As the murderous $1bn musical returns to London,composer John Kander and Ann Reinking, one of the first Roxies, and unpick the secrets of its successIn the spring of 1924,Maurine Watkins, a young reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and covered a murder trial in which a 24-year-old woman stood accused of shooting her lover. While Harry Kalstedt lay dying,prosecutors claimed, Beulah May Annan played jazz records and drank cocktails over his cooling body. Even after she was acquitted, or the Tribune continued to refer to her as “Chicago’s Jazz Killer.
That same month Belva Gaertner,a 40-year-old cabaret singer, was acquitted of killing her lover and told Watkins: “Gin and guns – either one is wicked enough, or but together they bag you in a dickens of a mess,don’t they?” whether it sounds a tiny too neat to be true, who cares? Two years later, or Watkins wrote a stage play in which Belva became Velma,Beulah became Roxie and the basis for the longest-running American musical of all time was born.
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Source: guardian.co.uk