Chicago (play)

Watkins wrote the script (originally titled Brave Little Woman) as a class assignment while attending the Yale Drama School.

[1] Produced by Sam H. Harris, the play debuted on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on December 30, 1926, directed by George Abbott, where it ran for 172 performances.

The Tribune reported that Annan had played the foxtrot record "Hula Lou" over and over for two hours before calling her husband to say she killed a man who "tried to make love to her".

Annan's husband Albert, a car mechanic who emptied his bank accounts to pay for her defense only to be publicly dumped the day after the trial, served as the basis for Amos Hart.

She is booked into the Cook County Jail for holding; terrified of her potential fate, Jake, a crime reporter for The Morning Gazette newspaper, reminds her that the Chicago justice system is relatively easy on women and that she faces minimal risk of the death penalty and substantial opportunity for brief fame, intriguing Roxie.

She convinces Amos to cover the expenses, but he lacks the funds, prompting Billy to threaten to delay Roxie's trial, and thus keep her held in jail, until he gets his fee.

When another new inmate, Kitty, takes the spotlight away for the time being, Roxie comes up with a new idea: she takes a baby's outfit that Maggie, a Hungarian woman who apparently was framed for selling poison moonshine but was jailed because her attorney would not put up a proper defense, had knitted in hopes of reunion with her child, and Roxie begins feigning illness and weakness—stating that she is now pregnant and risks having the baby in jail, creating a new sensational story.

Cecil B. DeMille produced a silent film version, Chicago (1927), starring former Mack Sennett bathing beauty Phyllis Haver as Roxie Hart.

In the 1960s, Gwen Verdon read the play and asked her husband, Bob Fosse, about the possibility of creating a musical adaptation.