Review: Chicago, Cambridge Theatre

If you wait long enough, it feels like you could watch anyone you wanted to in Chicago such is the roundabout that is their ever-changing cast, but recently it has become to go-to place for television stars to come and tread the boards. Jill Halfpenny is the latest person to make this journey, but in winning Strictly Come Dancing, has already established her dance credentials and so this show feels like a good fit for her.

She’s in the role of Roxie Hart, an ambitious chorus girl who murders murders her lover, smears her husband’s name and razzle-dazzles her way in court in order to make herself a star. The show mixes great songs, Fosse-inspired dance routines and a whole load of showmanship into an exuberant whole which is now probably one of the longest-running shows in the West End.



Unfortunately, I wasn’t as mad keen on the rest of the show around her which disappointed on a few levels. Anna Montanaro’s Velma Kelly was vocally quite weak and lyrically very unclear, French looked like her was just going through the motions and there was not a lot of cohesion in the chorus, most of them look gorgeous and buff but there were rarely synchronised well. Maybe this is because I had the film in my mind throughout, but ultimately this production did feel a little shabby.

Halfpenny does well as a character who seems so very far from her own (one disadvantage of reality tv over regular acting means that one gets a greater sense of actors as people rather than their acting skills) but pulls it off really rather well. Her American accent was flawless, her dancing strong and she has a great sense of comic timing too, her rendition of We Both Reached for the Gun with Michael French’s Billy French was hysterical. She seems very much at home on the stage, no awkwardness or over-acting and given that she was reason I’d booked to see the show, this made me very happy.

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