On the night of March 23, 2003, the Academy Awards came down to a single white envelope.
Inside the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, five films waited for the words that would end the evening.
Three days earlier, the United States had gone to war, and the ceremony carried a sober, muted tone.
The favorites were heavyweights, a gangster epic, a wartime drama, a fantasy colossus and a literary tragedy.
Beside them sat a jazz musical about two women on trial for murder in 1920s Chicago.
A musical had not won Best Picture since Oliver! took the prize for 1968.
For thirty-four years, the genre had been treated as a relic of an older Hollywood.
Its director was a Broadway choreographer who had never made a feature film before.
Its producer had chased this movie for nearly three decades.
When the envelope opened, the room heard the name of the musical.
Chicago had won Best Picture, the sixth statuette of its night from thirteen nominations.
Catherine Zeta-Jones had performed that evening, eight months pregnant, and then collected the supporting actress trophy.
There was just one problem with the celebration.
Hollywood had spent decades insisting that this kind of film could not be made anymore.
The music simply refused to die.
This is the story of the seventy-six years it took to prove that wrong.
Two Real Trials in Jazz Age Chicago
The story begins not on a stage but in a Chicago courtroom in 1924.
A young reporter named Maurine Dallas Watkins covered criminal trials for the Chicago Tribune.
That spring and summer, two women in turn stood accused of killing the men in their lives.
Beulah Annan was a young wife whose story shifted almost every time she told it.
Belva Gaertner was a cabaret singer whose lover was found dead in her car.
Both women were acquitted, in verdicts that baffled and entertained the city in equal measure.
Watkins watched the press turn the accused into celebrities before the juries had even spoken.
She also watched lawyers perform for reporters as carefully as they performed for judges.
Out of that spectacle she built a play, simply titled Chicago.
It opened on Broadway in the final days of December 1926, directed by George Abbott.
The play ran for 172 performances and was filmed twice within two decades.
Its real subject was never murder, but fame, and the machinery that manufactures it.
The Playwright Who Would Not Sell
For decades afterward, the play sat locked in its author’s fierce protection.
Watkins had turned against her own creation and the celebrity culture it mocked.
One performer, however, could not let the part of Roxie Hart go.
Gwen Verdon, the defining Broadway dancer of her generation, dreamed of playing Roxie onstage.
She pressed her husband, director and choreographer Bob Fosse, to make it a musical.
Again and again, the pair sought the rights, and again and again Watkins refused.
Watkins died in 1969.
Only then could Verdon finally secure the play she had wanted for so long.
Fosse turned to the songwriting team he trusted most from Cabaret.
John Kander wrote the music, and Fred Ebb wrote the lyrics and shared the book.
Broadway, 1975
The musical Chicago opened on Broadway in June 1975.
Verdon played Roxie, Chita Rivera played Velma, and Jerry Orbach played the lawyer Billy Flynn.
Fosse staged every song as a vaudeville turn, a spotlight act borrowed from old-time variety theatre.
Between the acts, the story stayed cynical, funny and unusually cold-hearted for Broadway.
The production ran for 936 performances, a solid success by the standards of the day.
Yet it arrived in the shadow of A Chorus Line, which opened weeks later that same summer.
Chicago earned eleven Tony nominations and went home without a single win.
Critics admired the craft while some found the evening chilly and mechanical.
The score, though, kept glowing in the dark, all brass, bite and vaudeville snap.
Dancers kept the Fosse vocabulary alive in classes and revivals around the world.
And the producer who had helped mount the show never stopped thinking about a film.
His name was Martin Richards, and he had bought the film rights almost immediately.
The movie of Chicago became his life’s longest unfinished sentence.
The Film That Kept Not Happening
Richards’s plan was simple enough, because Fosse himself was going to direct the film.
Fosse had already proved with Cabaret that a stage musical could become a daring movie.
Bob Fosse died in 1987.
With him went the film’s director, its choreographer and its clearest reason to exist.
Through the following decade, the project drifted from studio to studio and draft to draft.
Miramax optioned the rights from Richards in 1991, and still the cameras stayed silent.
Directors were courted, scripts were commissioned, and stars were rumored in the trades.
Each version stumbled on the same unanswered question about audiences in a changing century.
Would modern moviegoers accept characters who stopped the story to sing at them?
By the late 1990s, the honest industry answer was usually no.
The movie musical had become a genre executives apologized for in meetings.
