Heartthrob actor Gregory Harrison knows all about Billy Flynn, the unscrupulous lawyer he portrays in a road company of "Chicago," which comes to Clowes Hall on Tuesday.
In the musical's "Razzle Dazzle" number, the slick, handsome Billy sings: "Give 'em an act with lots of flash in it / And the reaction will be passionate."

As the smooth, dreamy Dr. Gonzo Gates on TV's "Trapper John, M.D.," Harrison did something similar from 1979 to 1985. He cultivated passionate fans, especially women, by flashing his charm and his pecs as the playboy sidekick.
Harrison considers the two hunks inversely related: good-guy Gonzo with bad-boy tendencies, and unprincipled but adorable Billy. Yet while enjoying Gonzo, Harrison, 54, called Billy "a highlight of my career. It requires me to use everything I've been working on for 30 years," he said from a hotel phone while on tour.

In the slinky, savvy, cynical musical, vaudeville singer Velma Kelly becomes a media darling after shooting dead her man and her sister upon discovering their affair. But the married chorus girl, Roxie Hart, steals the limelight after plugging her insensitive lover. Both hire Billy to represent them. And as he cons the press and court, the greedy shyster shifts his loyalties to whichever jailbird gets more headlines.
Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb based the 1975 show on true 1920s crimes. Bob Fosse, director/choreographer of the original, co-wrote the book with Ebb. Hit songs include "All That Jazz" and "Mr. Cellophane." The musical won 1997 Tony Awards for revival, direction and choreography; the movie earned the 2003 Academy Award for best picture. A tour played Indianapolis in September 1998.

"Most shows, you do them for six, seven, eight months, and you've mastered it. I'm still growing in this role. I love doing it. I don't have to take a deep breath here, and believe me, I've been in shows where I've had to" suck it up, said Harrison, whose Broadway credits include the musical revival of "Follies" (2001).
The pleasure and challenge in portraying Billy is "trusting that people will appreciate the character. It's important they like Billy," he said.
"It's hard sometimes to play a role as ruthless as this without trying to pull back. What I've learned is sometimes it's best to do the opposite: attack the ruthlessness with even more gusto. The lack of apology makes the audience like Billy because they can learn to trust him and find him to be consistent."

So Harrison renders Billy's first number, "All I Care About," a hypocritical renunciation of the superficial values that Billy covets, for laughs. The cool, self-interested Billy, Harrison said, lets audiences in on the joke from the get-go: When the seemingly devoted counselor declares, "All I care about is love," the narcissist is really talking about himself.
Of his three songs, Harrison most relishes "We Both Reached for the Gun," a ventriloquist routine in which Billy places Roxie on his knee and puts words in her mouth before reporters, officials and onlookers.
Mirroring Billy, "it has great shifts in tempo," he said. "It finally shows what people have been saying about Billy up to this point. It shows him in action. It sharpens the perception of him as a lawyer, manipulator, juggler."
In it, Billy, remaining true to himself, "doesn't shy away from fully owning that he's there to do a job" that tickles him. The trickster just adores the people he hoodwinks, said the actor.

Kander and Ebb's songs stem from and build the character, said Harrison, who appeared in the team's 1997 "Steel Pier." "Many composers and lyricists arbitrarily stop things, leave the character off and have him suddenly break into a generic song. But with Kander and Ebb, everything counts."
In the movie, all numbers emanate from Roxie's imagination. The stage version, though, "is very presentational. We don't have to smooth the path to that conceit. Ours is so precisely constructed with locomotive speed. We've rehearsed so specifically to keep driving it forward and find the humor and flair. Every split second is thought out," from songs to dances to visuals to themes to motivations. "It's all so carefully calculated."
Just like Billy.

©   September, 12 2004 Indy Star

Spandex and a good pitching arm helped actor Gregory Harrison land his spouse.

While doing advance publicity for a national tour of the musical "Chicago" (at Clowes Hall Sept. 14-19), Harrison told a loving but risque story about how he met his wife, the former model/actress Randi Oakes.
A musical-theater veteran, Harrison, 54, co-stars as the slick defense lawyer Billy Flynn in the sexy, cynical 1997 Tony Award-winning revival about murder, greed and fame. In 1979, when he first cast eyes on Oakes, the young actor had just gotten his big break as Dr. Gonzo Gates, the hunky sidekick on TV's "Trapper John, M.D.," which ran through the mid-1980s.

"It was a huge hit, and CBS asked me to do 'Battle of the Network Stars,' an Olympics-like competition featuring teams of TV talent vying on a beach. It was one of the rare occasions where a whole bunch of scantily clad celebrities could get together and check each other out completely before you decided who you would want to date," he said.

