Fosseville

Sweet Charity’s success was bittersweet for Bob Fosse: an old show celebrated while his new work was snubbed. There was a memorial air to the awards and honors that now came his way. When Fosse and Gwen Verdon appeared together as presenters on the 1987 Tony Awards, his tribute sounded like his own final summation of her importance to his work. Describing the choreographer’s art as “only about fifty percent conception,” he proposed “that the real test of your talent is getting five or six . . . people in a room who are just a little crazier than you are, and who can try to live out that thing in your head.” After a pause, he continued, “And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you can find someone who dances it better than you ever dreamed it . . . and for me, that someone was Miss Verdon.”1

Fosse and Verdon worked together rehearsing first Ann Reinking, as Debbie Allen’s Broadway replacement, and then Donna McKechnie for Sweet Charity’s national tour in the summer of 1987. By now, Verdon had coached two generations of dancing actresses in the role she had originated. The bond between Fosse and Verdon remained strong, driven by mutual respect and the desire to see his work performed to its highest capacity. A photograph taken in East Hampton during this period signals their complex, continued intimacy. Verdon faces directly out with a warm and satisfied smile, as if basking in Fosse’s presence, while his gaze is downward and contemplative, both comforted and conflicted by her closeness.

Fosse, along with Verdon and Cy Coleman, made the unusual practice of traveling to each stop on the Sweet Charity tour to work with the cast. There was a particular urgency to the rehearsal just before the show opened at the National Theater in Washington, DC, on September 23, 1987. “He worked us to the knuckle that day, because this was a turning point,” remembered Diane Laurenson.2 Business had been soft in earlier tour stops. Strong reviews in Washington would hopefully lead to improved business; if not, the tour could end. Following rehearsal, Fosse returned to his hotel to change. On the way back to the theater, he suddenly collapsed on the street. With Verdon beside him, he was rushed to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room of a massive heart attack at 7:23 p.m., just as the curtain was going up on Sweet Charity. 3 At the end of the show, the opening-night audience stood and cheered, unaware that its star director had just expired. It was a moment steeped in theatrical irony that Fosse would have appreciated.

A memorial was held on October 30 at the Palace Theater. The speakers were all male, and almost entirely writers. No dancers appeared except in film clips, and all were overshadowed by images of Fosse, who seemed to laugh at death as he glided across the screen. The memorial was followed that evening by a kind of wake, produced and directed by Fosse himself. In his will, he had earmarked $25,000 as a gift for sixty-six friends to “go out and have dinner on me.”4 Held at Central Park’s Tavern on the Green, the dinner guests included Fosse’s writer friends, dancers and actors, his agent, his doctor, his daughter, his wife, and various girlfriends from over the years. “They all have at one time or other during my life been very kind to me. I thank them,” Fosse wrote.5 His thanks provided a lavish spread, endless drinks, and an orchestra. “Dance like you’re going to percussion heaven,” he exhorted the Sweet Charity cast on the last day of his life,6 and as the evening wore on and the dance floor filled, his friends fulfilled his directive, dancing one last Fosse showstopper.

A wave of AIDS-related fatalities was devastating the theatrical community, and Fosse’s death was somewhat overshadowed by that of another important figure who had recently succumbed to the disease. Michael Bennett, whose landmark musical A Chorus Line was still going strong on Broadway and around the world, died of the disease on July 2, 1987. He was forty-four years old. Coverage of Fosse’s death at sixty implied that perhaps his best work was behind him. Bennett was in the prime of his career, and his death left major projects to languish; unlike for Fosse, a sense of promises unfulfilled infused the mourning for the younger man.

At the 1988 Tony Awards, Bennett was afforded a lengthy tribute, featuring numbers from several of his shows. Nothing was mentioned of Fosse until Chita Rivera, presenting the choreography award, paused to remember Fosse’s words from the previous year about the art of choreography: “So from all of the dancers and all of the people who have ever worked with Bobby, I would just like to take a moment and remember, and say that he did make us deliriously crazy, very happy, and very proud.”7

“I have two major fears in life. One is that I’ll be asked to do things like appear on those talk shows where famous old people talk about their careers and that I’ll be asked to choreograph toy store commercials. The other fear is that I’ll accept both of those.”

Bob Fosse, 19848

At Fosse’s memorial service, Pete Hamill defined his art as a spot “where corrosive wit and cynical style always play against the most darkly glamorous backdrops” and called that spot “Fosseville.”9 Chicago’s 1996 revival served as a return trip to Fosseville, celebrating his spirit and the theater he embodied. At the same time, another musical salute to Fosse was being developed. In 1985, Chet Walker, who had danced in Pippin and Dancin’ and would be part of the Sweet Charity revival, approached Fosse with an idea for a television retrospective of his work, but with a difference. As Walker later recalled, “The impetus was for people in this business to say, ‘thank you’ to him.”10 In Walker’s concept, Fosse travels down the

hallway of a rehearsal studio. Each door he opens reveals a familiar face—Verdon, Shirley MacLaine, Joel Grey, Chita Rivera, Ben Vereen—teaching young dancers the Fosse numbers that made each a star, demonstrating his influence on multiple generations of dancers. Fosse, always ambivalent about looking backward, threw up several caveats. “I don’t want anyone on the show that’s worked with me before,” he demanded. When asked why, he replied, “Because I don’t want to be told what I did. I want to do.”11

With Fosse’s death, the tribute was placed on hold. In the early 1990s, Walker reached out to Verdon with the idea of reviving the project as homage to Fosse’s body of work. With her blessing, Walker began teaching classes in Fosse style, eventually reconstructing entire numbers. A new generation of dancers was eager to learn the Fosse repertoire, and Walker and Verdon not only taught Fosse’s style but also provided provenance and historical context for his signature movements.

