Co-Op Brings Chicago To New Haven

Lucy Gellman Photos.

On the stage at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, all ears were on trumpeter Maya Martinez. A near-total darkness engulfed musicians, the air thick, quiet but electric where an orchestra sprawled across the stage. In the wings, dozens of feet got ready to fly across the floorboards all at once. Beneath a cropped blonde wig, Payton Goodwin listened for her cue.

Then a full, growling and brassy stream of notes made its way out toward the audience, broad-shouldered and swaggering by the time it got to the first rows. Dressed in black to the nines, Fallon Williams slipped onto the scene like she owned the place. Chicago had arrived in New Haven.

Goodwin, Williams and Martinez, all seniors at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, are just three of the 67 students in cast, crew, pit orchestra, and dance ensemble soaking in a production of Chicago that has lifted the school clear out of the wintry doldrums, and given the long-awaited spring musical of its dreams.

As the pit takes over a third of the stage, the musical becomes many things: a cautionary tale about romance, stardom and the fourth estate, a saucy retelling of the jazz age in a city overwhelmed by scandal, and a chance to showcase the school’s young artists one last time before many of them graduate.

Mostly, though, it’s another way that students at the arts magnet, too often siloed by discipline, are learning to listen to each other, one note, step, and breath at a time. In total, Co-Op offers seven disciplines: band, strings, dance, drama, visual arts, choir and creative writing.

Payton Goodwin as Roxie Hart and Fallon Williams as Velma Kelley. 

“A lot of it is eye contact,” said Martinez, a senior in the band who plans to attend Western Connecticut State University for music education in the fall. In the musical, she plays the first and last notes, meaning that Chicago doesn’t happen without her, at least not in the same way. “There’s always a moment where I have to double Payton … I have to breathe when she breathes. I know when we get that first breath together, we’re good.”

Based on the 1926 play by Maurine Dallas Watkins, a journalist-turned-playwright who wrote with sharp, dark humor about the city she once covered, the musical Chicago tells the story of aspiring stars Roxie Hart (Goodwin) and Velma Kelley (Fallon Williams), who both end up in the Cook County Jail after killing their intimate partners. Kelley, who has fashioned herself into a darling of the press, has murdered both her husband and sister, after finding the two cheating on her.

Hart, who is initially clueless on these matters, has shot Fred Casley (Sam Franco), with whom she was cheating on her husband Amos (Max Alexander). As she awaits her trial, she learns how to game the system, from the prison matron (Kayla Quintanilla) to lawyer Billy Flynn (Max Hoffman, who brings big Jerry Orbach and Jane Krakowski energy with him), who can guarantee both coverage and innocence for a high enough price. Around them, an ensemble keeps it moving, with high-kicks, jazz hands, back bends and a lot of scatting while in motion.

It is fast paced, tightly choreographed and dripping with drama and intrigue in a way that has Bob Fosse written all over it, which is not surprising since he worked on the musical with John Kander and Fred Ebb. At Co-Op, where it is directed by theater teacher Robert “Espo” Esposito, it’s also very much a labor of love, with a total of 10 staff members from across the arts and humanities who have come together to choreograph, run the pit, coach vocalists and keep the show on track.

Top: Alyah Rodriguez. Bottom: Goodwin as Roxie Hart, surrounded by ensemble members turned reporters. 

In a tech rehearsal Friday night, that unfolded right from the top of the run, as choir director Jaminda Blackmon ran warmups from the stage, and actors shook out their jitters, glittering in flapper dresses, garters, slinky nightgowns and all manner of sequinned fringe. Behind her, band teacher Matt Chasen checked in with students in the pit orchestra, making sure everyone had what they needed before the play began.

Blackmon, who transferred into Co-Op from Wexler Grant Community School at the beginning of this academic year, raised her hands just a little, as though she were about to conduct. Already, dance instructor Christine Kershaw-Hobson had run through choreography from the top of the show, students raising their arms, palms outstretched, as the word “Chi-c-aaaa-go” became breathy and long.

“Ok, breathe in!” Blackmon commanded, and around her, a sharp, layered inhale of breath filled the room. “You’re gonna let it out in a lip trill.”

A high, bird-like sound built from where actors stood, and it took a moment to realize all of them had started trilling, and were waiting for Blackmon’s next direction. She lifted her hands toward the ceiling, and the trills traveled upwards, some students close to humming. She lowered them, and the trilling dipped down and became quieter. Someone let out what sounded like a grunt, and the cast paid it no mind.