Host Howard Cosell introduced them. The two "flirted like crazy." Harrison had to select an opposing player to sit atop the plank of a dunking booth. He chose Oakes, the eye candy - or Officer Bonnie Clark - on "CHiPs." "I didn't know her. I picked the girl who looked good in the Spandex bathing suit."
An all-Californian catcher in high school, Harrison hit the target with all three throws. "And let me tell you, she looked good wet." He prized Oakes, now 53 and out of show business since having their first child, more than the $20,000 each member of the winning team got. Losers took home half that during the two-day contest.

Oakes was there with her fiance, Harrison with his girlfriend. "It took months, but we started dating," he said. The couple lives on the Oregon coast with their four children ages 13 to 18.
"It's all there on tape, and my children have watched it with great disgust."

©   September, 03 2004 Indianapolis Star

Friday, August 06, 2004 - The big-bang musical "Chicago" comes to Denver on Tuesday, with Johnnie Cochran in a starring role. Except he'll be looking far more like a beloved former television character named Gonzo than the real-life gonzo litigator.
Talk about your razzle-dazzle.
"Chicago" stars former "Trapper John, M.D." favorite Gregory Harrison. But he says the slick and seductive attorney Billy Flynn he plays is all Johnnie C.

"Johnnie Cochran is Billy Flynn. He's just a black Billy Flynn," Harrison said from Tampa, Fla., where the second national tour of the musical launched Sunday. "When he defended O.J. Simpson, he made up whatever he had to make up, he said whatever needed to be said. He had a job to do and he did it, and he was one of the best salesmen you have ever seen.
"Johnnie loved his job, loved coming to work every day, loved his client, loved the judge, loved the jury and loved the people at home," he said. "This is very much like Billy Flynn. If he had only broken into song, it would have been the entire picture."

"Chicago" was a hit - in more ways than one - for three years on Broadway beginning in 1975. The original show starred Jerry Orbach, Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon. The cynical 1929 sendup of murder, media manipulation and legal corruption took on new resonance after Simpson was accused of killing his ex-wife and her lover in 1994.
Its aim and its teeth were sharpened for the gritty 1996 revival that on Aug. 14 will become the 12th-most attended production in Broadway history, with 3,225 performances. There was also the groundbreaking 2002 film that won six Oscars and grossed $306 million as one of the few musicals of the previous two decades to be effectively adapted to film. The first national company won the Helen Hayes Award as 2003's best touring musical.
Two major reasons for its resurgence are the carnival atmosphere that surrounded the Simpson murder trial and the subsequent proliferation of reality TV.

"With the growth of the mass media and new communications technology, we are creating stars and celebrities who last five minutes," Harrison said. "You see it every night on primetime television. People will eat anything, jump off anything, say anything and do anything to anybody for that five minutes of fame.
"That's what our show is about: the desperate need for fame and notoriety and the willingness to do anything to get it. And the public's huge desire and willingness to glorify even the most criminal minds - if there is a good middleman who can sell it properly."

"Chicago" is the tale of glamorous moll Velma Kelly and the wannabe showgirl who pushes her out of the spotlight - and worse, out of the headlines. When both stand innocently guilty of separate shootings, enter Flynn to give the people what they want: His clients want freedom at any cost, and the public demands three-ring show biz.

"Playing Billy Flynn is as good as it gets, and as fun as it gets," said Harrison, who played the role on Broadway before last year's first tour.
For those who only have seen the film, Harrison said, the stage version is faster-paced and a lot funnier.
"The film was adapted in exactly the way it needed to be to work cinematically," he said. "It focuses where any movie needs to, which is on faces and characters. And it reintroduced the whole idea of characters breaking out into song and made that acceptable to audiences by placing the musical numbers inside Roxie's mind.
"That gave it a more realistic, natural foundation, but the stage version has no such boundaries," he said. "What live theater offers so brilliantly is the big, wide picture of dancing feet and moving bodies. There is a magical cause and effect going on between the audience and those of us onstage, and that kind of magic does not always come across the screen and into the seats the same way."

As for his own notoriety, Harrison knows his name always will be synonymous with Gonzo, the rebellious young doctor he played from 1979-86 on "Trapper John, M.D."
"It was a wonderful steppingstone in my career, and there are an awful lot of people who remember Gonzo very fondly," Harrison said. "It allowed me to do a lot of other things that also have been very fulfilling. But it was a long time ago, and I have done 40 movies and eight series since then."
If not for the entertainment industry's fickleness, Harrison might well be off the stage and on the small screen this fall. He shot a pilot ("Working Girl") that was not picked up, despite starring Roxie-like "it" girl of the moment Jessica Simpson.
"It was called a 'sure thing,' which was the kiss of death," he said. "ABC decided Jessica was so hot that they were going to increase the variety specials she and her husband will do, and not use her up in a sitcom. So the 'sure thing' suddenly became a liability.
"That's my business in a nutshell. It's like Vegas. You just go there, roll your dice and see what number comes up."

©   August, 06 2004 Denver Post