Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we dive into a new title: the reissue of the play Chicago: With the Chicago Tribune Articles That Inspired It, by Maurine Watkins, edited by Thomas H. Pauly.
In 1924, the murder trials of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner shocked the world, providing the real-life inspiration for Maurine Watkins’s unforgettable characters, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. Now, a century later, this reissue of Watkins’s play offers a fresh look at the origins of the story that has since become a household name.
From the silent film Chicago produced by Cecil B. DeMille in 1927 to the 1942 film Roxie Hart starring Ginger Rogers and the Broadway sensation created by Bob Fosse, Fred Ebb, and John Kander, this play has continuously evolved. It even inspired the 2002 Oscar-winning film Chicago starring Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere. But until recently, as editor Thomas H. Pauly writes in the book’s introduction, the real-life roots of the story were obscured.
While researching for a book on crime-as-entertainment during the 1920s, Pauly came across Maurine Watkins’s play, which was then out of print. After noticing similarities between the play and a series of articles Watkins penned for the Chicago Tribune prior to the creation of her play, Pauly knew he had stumbled upon a revelation: Watkins’s play was based on real people.
This week on Inside The Blanker Fort from SIU Press.
