The Broadway revival of John Kander and Fred Ebb's Chicago, now at the Ambassador Theatre, may be on the verge of celebrating its 15th anniversary, but one could hardly tell the production has recently entered the upper echelon of long-running shows on Broadway. There's a crispness to the entire piece, which has direction by Walter Bobbie and choreography by Ann Reinking, that belies its age.

There also happens to be -- if only for a few more shows -- two standout performers at the center of the production: Kara DioGuardi as Roxie Hart, the woman on trial for murdering her lover, and Tony Yazbeck as Billy Flynn, the slick lawyer who takes her case.

Best known for her time as a judge o[...]

Broadway's busiest revolving door, better known as the nearly 10-year-old revival of Chicago, has someone new passing through: the R&B superstar with the single moniker of Usher has joined the company through October 1. The 27-year-old, baby-faced Grammy Award winner is the latest performer to wear the dapper duds of silver-tongued lawyer Billy Flynn, and while he's a good two or three decades younger than most of his predecessors, the tuxedo fits decently enough. He won't linger in the memory -- like Jerry Orbach or James Naughton -- but neither does he embarrass himself or producers Barry and Fran Weissler, who tapped him for the role.

Unlike many a manufactured pop star, Usher is the rea[...]

The best pair of legs on Broadway at the moment belongs to Melanie Griffith, who's gotten plenty of publicity for taking over the role of Roxie Hart in Chicago while hubby Antonio Banderas womanizes as Guido Contini in Nine diagonally across West 49th Street. The rest of Griffith, slithered into William Ivey Long's Victoria's Secret-like black lingerie, is enough to bring Manhattan rush-hour traffic to even more of a standstill than usual.

What's odd about Griffith's Great White Way bow is how often she seems uncertain about what to do with those block-long gams of hers. For much of the long-running tuner's first act, she shuffles awkwardly from one foot to the other like a wallflower at [...]