Rita goes Roxie in her Broadway debut

updated 2:53 p.m. ET July 12, 2006

NEW YORK - The first time Rita Wilson saw the musical “Chicago,” she was enthralled, delighted and excited. The second time, she almost threw up.

What happened in between was this: Wilson, already a fan of the show, had been offered the role of Roxie Hart on Broadway this summer and decided to refresh her memory by catching a touring version of “Chicago” with her stepdaughter and husband in tow.

She sat in the darkened audience and watched as dancer Michelle DeJean made a knock-out Roxie. “I looked at her and said, ‘Oh. My. God. There’s no way,”’ Wilson recalls. “There’s just no way.”’

That’s when a fellow actor came to the rescue: Tom Hanks, her Academy Award-winning husband.

“At the intermission, I turned to him and said, ’Oh, man. I don’t know.’ I was kind of sick to my stomach. He said, ‘Oh no, you gotta do it. This is great! You can totally do this. Yes! Do it! Do it!”

Her stepdaughter, Elizabeth, also chimed in: “‘Mom, you can do this, definitely!”’ Wilson recalls. “If they hadn’t said that, if they had looked at me askance, I would have been so out of there.”

Instead, Wilson, primarily known as a comedic film actress, is reveling in her Broadway debut as the Cook County Jail inmate who kills her husband, frames her boyfriend and sings “I’m gonna be a celebrity.”

“You know how you sometimes feel like, ‘I’ve been waiting for this my whole life?’ she says. “I love all of this stuff. I love it! I love doing it, I love every single second of the process.”

Stepping into big footsteps
Wilson steps into the 10-year-old revival of the Tony Award-winning Kander and Ebb musical aware of its rich history. The role of Roxie has been tackled by such actresses as Gwen Verdon, Ann Reinking, Marilu Henner, Charlotte d’Amboise, Paige Davis and Sandy Duncan. Renee Zellweger played Roxie in the 2002 movie version.

“I can’t believe I’m in that company of performers — not just the ones who are familiar names, but all those amazing dancers and singers and Broadway performers and everybody backstage,” she says.

“I’m in awe of them. That’s the bottom line. I look at them and say, ‘You’ve been doing this for 10 years. I get to do this for two months and then I go away.’”

When Wilson first saw the show in 1997, the stars were Reinking as Roxy and Bebe Neuwirth as Velma Kelly. “I remember being blown away when I saw them. I kind of thought they were aliens. How did they do that?” she says. “Now I’m an alien. I love it.”

As the show’s dance captain, Gregory Butler, has seen many actresses join the company, but was impressed by Wilson’s fearlessness. She wanted to follow in Reinking and Neuwirth’s footsteps — literally.

“Rita goes full out all the time. I respect her so much because even with the dancing, she wanted to do the original choreography. She didn’t want Plan B. She wanted to do Plan A,” Butler says. “We worked on it and she got it. I could not be prouder.

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