All That Jazz: The Life and Times of the Musical Chicago

In 1975, the Broadway musical Chicago brought together a host of memes and mythsamp;mdash;the gleefully subversive character of American musical comedy, the reckless glamour of the big-city newspaper, the mad decade of the 1920s, the work of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, and the Wild West gangsterville that was the city of Chicago itself.

The tale of a young woman who murders her departing lover and then tricks the jury into letting her off, Chicago seemed too blunt and cynic…