Alive and kickin'

At 35, Chicago the musical is like a woman in her sexual prime: knowing, mature and smokin' hot. Since its Broadway debut, the show has been seen by about 18 million people in 17,000 performances worldwide - it premiered in Hong Kong a decade ago - but its style and relevance remain undiminished. Set in Prohibition-era Chicago, it combines vaudeville song-and-dance with the scandalous tale of two murderesses vying for supremacy in the cell block and the media.

Next Thursday, the show returns to the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, with the women in the 23-member, mainly Australian, cast showing how All That Jazz is done in slinky leotards and lacy negligees.

Decades on, the allure of its bad-girl protagonists has been replicated in the public's prurient curiosity about the mistresses of celebrities such as golfer Tiger Woods and Jesse James, the husband of Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock.

The production's associate director, Nigel West, is keen to talk about celebrity culture and its impact on the musical's reception. 'We all love celebrity. We buy magazines to look at photos of famous people. It only heightens what we see on stage,' says the 50-year-old Briton.

But during the musical's initial 1975 to 1977 run, long before the internet gave rise to the cult of celebrity as we know it today, it languished behind A Chorus Line, which opened in the same year, at the box office and at awards ceremonies. West says it might have been too close to home for US audiences then.

'It came out right at the time of Nixon and Watergate, and all that corruption of that time. People didn't want to go to the theatre and be reminded of it. Nowadays, people have moved on and see the show for what it is.'