“Beautiful! Great job, great job, great job,” she said. “Okay, we’re gonna go into ‘Me and My Baby.’ Before we do, who are my hot-cha, whoo-pee, those friends? Who are you?” A few students raised their hands. “Okay, can you say those lines for me really quickly?” Within seconds, the auditorium was a jazz club.

Stage manager Arianna Ellison took off her headset, poked her head out from her lamp-lit table in the center of the auditorium, and walked toward the sound, stepping down as the rows dipped toward the stage. Only after the run would she let herself feel the totality of the moment—the penultimate tech rehearsal of her last high school show—and sit with those bittersweet feelings.

But as she spoke, she was all business.

“One of my light cues is on ‘Skidoo!’, so you need to be a little louder,” she said with a completely straight face, raising her voice just enough for the actors to hear it. During her time at the school, and thanks largely to teacher Janie “Ms. A” Alexander, Ellison has been able to shadow professional stage managers during touring productions that come through the Shubert Theatre. It has confirmed that she wants to do tech theater for the foreseeable future.

“I’m gonna miss this,” she said later in the evening, stepping out into the hallway outside to gather her thoughts.

Back in the pit, which was really not a pit at all, Christine Dominguez took stock of the students around her, and her eyes sparkled. Before arriving at Co-Op in August—Dominguez took over after Pat Smith retired last year, just as Blackmon has taken the pedagogical mantle from Harriett Alfred—she served as the choral director for the Westport Public Schools, and before that for Notre Dame High School.

Some of the students behind the scenes include Arianna Ellison, who goes by Ari, and Keyla Gordillo. 

When she started talking to Esposito about the show, she proposed an orchestra with a sort of speakeasy vibe. The idea stuck: actors now interact with the musicians, many of whom are also in period costume, during the show. Esposito said it’s the most polished student pit he’s worked with in years, in part because they’ve been rehearsing with actors for months, instead of coming in a week or two beforehand to learn the music and the timing.

Many of the students have also worked together for years: Goodwin and Martinez, for instance, know each other best on the school’s stage, where the two started out together in Hairspray, and then mastered the music for The Wiz, Into The Woods, and now Chicago. In four years, both of them have risen to the top of their respective fields—which in the school, rarely mix outside of activities like the musical. (“That’s why it’s the all school musical,” Esposito said with a little smile, adding that students have begged him to do the work for years.)

When the curtains parted minutes later, a person could see and hear that excitement building in real time. Martinez’ trumpet growled and wailed its hello, and the stage came to life, students pretzelling themselves into glitter-clad, jazz-handed formations as Goodwin and Williams stepped out from the curtain, and scurried against a sleek, projected backdrop of the Windy City. Brass and woodwinds chased circles around each other until it was nearly impossible not to get up and dance. Williams sauntered upstage for “All That Jazz,” and the play surged forward.

For the next hour, students turned back the clock almost exactly a century, channeling both the craft, climax and razzle-dazzle of the 1920s (think mob bosses, but make it cute) and the way the show is still timely. Chicago may be set in the 1920s, but it’s a story of media manipulation, disinformation and the precipitous and fiery spread of fake news that seems incredibly prescient, especially as TikTok and ChatGPT vie for students’ attention. People like real-life, glam murderers Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner were just among the original influencers.

As she stepped out onto the stage as Velma Kelley, Williams let herself become the character completely, shedding her quieter, buttoned-up high school violinist self for a version of the femme fatale that owned every inch of the stage. By the time she announced, crisply, that “It wasn't until later, when I was washing the blood off my hands, I even knew they were dead!” during a heart-pounding “Cell Block Tango,” she looked out into the audience with gleaming eyes and long, pointed fingers, as if she were truly capable of murder.

“I would not be able to do what I just did as a freshman,” Williams said later in the evening, during a pause in rehearsal. Outside of the show, she’s not part of the school’s theater program: she’s a string student, who plays the violin and dances at Tia Russell Arts Center on the side. “These ladies are out here offing their husbands because they want to be the star. It’s definitely in tune with how people can be in this world.”

“Velma Kelley stood out to me because she’s confident, she’s bold, and she does it without anybody’s opinion,” she added a beat later. “I love the confidence that radiates off her.”

