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 back in the Seventies did his job so well that, in the last ten minutes, I’ve gone over to the bookcase four times to look his name up and each time I’ve forgotten it by the time I’ve got back to my desk. To give the man his due, it was Barney Martin, a wonderfully woeful, shambling hulk of an actor. But my point is this: in the new production, his place has been taken by Joel Grey, about a twentieth of the size but a much bigger name on the marquee, and, even though he still only has a couple of tiny scenes in Act One and his plaintive solo in Act Two, it’s clear that the audience adores him