The orchestra seats of the Ambassador Theatre are covered in tech tables. Lighting designer Ken Billington speaks over the God mic, asking to bring up the brightness of the light hitting the showgirl feather fans. A worker from the hair and wig department scurries onstage to smooth an ensemblist’s flyaway. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was tech rehearsal for a new show. But the Ambassador Theatre is home to the revival of “Chicago,” which has been running on Broadway for almost exactly 30 years. What was happening on this day in May 2026 was the video and photo shoot for the 30th anniversary advertising campaign of the long-running razzle-dazzler.
This production of “Chicago,” a revival of the musical by Bob Fosse, Fred Ebb and John Kander, officially opened on Nov. 14, 1996, at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. The “story of murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery — all those things we hold near and dear to our hearts,” as the show’s opening line goes, moved from the Rodgers to the Shubert Theatre in 1997 before settling in its current home at the Ambassador Theatre, where it’s been playing since 2003.
Ann Reinking, who choreographed the show in the style of Fosse (who directed and choreographed the original), began as Roxie Hart alongside Bebe Neuwirth as Velma Kelly and James Naughton as Billy Flynn. In the ensuing decades, hundreds of actors have cycled through the cast, including dozens of celebrities, especially in the lead roles of Roxie and Velma. The campaigns promoting the show — from milestone anniversaries to these celeb stints — have been photo-heavy, be it a line of chorines power-walking across an airfield, Brandy staring down the camera or Pamela Anderson tangled in bedsheets.
Photos have been so crucial to the “Chicago” brand that producers Barry and Fran Weissler and their ad agencies along the way have hired the likes of American celebrity photographer Jason Bell, British fashion photographer Max Vadukul and German editorial photog Ellen von Unwerth to capture what have become iconic black-and-white images.
But for the 30th anniversary, “Chicago”’s current advertising and marketing firm, RPM, opted for a video-first campaign, practically a first for the show. “‘Chicago’ obviously has been around for a very long time and there’s iterations of B-roll that have existed of the production,” Nick Pramik, managing partner of RPM, told Broadway News, “but the show hasn’t invested in a super high-quality B-roll shoot since it first opened.”