What the property needed was not money, but a way of seeing.
The Revival That Changed Everything
The rescue began with a stripped-down concert staging in New York in 1996.
That staging transferred to Broadway as a full revival that November.
Out went the scenery, and in came black costumes, bare chairs and pure Fosse movement.
The revival won six Tony Awards and turned into a phenomenon nobody had predicted.
Audiences who had never heard of the 1975 production treated it as brand new.
It became the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, and it is still running.
Suddenly the film rights sitting in Richards’s drawer looked valuable again.
The stage had proved that the material could thrill a modern, skeptical audience.
All the movie needed was a director who thought like the revival.
It found one in a man who came to the meeting to discuss something else.
The Meeting About a Different Movie
In May 2000, Rob Marshall walked into the Miramax offices to discuss Rent.
Marshall was Broadway royalty by then, a choreographer with five Tony nominations.
He had never directed a feature film, and the meeting was about another show entirely.
Somewhere in the conversation, he mentioned the property he actually dreamed about.
Then he described how he would film Chicago, and the room changed temperature.
On stage, the songs had always been presented as vaudeville acts between scenes.
Marshall proposed shooting those numbers as performances happening inside Roxie’s imagination.
The real world would stay hard, grey and frightening, shot like a crime story.
The fantasy world would blaze with footlights whenever Roxie needed the world to applaud.
Miramax hired him, and screenwriter Bill Condon built the script around that single idea.
A first-time director had talked his way into Hollywood’s most patient movie.
Inside Roxie’s Head
The device solved the musical’s oldest problem in a single stroke.
Nobody in the film’s real world ever sings, so nobody has to explain the singing.
When Roxie feels cornered, her mind escapes to a stage where she is the star.
Velma’s opening number plays as both a nightclub act and a headline in Roxie’s head.
A prison matron’s bribe becomes a torch song under a follow spot.
A press conference becomes a ventriloquist act, with the lawyer pulling every string.
Even the trial arrives as show business, because that is how its participants behave.
Condon’s script cut ruthlessly, dropping beloved stage songs that slowed the camera down.
What remained moved like the city itself, quick, hungry and always selling something.
Cinematographer Dion Beebe gave the fantasy sequences their lacquered, smoky glow.
Editor Martin Walsh cut on rhythm the way a drummer keeps time.
The audience was never asked to believe the fantasy, only to understand it.
Three Stars Who Became Triple Threats
Casting gambled on performers the industry did not file under musical theatre.
Renée Zellweger arrived straight from Bridget Jones’s Diary, with no singing or dancing training.
She trained for months, learning to move and sing like a woman possessed by ambition.
Her Roxie is soft-voiced and smiling, with a daydreamer’s eyes and a killer’s timing.
Catherine Zeta-Jones, by contrast, had been a stage dancer since childhood in Wales.
Offered either lead, she chose Velma, the role that opens the show.
She insisted on the short black bob so no one could doubt the dancing was hers.
Richard Gere had not sung on screen in years, and Billy Flynn demanded a tap dance.
He took tap lessons for three months to prepare for a single courtroom number.
The finished routine was filmed in half a day, and every step is his.
Queen Latifah brought warmth and command to Mama Morton, the matron who runs the jail.
John C. Reilly played Amos, the forgotten husband, as the film’s broken heart.
His solo, Mister Cellophane, performed to an imaginary empty house, stops the film cold.
And Broadway loyalists spotted a gift hidden in the jail scenes.
Chita Rivera, the original Velma of 1975, appears briefly as a fellow prisoner.
The past was literally standing inside the present, watching it dance.
Filmed in Toronto, Released at Christmas
For all its Chicago soul, the film was shot in Toronto through one winter.
Cameras rolled from December 2001 to April 2002, in halls, stations and a distillery.
The budget came to forty-five million dollars, modest for the spectacle on screen.
Miramax opened the film in late December 2002, in the thick of awards season.
It did not explode, the way modern blockbusters are expected to explode.
Instead it did something older-fashioned, growing week by week on word of mouth.
Remarkably, it never once topped the American box office, peaking at number three.
Yet when the run finally ended, it had earned about 306 million dollars worldwide.
The soundtrack album climbed to number two and later won a Grammy of its own.
Critics, who had braced for a museum piece, mostly found themselves grinning.
A film everyone feared was uncommercial had become the season’s happiest accident.
