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Highlighted by songs in which women celebrate the murder of wayward men and a lawyer demonstrates the art of manipulating the media, musicals don't get much more cynical than Chicago. A ripped-from-the-headlines jazz-age play by Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins turned into a 1975 musical by songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb in collaboration with Bob Fosse, Chicago enjoyed an initial run of qualified success, overshadowed by the crowd-pleasing A Chorus Line. It makes perfect sense, however, that it found a second audience on Broadway in the 1990s

This collision of real-life tragedy and satirical ambition is much discussed at the Times Square headquarters here of Nickelodeon, a unit of Viacom, mostly because a day of trauma for America is also the birthday of a gentle and singularly optimistic character who, over the next 16 years, would prove eminently capable of soaking up at least a least a little bit of the world's ongoing sadness.

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