New York City
Maurine Dallas Watkins’s 1926 play joins the 2018 Project Shaw lineup.
Gingold Theatrical Group has announced casting for Chicago The Play, the next production of its 13th season of Project Shaw. The show will run for one night only on July 23 at Symphony Space's Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre.
Written in 1926 by Maurine Dallas Watkins, Chicago is best known today as the inspiration for the 1975 stage musical Chicago. The satirical play was based on two unrelated 1924 court cases involving two women, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, who were both suspected and later acquitted for murder and whom Watkins had covered for the Chicago Tribune as a reporter.
The play, which debuted on Broadway in 1926, has been adapted into the 1927 film Chicago, the 1942 film Roxie Hart, and the 1975 stage musical Chicago (revived in 1996 and still running), which in turn was adapted as the Academy Award-winning 2002 film.
Pamela Hunt directs a cast that features Arnie Burton (Peter and the Starcatcher), Robert Creighton (Cagney!), Robert Cuccioli (Jekyll & Hyde), George Dvorsky (Dames at Sea), Joy Franz (Company), Judy Gold (The Judy Show – My Life as a Sitcom), Jonathan Hadley (The Bodyguard), Susannah Perkins (The Wolves), Anna Marie Sell (Kingdom of Earth), and Time Out NY theater editor Adam Feldman.