I'm amazed by how enduring this little story has turned out to be. Maurine Dallas Watkins' original play ushered in a generation of cynical, wise-cracking newspaper comedies. It actually opened a few months before The Front Page. In 1975, Bob Fosse cast a darker light on the material. The corruption of the legal system became a metaphor for the hollowness of all American institutions. Like so much popular art of the time, it was informed by the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. Then Chicago was revived in 1996, on the heels of the O.J. Simpson case, and the show business metaphor really came into focus. People connected to it in a completely new way. As for the movie, I suspect that the blurring of the line between notoriety and celebrity will make a lot of sense in our post-Monica age.

Chicago is a terrific show (even without the Broadway razzle-dazzle, as in William Wellman's 1942 non-musical adaptation starring Ginger Rogers and Adolphe Menjou). And it's more terrific than Bob Fosse's much-cited claim to have been inspired by Watergate would make it even if such motivation were discernible in the final production. (Click here for a comparison of the original Broadway production and the movie, as well as some interesting background links.) Topical satire tends to be overrated by people who agree with it, which is to say by the people least in need of feeling its impact. The situation with Chicago is a little trickier--they seem to be interpreting it as topical satire so that they can "agree" with it, that is, so that they can take it more seriously than they would a more generally jaded, less specifically committed (i.e., "irresponsible") form of irony, which I prefer.

The best movie response to Watergate has been Nasty Habits (1976), based on Muriel Spark's 1974 novel The Abbess of Crewe, which transposes the scandal to a convent where Glenda Jackson engages in dirty tricks to ensure her election as Mother Superior. And it's wonderful not because it tells you anything about Watergate or political corruption, but because it translates all that into a humming little hive of fantasy of its own.

(Perhaps the most serious problem with topical satire is that the target audience adjusts (or, frankly, lowers) its aesthetic standards once it perceives congenial opinions, and the artists aim lower in anticipation of this. Indeed, the artist doesn't have to be trying to make a point at all, so long as he says something that can be taken as one. Recently I was dumbfounded when the audiences at the New York City Opera production of Benjamin Britten's Rape of Lucretia and the Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night applauded at lines that sounded like critiques of the current Administration's foreign policy. Even if the people staging these shows had intended this accidental punning, it wouldn't have made any sense in context.)