Where the gin is cold but the piano's hot

The 1996 Broadway revival of Chicago is quite simply the biggest to thing to happen in the world of musical theatre in the last decade. Kander and Ebb's darkly glamorous tale of murder, revenge and notoriety enjoyed ecstatic reviews and collected armfuls of awards. And it's still thrilling packed houses in New York and London. The show, which features the irresistibly catchy number All That Jazz, was also turned into a movie, which in turn has had its fair share of awards, rave reviews and big box office takings.

For something to be so amazingly successful, there must have been a David Thompson involved in it somewhere. And indeed there was. The script of Chicago was adapted for the revival by David Thompson, a former journalist who now writes for the theatre.

Other work by David Thompson (known to his friends as Tom) includes The Look of Love, a show that's based around - yes, you're ahead of me - the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. In 1997 Steel Pier earned him a Tony Award nomination for best book of a musical.

David Thompson also devised and scripted Thou Shalt Not, a musical with songs by Harry Connick Jr. The story is based on a novel by Emile Zola but with the setting switched to New Orleans in the 1940s. And Zola isn't the only nineteenth-century European novelist to have been given the David Thompson treatment: his adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol is performed every year at the McCarter Theater in Princeton.

He finds that when a show is first put on in front of an audience it often needs a few changes before it really comes together. 'There is one story that you've told, and that story has been determined by what looks good three feet back in the rehearsal room. But that isn't necessarily a story that's going to work when played to the twentieth row in the theatre.'