scene in Chicago Huey gives a rhetorically provocative closing argument. The way it's scripted, even though the audience can see it's tripe, it's still rhetorically poignant tripe designed to manipulate the heartstrings of the jury. I think Huey rushes through the delivery a bit and it takes away from the power the soliloquy is supposed to have. In fact, overall, I think Huey may need to slow down and claim his space as a character a little more. Of course, I note the heavy irony that I'd even suggest such a thing of him, since in real life when Huey's just being Huey he's much better and more practiced at public speaking than I am and has no problem taking the time he needs to get the most punch from his delivery. (Whereas I'm still learning.)
I did find last night, though, that I was having an unexpected and somewhat negative reaction to the play, for reasons having nothing to do with Huey per se but a lot to do with Billy Flynn. When I watched it last December I was still in law school. "Ha, ha," I often joked (somewhat not unembitteredly…), "Huey's getting to be a lawyer before I am." But seeing as how I was still in law school I just made more jokes about not having taken classes on razzle-dazzling and left it at that.
This time it was different. I'm out of school, and fighting tooth and nail to become a lawyer, wrangling with bar exams and moral character applications and the general angst that comes with trying to break into a new career. At this point I identify much more with being a lawyer. It's a role I'm ready, willing, (nearly) able and anxious to take on. So when I watched Billy Flynn commit all sorts of breaches of legal ethics (e.g., failure to zealously advocate for his clients, suborning of perjury, etc.) I think I took it personally somehow. It wasn't funny to me to watch a bad lawyer; in an odd way it almost felt like an attack on me through its attack on the profession I'm eager to join and nobly uphold.
Anyway, my point is mostly that by being a graduate as opposed to a law student I found myself identifying with the role in a much different way. Never fear, however: I'm still aware that it's just a silly play.
Edit 10/31: Turns out I had a few more thoughts on this...