Queen Latifah Previews Chicago

Queen Latifah has good news for those Broadway aficionados skeptical about Miramax's upcoming movie version of the Tony-winning musical Chicago: Don't worry, it's good. "They are going to be totally blown away by it," the singer-actress tells TV Guide Online. "I'm telling you — Renée Zellweger (Roxie) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Velma) have got it going on! It's gonna be great."

In the highly anticipated adaptation (due in theaters this Christmas), Latifah assumes the role of prison matron Mama Morton. How did she take to the character's enticing — if dwindling and drafty — wardrobe (read: Miniskirt)? "You won't be seeing me kicking my legs up that high," laughs the onetime talk show hostess of her sexy, circa 1920s wardrobe, "not in the dress I'm wearing."

Still, Latifah describes Mama's choreography as "very risqué, sort of a flirtatious Sophie Tucker-Pearl Bailey routine. It's like jazz, drunk-in-a-club over a piano-type [singing]."

Prior to Chicago, the 31-year-old New Jersey native completed work on the modern-day romantic comedy Brown Sugar (out this summer), in which she plays best friend to Love & Basketball's Sanaa Lathan. What was it like bouncing between the polar-opposite parts? In what has to be the understatement of the year, she says simply, "It was weird."