The Night of Six Statues
When the Academy Award nominations arrived, Chicago led the entire field with thirteen.
Four of its performers were nominated, two of them against each other.
On Oscar night, the film collected six awards across the evening.
It won for its art direction, its costumes, its editing and its sound.
Zeta-Jones won supporting actress, eight months pregnant and weeks from giving birth.
She had even performed live that night, alongside Queen Latifah, without missing a step.
Marshall himself lost the directing prize to Roman Polanski for The Pianist.
Then came the final envelope, and with it the verdict of the whole evening.
Producer Martin Richards accepted Best Picture, twenty-eight years after his Broadway opening night.
A musical stood on top of Hollywood for the first time since Oliver! in 1968.
The result was not close, in nominations, in wins, or in symbolism.
The film had entered the night as a gamble and left it as a landmark.
Every executive who had passed on the property could do the arithmetic.
Why It Still Holds Up
The years since have been kind to the gamble.
The American Film Institute ranked it the twelfth-best movie musical ever made.
Its editing language, all snap cuts and stage smoke, taught a decade of imitators.
Moulin Rouge! had opened the door a year earlier with pop songs and delirium.
Chicago walked through it in evening dress, proving the revival could also be elegant.
Stage musicals returned to studio slates, from Hairspray to Les Misérables and beyond.
Some soared and some sank, but the argument that audiences hated musicals was over.
The film also endures because its cynicism turned out to be prophecy.
Its Chicago is a town where courtrooms behave like theatres and headlines like verdicts.
Fame in the film is a currency, printed daily and worthless by suppertime.
John Kander, who wrote that score, turned ninety-nine years old in March 2026.
His Chicago still plays on Broadway, the same revival the film once rode to life.
Maybe you first met this film on a television screen on some ordinary Sunday afternoon.
Maybe its brass and nerve reminded you that old forms survive by being reinvented.
The music simply refused to die.
A buried genre had learned to dance again.
Rob Marshall: The Man Who Revived the Musical
A Professor’s Son in Pittsburgh
Robert Doyle Marshall Jr. was born on October 17, 1960, in Madison, Wisconsin.
His father, Robert Sr., was then a doctoral student at the state university there.
His mother, Anne, was a teacher, and the house ran on books and lessons.
In 1964 the family moved east when his father joined the University of Pittsburgh.
The elder Marshall became a professor of English there, and eventually a dean.
Anne later worked in education too, with the city’s schools and the university.
Stories, language and teaching were the family’s daily bread.
His younger sister Kathleen grew up to become a choreographer and director herself.
So the boy who would revive the movie musical learned rhythm at home first.
Pittsburgh, steel-grey and theatrical, became the hometown he still claims.
The professor’s son was headed for the stage, by way of the classroom.
Carnegie Mellon and the Civic Light Opera
He attended the Falk School, the university’s own laboratory school for children.
He graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1978, already aimed at theatre.
Carnegie Mellon University, across town, ran one of America’s great drama conservatories.
Marshall enrolled there and graduated with his fine arts degree in 1982.
Between terms he performed with the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera.
Summer stock taught him the professional’s arithmetic of eight shows a week.
He learned how a number is built, breath by breath, count by count.
New York was the obvious next address for a dancer with his training.
Broadway, however, had its own curriculum waiting for him.
The Injury That Changed the Choreography
Through the 1980s he danced in Broadway ensembles, gifted and replaceable.
He toured, he understudied, and he studied every director who stood before him.
The turning point arrived inside the long-running phenomenon called Cats.
A herniated disc ended his performing career while he was still a young man.
For many dancers, that diagnosis is the end of the whole story.
Marshall treated it as a doorway, moving behind the table to choreography.
The man who could no longer jump began teaching others how to fly.
It remains the quiet hinge on which his entire career swings.
The movie musical’s revival began, improbably, with a dancer’s bad back.
Broadway’s Busiest Pair of Feet
The 1990s made him one of Broadway’s busiest makers of movement.
He came aboard Kiss of the Spider Woman and helped shape its dances.
He staged the numbers for revivals of She Loves Me and Damn Yankees.
Julie Andrews headlined Victor/Victoria, and Marshall’s dances carried its stage machinery.
The nominations began arriving, five of them across the decade’s work.
Directors like Hal Prince trusted him with entire evenings of movement.
He also learned the politics of the rehearsal room, where steps meet egos.
Each show sharpened the same gift, storytelling told through bodies in motion.