She passes it on to her castmates, too. As Flynn, Hoffman is witty and sharp, leaning into the panache and parody of the role with an ability to make fun of the character, and also totally turn him into something more than just a caricature of himself. Just as Flynn is written to channel several over-the-top Chicago lawyers of his day, Hoffman taps into figures across recent pop culture history—Tim Curry, Nathan Lane, Dominique Jackson, and Tom Kenney, but also Judge Judy, Rudy Giuliani, and the sweetest smidge of Bill Nye the Science Guy.

In the process, he makes it clear how much of a farce the courtroom can (and often has) become, an approach that the cast nails with glowing red lights, circus hoops and a gold-wrapped, moving chaise during the cross-examination scenes. At times, it makes a person think not of the ostensible miscarriages of justice playing out 100 years ago, but of those today, in which everything from probate to immigration court has become increasingly surreal.

Alongside him—and often on her own, too—Goodwin owns the role, making the most of Hart’s mischievous and conniving tendencies. She is, blessedly, never hysterical, going for something more diabolical and sticking the landing every time (she’s a dance student, so maybe that was in the cards). Onstage, she and Hoffman, as well as she and Williams, have particularly good chemistry, playing up their role as high-stakes frenemies who ultimately all need something from the other.

It’s most satisfying in songs like “We Both Reached for the Gun,” in which she plays a floppy marionette, and Hoffman the ventriloquist. Surrounded by members of the ensemble who have transformed into reporters—who can also dance in period dress, because this is Fosse after all—the two are immensely fun to watch, with a kind of dynamic that speaks to the trust they have built with each other during the show.

By intermission, even the tech theater kids seemed as though they were on the edges of their seats, already thinking through the light cues and stage directions for the second act. In the orchestra, senior Keyla Gordillo chatted with freshman Scarlett Ardon, who she refers to as her musical daughter. At her feet, an alto and soprano sax sat side-by-side, as if they were waiting to see which she would pick up first. A flute rested casually in her lap.

In Chicago, she said, she’s most excited for the way the orchestra is woven into the show. It feels completely unique to any of the musicals she’s been a part of over the past four years.

“I like being able to have that dynamic with actors,” she said. She added that the costume helps her get into character: she still gets nervous before the curtain opens on every performance.

If the show belongs to its seniors, who are spread joyfully across cast, crew and pit, it’s also a musical that has given underclassmen a moment to shine. In his breakout role, freshman Max Alexander makes Amos completely his own, dryly funny with a sense of timing that is so crisp a person can feel it from the audience. In many productions, including a glitzy film adaptation in 2002, Amos is dopey, the last person in the room to figure something out. Here, he’s more emotionally exhausted with the weight of the world, with a tendency to trust people that is ultimately his undoing.

Max Hoffman as Billy Flynn and Max Alexander as Amos. 

Sophomore Alyah Rodriguez nails the character Hunyak, who has to speak in Hungarian while also dancing around the man she ostensibly didn’t kill. Jael Phillips, a sophomore who is studying creative writing at the school, has such fun with the sob story-prone, suggestible journalist Mary Sunshine that she becomes a reminder to invest in and consume the news, and also to have a healthy distrust of it. Ardon, a freshman who started playing the saxophone in middle school, learned the baritone sax specifically for the role.

“I love it,” Ardon said, as she went to fit dinner in before two more hours of tech rehearsal. “It’s a wonderful opportunity … I just feel like I can be myself up here.”

As actors broke for dinner around her—penne alla vodka, courtesy of Goodwin’s mom—that sense of mentorship was palpable. As a future music educator who got her start at Co-Op and the Shubert Theatre, Martinez worked to introduce Ardon to fellow musicians in the orchestra, noting how much they would learn from each other. Her approach, she said, is inspired by teachers like Smith, Chasen, and now Dominguez.

“I want to be for future musicians what they [teachers] are for me,” Martinez said after a full run, adding that she thinks of Chasen as a kind of father figure. While she’s ready to head to WestConn, knowing it’s the last musical of high school.

Goodwin came down from the stage, quieter than she’d been just minutes before. Before heading to the cafeteria, she said that Chicago has been a dream come true for her since she first stepped onto a stage several years ago, in All Shook Up at the New Haven Academy of Performing Arts. Now, she gets to make her mark before graduating.

“I’ve always wanted to play Roxie,” she said. Normally, Goodwin doesn’t play the villain, although her freshman performance of Amber Von Tussle makes this feel “full circle,” she said.

“Mmm,” Williams chimed in from behind her, adding that as a musician, she loves the jazz history plastered all over the show. “I just have fun messing around with the pit. I’m surrounded by people who love what they do. This is one of the coolest roles that I could only touch in my dreams.”