The second longest-running musical on Broadway, with six Tony awards, two Olivier awards and a Grammy, the Opera House stage tonight is no place for amateurs as Chicago returns to Manchester. Fortunately, it's clear right from the off that this will be one polished production.
Set in jazz age Chicago and based on a 1926 play by reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins about the real-life criminals she wrote about, we are introduced to Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, two fame-obsessed murderesses, one a washed up vaudeville star guilty of murdering her husband, the other a wannabe celebrity in prison for bumping off her lover.
Former Coronation Street star Faye Brookes, back on home turf, is delightfully impish as Roxie and the perfect foil to the hardened, cynical maestra murderess Velma Kelly (played on opening night by Michelle Andrews). Sheila Ferguson, of The Three Degrees fame, as Mama Morton also nails the part of the laconic and openly corrupt prison warden, who befriends her charges purely in order to relieve them of their cash.
