All That Jazz — official video

Almost every musical opens by telling you where you are. Chicago opens by telling you what it wants from you: Velma Kelly walks out alone, invites the audience to a night of “music and dancin’ and all that jazz”, and performs an entire number without mentioning that she has just killed two people.

Watch what runs underneath it. While Velma holds the front of the stage, Roxie Hart shoots her lover on the other side of it — the show’s whole argument delivered before anyone has said a line: the crime is the small part, the performance is the career.

The number belongs to Fred Ebb’s lyric and John Kander’s vamp, and to the Fosse vocabulary that arrives with it — turned-in knees, angled shoulders, the hat doing the work a face would do anywhere else.