The Exonerated and Chicago

After our discussion of The Exonerated on Thursday, I was reminded of a performance that shares some intriguing similarities and differences with that play—the musical Chicago. The tone of these two pieces is clearly very different, and as an audience we react to them in very different ways. Chicago is entertainment rather than activism, but they both point out some of the flaws in the judicial system and the way some people can work it to their advantage and others cannot. They both have an implied opposition to the death penalty, although in the musical it is perhaps a bit less intentional than in the play. Regardless of their significant differences in tone, genre, and theme, I walked away from both of them with increased skepticism about the courts and an increased sympathy for those who are imprisoned for serious crimes.

In some ways, Chicago is more successful than The Exonerated at drawing attention to the problems of the judicial system and the death penalty because it removes the melodramatic lines of good and evil. In the play, we know that the characters are innocent, and we pity them because of the injustice of what they suffered. But in the musical, almost all the characters are guilty, and we empathize with them anyway. One particular musical number stands out to me for its clear contrast with the play. In “Cell Block Tango,” each of the six women accused of murder step forward and tell why they killed the men in their lives, and why they were justified in doing so. The chorus is a direct invitation for the audience to take their side: “If you’d have been there, if you’d have seen it, I betcha you would’ve done the same.”

The staging and effects of the musical draw attention to the theatricality of the court, and the women who go free are the ones who know how to perform for the public to create sympathy and interest. Interestingly, the only woman who is executed in the musical is also the only one who was innocent, and that scene gives the rest of the musical a greater seriousness. The women on trial may be playing up their roles with song and dance, but they are facing a real threat, and the audience feels that with them.

It’s hard to say which one of these performances is more successful at drawing negative attention to the judicial system, and the death penalty in particular. In “Uses of Empathy,” Blank and Jensen recalled hearing an inmate speak and thinking that they were the wrong audience for that speech, and so they wrote a play. In class we touched on the qualities of the typical play-going audience and wondered if that was still the wrong audience in some ways. Chicago reaches an audience of a different kind, especially the film version, which is available for mass-consumption by a broader group of people. Similarly, its message is more diluted that that of The Exonerated. However, it might provide a better reason to fight the death penalty by pointing out the flaws in the system without resorting to clear labels of innocent and guilty.