Leechburg High School cast excited to stage 'Chicago'

Members of Leechburg’s drama club are getting all jazzed up for this year’s spring musical.

The club will stage performances of the teen edition of “Chicago,” the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, the weekend of March 31.

“When I heard what our options were, I got so excited for ‘Chicago,’ ” said Bailey Spiering, 17, a senior from Gilpin who will portray Roxie Hart, one of the two murderesses at the center of the story based on true events in the 1920s. “I always loved the music in the show.”

Katie Monroe, 16, a sophomore from West Leechburg, will be Velma Kelly, Hart’s rival.

“There’s something for everybody, whether you’re somebody that loves the singing or the dancing,” she said. “There’s some funny moments in the show. All together, it’s just a beautiful, iconic show that everyone should see at least once.”

Tickets for the performances March 31 and April 1 and 2 will be available at the door and on the drama club’s website at leechburgdramaclub.com.

The 1975 musical is based on a play by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who covered the 1924 trials of accused murderers Beulah Annan, the basis for Hart, and Belva Gaertner, the basis for Kelly. The musical became a 2002 movie featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones as Kelly and Renée Zellweger as Hart.

“In all of the shows that I’ve done, anytime anything can be learned about the history of events or how things were done, we always take the time to talk about that,” said director Alyssa Bruno Walls of Vandergrift, who advises the drama club. “The kids have had a really eye-opening time understanding they are playing real people.”

The teen edition of “Chicago” has been edited to be appropriate for younger audiences, Walls said.

“The integrity of the story still stands with the edited version,” she said. “I think that ‘Chicago,’ in and of itself, is misrepresented. It’s meant to be portrayed as satire. That is missed on a lot of audiences.”

“Chicago” was chosen, in part, out of necessity.

“At the start of the school year, we didn’t have as much participation as we thought with the club. We thought there’s no way we can produce a larger show, so we need to go with a show we knew we had the cast for,” she said. “We have a ton of talent, especially female talent, this year. We wanted to pick a show that had a lot of female features and female leads.”

Of the 28-member cast, 21 are girls.

Rehearsals started in January on “Chicago,” which Walls said is a short show, about 90 minutes.

“That gives us more time to perfect what we’ve learned instead of spending time in learning all of the material,” she said. “We’ve learned the material. Now we can spend more time exploring it and perfecting it.”

As they prepare for their own performances, Spiering and Monroe were among members of Leechburg’s cast who saw the teen edition of “Chicago” performed at Shady Side Academy in February.

“I thought it was really cool seeing our musical versus theirs and how it differs,” Spiering said.

Monroe said they saw some things they liked and things they didn’t in Shady Side’s production.

“It was so cool seeing the stuff we have been working on all put together,” she said.

Spiering said she personally loves the movie, while Monroe said Zeta-Jones has been a great inspiration to her.

“She learned how to sing and perform for the movie. She was not previously a singer,” she said. “That’s really helped me work along. I’ve only been doing this for how long compared to some of these people. Knowing she was able to pull off something so beautiful and iconic just really inspires me.”

Senior Tyler Foley, 18, of Leechburg will play lawyer Billy Flynn. While he didn’t see the Shady Side Academy performance, he has seen the movie, where his role was played by Richard Gere.

Foley knows he has some high standards to meet.

“I’m playing a man that really doesn’t care about anything except money. I like to chase after the money, too. It’s going to be a fun, good role to play,” he said. “It’s going to be a very fun, energetic musical.”

The movie is what a lot of people have in mind when they think of “Chicago,” said Walls, who has performed in the full-version of “Chicago” three times herself, each time portraying a Hungarian woman, Hunyak, whose only words in English are, “Not guilty.”

“The movie is a whole of spectacle. It’s different when you see it on stage,” she said. “You see more of the humanity of everything.”