Lawson Taitte

With every year that passes, Chicago rises higher in the list of great American musicals.

A tepid success when it first appeared in 1975, Kander and Ebb's cynical masterpiece about the American system of justice as a branch of show business only came into its own with the 1996 Broadway revival. That production still runs on Broadway and tours worldwide. This week and next, it's back at Fair Park Music Hall thanks to the Dallas Summer Musicals.

Although the Oscar-winning movie version has its charms, Chicago is best relished on a real live stage. The dancing is always a thrill, thanks to Ann Reinking's choreographic homage to co-writer and original director Bob Fosse. The bare-bones staging and the costumes of black lingerie razzle-dazzle in Ken Billington's circus-and-film-noir lighting plot.

Milton Hinnant / DMN

Lisa Rinna does some impressive hoofing in Chicago.

Director Walter Bobbie also manages to keep the glamour polished after, by now, hundreds of cast members have cycled through the various versions. The current tour, reviewed Wednesday, stars TV celebrity Lisa Rinna as Roxie. As fans of Dancing With the Stars know, Ms. Rinna can certainly shake a leg. She's the sexiest of Roxies as well, projecting an aura of dumb but knowing self-preservation and then ambition, pursing and pouting and smiling wolfishly with those puffed-up lips.

Roxie, you'll recall, murders her lover during the opening number and almost persuades her nebbish of a husband, Amos (Eric Leviton), to take the rap. She gets the city's most polished and unscrupulous lawyer, Billy Flynn (Tom Wopat), to take her case. The press conference he arranges moves the previous celebrity killer, Velma (Terra C. MacLeod), off the front pages – and the exuberant Roxie basks in the fantasy of at last fulfilling her dreams of becoming a vaudeville star, once she is acquitted, because of her newfound notoriety.

The present tour is a long way from the best sung we've heard in these parts. Ms. Rinna (like many a dance star before her) slides and croons and blasts her way through the tunes – but she does make every word and every thought count. Mr. Wopat, a charismatic Billy Flynn on an earlier tour visit, now emphasizes the character's seediness and sounds worn.

Ms. MacLeod starts out over-emphatically but does some real singing before the evening is over. She dances all-out from start to finish. Mr. Leviton and Carol Woods as the world-weary jailer, Mama Morton, provide us the most complete renditions of their great numbers – Mr. Leviton by way of sad-sack charm and Ms. Morton through sheer vocal power, sly finesse and mastery of the stage.

Chicago gives us the boiled-down essence of musical theater. Mr. Kander's score – a perfect distillation of jazzy 1920s style, filtered through memories of Kurt Weill – is a whole tray of bone-dry martinis, skip the vermouth. Words and music offer a profoundly political look at America, the land of the headline and the home of the old song and dance.