‘Chicago’ has Roxie and moxie

“Chicago”

(Epic/Sony Music Soundtrax)

***

The visual razzle-dazzle and structural fluidity of the new movie “Chicago” are surprising, because the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical had previously seemed a very proscenium-centric show, especially in its popular 1996 incarnation. Nor were there many indications in Rob Marshall’s 1992 staging of the show for Long Beach Civic Light Opera that, a decade later, he would direct a glitteringly re-imagined film version.

When assessing the new “Chicago” soundtrack album, however, you try to forget the visual display. The recording has a lot going for it, especially the vocal timbre of Renee Zellweger’s Roxie -- a fetching combination of hard edges and soft centers that’s much easier on the ears than Ann Reinking’s froggy sound on the 1997 Broadway cast album.

Catherine Zeta-Jones snarls magnificently as Velma, but her performance doesn’t sound especially different from those of previous Velmas. Richard Gere’s Billy Flynn has a breezy, crooning style, heading in the direction of Rudy Vallee instead of James Naughton’s darker tones on the 1997 album. Doug Besterman’s orchestrations are appropriately raucous.

Still, the 1997 recording is ultimately more satisfying, because it’s the most complete rendition of the score. Perhaps in an effort to keep the movie lean and mean, five of the original show’s numbers are missing from the movie and the soundtrack. In order of importance, beginning with the most important, they are “My Own Best Friend,” “Me and My Baby,” “I Know a Girl,” “When Velma Takes the Stand” and “A Little Bit of Good.”

The movie album provides some original numbers of its own. Two instrumentals by Danny Elfman -- “After Midnight” and “Roxie’s Suite” -- and “I Move On,” a Kander & Ebb song that wasn’t in the theatrical versions (performed by Zellweger and Zeta-Jones over the closing credits of the movie), remain consistent with the general style of the original score.

The album also restores “Class,” an irreverent duet from the original, sung here by Zeta-Jones’ Velma and Queen Latifah’s Mama, even though it didn’t make the movie’s final cut.

Tacked on to the end of the album are two tracks “inspired by the motion picture.” In this context, both of them are too jarringly contemporary to qualify as “inspired.” Latifah, Lil’ Kim and Macy Gray do a hip-hop interpretation of the show’s “Cell Block Tango,” and the dance music diva Anastacia performs a piece of pap that’s not even from the show, “Love Is a Crime,” in which the only connection to “Chicago” appears to be occasional interjections of the word “Chicago.”

Don Shirley

*

An all-star lovefest for Jerry Herman

“Tap Your Troubles Away: The Words and Music of

Jerry Herman”

(LML Music)

***

There’s an inevitability to Jerry Herman’s music that makes it immediately accessible and instantly timeless. This quality is much on display in the two-disc live recording of a Nov. 10, 2001, concert in Los Angeles that featured Herman’s most famous leading ladies: Carol Channing (“Hello, Dolly!”), Angela Lansbury (“Mame”) and Bernadette Peters (“Mack & Mabel”).

The recording preserves the concert’s electricity but is still better at capturing the nuances that got lost in the excitement that night. So the CD listener is better able to appreciate the hushed wonder in Hugh Panaro’s rendition of “It Only Takes a Moment,” or get wrapped up in the witty wordplay delivered by Jo Anne Worley in “Just Leave Everything to Me.” The CD also affords closer study of Ron Abel’s sleek, sly (but synthesizer-heavy) arrangements.

Then and now, the most transcendent numbers are Leslie Uggams’ bluesy “If He Walked Into My Life,” Rita Moreno’s quietly introspective “I Won’t Send Roses,” Tyne Daly’s golden “Tomorrow Morning”/”And I Was Beautiful” and Peters’ aching “Time Heals Everything.” The high point: Lansbury and Channing playfully swapping their theme songs from “Mame” and “Hello, Dolly!”

-- Daryl H. Miller

*

There’s no disco like Merman disco

“The Ethel Merman

Disco Album”

(Fynsworth Alley)

**

The skeleton is out of the closet, dancing to a disco beat.

Hidden in the darkness for years, it had receded into a sort of urban legend: In 1979, Merman rerecorded some of her greatest hits for a disco album that quickly went out of print. Now reissued, it is everything you’d expect, yet stranger than anything you could have dreamed up.

The disco hallmarks are all there: the relentless pulse, the long rhythmic passages between verses, the chirping backup singers. But Merman conceded little to the style. She sang songs such as “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” much as she always had, with Peter Matz’s thumping arrangements fitted incongruously around them.

It’s fun to imagine reactions to the album in ’79. Did revelers at Studio 54 get a chuckle out of the “Some get a kick from cocaine” lyric from “I Get a Kick Out of You”? Did the dance floors at gay bars erupt in whoops for the “Something for the Boys” declaration “I’m always doing something for the boys, and they’re doing something for me”?

As for today, well, you’ll be swell, you’ll be great if you play it at your next dance party.

-- D.H.M.

*

Fewer miracles in Broadway version

“Flower Drum Song”

(DRG)

** 1/2

L.A. loved the renovated “Flower Drum Song” at the Mark Taper Forum in late 2001; Broadway’s reaction last year was more muted. Yet it’s the Broadway version that has been released on CD.

The most striking difference between the two, as far as CD listeners are concerned, is the first-act finale. At the Taper, “The Next Time It Happens” -- a song from a more obscure Rodgers & Hammerstein show “Pipe Dream” -- was interpolated into the same team’s original “Flower Drum” score and served as a defiant sadder-but-wiser number for the Chinese immigrant Mei-Li after she feels rejected by the handsome Ta.

Opinions were mixed about how the song worked in the theater, and it was cut from the Broadway version. But there is no question that “The Next Time It Happens” would have worked better on the recording than its New York replacement number -- yet another refrain of “A Hundred Million Miracles,” which also begins and ends the show.

Two sentences of “The Next Time It Happens” have in fact been salvaged at the beginning of the first-act finale: “What a foolish thing to say/Who expects a miracle to happen every day?” -- and the use of miracle imagery in both songs shows why “The Next Time” was used in the first place. Still, for variety’s sake, a recording of the L.A. version would have been more interesting.

This recording adds one song that was missing from the L.A. production: the pleasant but inconsequential “Sunday.” The rest of the score has definite high points (“Love, Look Away”) and low (“Gliding Through My Memoree”).

The cast remains largely the same as in L.A., with Lea Salonga and Jose Llana as the lovers and Sandra Allen and Jodi Long in brassy-woman roles, but Randall Duk Kim replaced Tzi Ma as nightclub operator Wang.

-- D.S.

*

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are released unless otherwise noted.