Here’s a postscript to last month’s review of Chicago—or anyway something that’s been bothering me. In Bob Fosse’s justice-as-vaudeville, everyone’s a sleazy, chiselin’ lowlife: Roxie, the merry murderess; Velma, her cellmate; Billy Flynn, their shameless attorney; the prison matron … The one exception, the only nice guy in sight, is Roxie’s innocent dupe of a husband, Amos —or, as Flynn absentmindedly keeps calling him, “Andy.” Amos has only one song, a pastiche of Bert Williams’s “Nobody” called “Mister Cellophane”:

… ’cos you can look right through me
Walk right by me
And never know I’m there.

At the end, when Amos asks for his exit music, the conductor doesn’t hear, and so he trudges off unaccompanied. The whatsisname who played Amos in the original production ...

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