Excited feet scurry into room 303, drop their backpacks off in the white shelves, grab a seat in the semi-circle chair formation in the center of the room and crack open their brand-new, gold-lettered “Chicago” scripts for their first day of rehearsal. Whether they read music or not, the new Chicago cast is ready to learn every single song in the show in just the first two weeks of rehearsal.

Yes, every single song.

“It’s been actually super productive and educational,” Junior Maddy Mills said at the end of her first week playing Roxie Hart, one of the leads in the show. “It’s so cool to see how the end product of the finished show comes from these few weeks just starting with the music, but things are going together.”

They began their two weeks of intense music training with learning the opening number, “All That Jazz,” a sultry and mysterious beginning to the show that begins with only a simple piano track and builds to a flashy, belt-y track, detailing the desirable life of a vaudeville star, Velma Kelly and her wannabe, Roxie Hart.

The story of Chicago has been in the mainstream for years now. The musical was adapted into a motion picture in 2002, and promptly won six Oscars the following year, including Best Picture. It’s often regarded as one of the best movie-musicals of all time, and brought the dance style of fosse and the music of Kander and Ebb to screens around the globe.

Lots of songs in Chicago are recognizable hits, but not just because it’s an Oscar-winning movie.

On platforms like TikTok, the song “We Both Reached For The Gun” is a popular song to use in character edits, and that same song was used in the cast’s dance call. Having recognizable music to go off of was helpful for the cast in learning the dynamics and structure of the score.

“I was relying a lot on hearing the music from TikTok, not the actual tracks,” Mills said during rehearsal. “So to break down the music was very useful and very much necessary because it helped with getting in touch of what the song was planned out to be.”

As the cast went along rehearsing, they learned more numbers, like the famous female-empowerment ballad “Cell Block Tango,” a fierce song blaming the men for the way they treated the women in their lives, and the emotional “Mister Cellophane”, detailing Amos Hart’s life in the shadows.

There’s always more to come, as next week the cast and crew will get together and do a “read through” of the entire show, speaking the entire script out loud from top to bottom, including the songs, to create the first steps of the cast’s chemistry and to hear the full story out loud for the first time.