Broadway insiders began using a particular word about him: director.
The work itself had started directing him toward the chair.
Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club
In 1998 he joined Sam Mendes on a radical new staging of Cabaret.
The production began in London and moved to Broadway as the era’s defining revival.
Marshall co-directed and choreographed, stripping the show to its decadent bones.
The Kit Kat Club numbers played as entertainment and warning at once.
Alan Cumming’s Emcee slinked through Marshall’s choreography like smoke through a keyhole.
The revival ran for years and collected Tony Awards, including best revival.
Marshall took home nominations for both his direction and his choreography.
Television executives watching that production saw a man ready for cameras.
Within a year, television came calling with a beloved orphan in tow.
The stage had given him everything except a screen test.
Annie Opens the Screen Door
The Wonderful World of Disney wanted a new Annie for television in 1999.
Marshall directed and choreographed the film as if it were a Broadway opening.
Victor Garber, Kathy Bates and a young Alicia Morton led his company.
Audra McDonald and Kristin Chenoweth sang in support, an embarrassment of riches.
The broadcast drew enormous audiences and reviews that used the word definitive.
Marshall won the Emmy Award for his choreography on the production.
He was also nominated for the Emmy for his direction of it.
More importantly, the film played like a calling card pressed into Hollywood’s hand.
It proved a stage choreographer could think in cuts, lenses and close-ups.
Miramax was among the studios that noticed, which is how the meeting happened.
A First Feature, a Guild Award
Chicago was his first feature film, an assignment most studios give to veterans.
He approached it as a choreographer who had quietly mastered camera grammar.
Every number was rehearsed like Broadway, then shot with a music video’s precision.
He shot his dancers whole, letting audiences see the steps land in full.
The Directors Guild of America named him its outstanding director of the year.
The Academy nominated him for best director alongside Polanski and Scorsese.
He was forty-two years old and suddenly the industry’s favorite argument.
The argument was simple, that musicals needed directors who spoke dance fluently.
The verdict echoed Fosse, whose own film had waited decades for company.
One film in, Marshall had already changed what studios believed possible.
Geishas, Pirates and Crown Jewels
Success made him the town’s designated adapter of difficult, beloved properties.
Memoirs of a Geisha followed in 2005, a bestseller turned into sumptuous pageant.
It won three Academy Awards for its photography, costumes and art direction.
Nine arrived in 2009, an all-star musical that divided audiences and critics.
Its stumbles were reported like news, which itself marked the genre’s return.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides took him to sea in 2011.
The pirate film became the biggest commercial success of his career.
Through it all, producers kept handing him the crown jewels of other eras.
He had become the custodian studios trusted with their heirlooms.
Woods, Poppins and One Little Mermaid
Into the Woods brought Stephen Sondheim’s fairy tales to Disney in 2014.
The film charmed audiences and earned Meryl Streep another Oscar nomination.
Mary Poppins Returns followed in 2018, a sequel nobody envied him for attempting.
Emily Blunt stepped into Julie Andrews’s silhouette, and the film was warmly received.
It returned Marshall to the world of the classic family musical.
The Little Mermaid swam into cinemas in 2023, with Halle Bailey as Ariel.
That production reunited him with the studio system at its most monumental.
Each project asked the same question Chicago had answered in 2002.
How do you honor a classic without embalming it for a museum?
His answer never changed, which was to stage it alive.
The Next Act
In 2024, fate handed him the most poetic assignment of his career.
TriStar asked him to direct a new film of the musical Guys and Dolls.
It was the very project he had been offered, and declined, in 2003.
This time he said yes, taking over from Bill Condon, his Chicago screenwriter.
He is co-writing the screenplay with John DeLuca, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra.
Production listings through 2026 have followed the film through its making.
At sixty-six, the professor’s son from Pittsburgh remains Hollywood’s musical custodian.
The dancer who lost his stage to an injury found a larger one.
He never left the theatre; he enlarged it.
Go back, finally, to that envelope in the Kodak Theatre in March 2003.
The war had darkened the week, and the room was quieter than usual.
A producer who had waited twenty-eight years heard his life’s work named.
A choreographer who had never made a movie became an Oscar-night answer.
Somewhere in the audience sat the ghosts of vaudeville, unbothered and grinning.
The genre they buried had simply changed its clothes and its century.
It is still out there tonight, in a revival house, a stream, a school auditorium.
The music simply refused to die.