Livent, a Canadian theatrical producing organization, funded a series of workshops during which the show was refined. Richard Maltby Jr., who had directed the celebrated revue Ain’t Misbehavin’, was eventually brought in to unify this anthology of dances into a loosely biographical form. Ann Reinking came aboard to create the connective tissue between the many numbers. When Fosse opened at the Broadhurst Theater on January 14, 1999, its cumbersome credits listed Maltby as director; Reinking as co-director and co-choreographer; Walker as responsible for choreographic recreation; Verdon as artistic adviser; and Maltby, Walker, and Reinking for overall conception.

Fosse’s three-act structure resembled Dancin’, and indeed, that later Fosse show was heavily represented. The cast of thirty-two served as a versatile dance company performing a repertoire of twenty-six full-length numbers. Fosse included such now-iconic numbers as “Steam Heat,” “Big Spender,” and “Rich Man’s Frug” and rediscoveries like “Cool Hand Luke” and the spirited “I Gotcha” from Liza with a Z. But Fosse’s early, lively work with Mary Ann Niles was hastily dispensed with, and numbers conceived for film, like “Mein Herr,” looked static without quick-cut editing. The three pas de deux from “Take Off with Us” were strenuous rather than sexy and, worse, appeared dated.

As in Big Deal, Fosse was bookended by “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” (“Sing Sing Sing” was its rousing encore number.) The song set a reverential and somber tone for the show, with the dancers often adopting a dead-eyed sultriness. One would never imagine that Fosse had staged some of the funniest dances ever seen on Broadway, like “Rich Kids’ Rag” and “A Secretary Is Not a Toy,” nor that he satirized sex so deliciously in “Whatever Lola Wants,” one of several prime Gwen Verdon numbers that were not included.

By focusing so heavily on Fosse’s later, more self-consciously serious work, the show inadvertently exposed what Fosse had always admitted: that he had a limited dance vocabulary. Ingeniously recycling those steps into fresh patterns and formations, he made them look both new and reassuringly familiar from one show to the next. Now, so many similar numbers in quick succession threatened monotony. By the time “The Manson Trio” was performed in the third act, it was only the latest in a long series of tight trio numbers that began to look alike.12

In a weak season for musicals, Fosse won the Best Musical Tony Award. Chet Walker’s original idea of including Fosse stars in a tribute show was partially realized when Ann Reinking, Bebe Neuwirth, and Ben Vereen joined the Broadway cast at various times during its run. With virtually no dialogue, the show was a hit with foreign tourists and ran for more than two years, closing after 1,093 performances. Fittingly, the show was the final work of Gwen Verdon, the indefatigable keeper of the Fosse flame. She died in her sleep at her daughter’s home on October 18, 2000, at the age of seventy-five.

With Fosse and Chicago both playing on Broadway, a Fosse renaissance was in full swing, capped by the worldwide success of Chicago’s 2002 film adaptation. The film restores Chicago to color from the revival’s black-and-white palette and preserves its original conception as a series of 1920s vaudeville turns. Rather than try to shoehorn the presentational numbers into a realistic setting, Chicago wittily embeds them in the narrative as fantasies seen through the eyes of Roxie Hart.

Chicago was the feature film–directing debut of Rob Marshall, a former dancer and one of Broadway’s busiest choreographers. He was clearly influenced by Fosse’s direction of Cabaret, and Chicago’s visuals are strongly reminiscent of that film’s foreboding glamour. Fosse’s staging concepts form the foundation for much of Marshall’s work, but he actively avoids references to Fosse’s famous style. The film’s choreography is strenuously sexy, giving off flickers of Fosse but no real heat. As with the Chicago revival, what is missing is the atmosphere of sensuality Fosse could so effortlessly create.

Chicago was criticized for its overly aggressive editing, but as the first fullfledged dance musical in years, it bears the hallmarks of Fosse’s musical films filtered through two decades of music videos, a new medium for filmed dance. All That Jazz appeared just two years before MTV broadcast its first music video, but its impact was almost immediately apparent in the dance-oriented videos that became a staple of the network. For many first-generation MTV stars, like Michael and Janet Jackson, Madonna, and Paula Abdul, All That Jazz was the first Fosse they had experienced. Their visual approximation of that film’s posed, locked-down choreography, captured in hurriedly edited, arresting images, would come to define dance for a new era. “Fosse” was now its own brand.13

Less felicitously, musicals that followed All That Jazz, from Flashdance and Staying Alive to the more recent Magic Mike and the Step Up series, reflect what dance critic Joan Acocella called the “MTV trickle-down” of Fosse’s influence.14 Fosse constructed his film dances as if they were to be performed onstage, but in these new musicals, frantic editing allows dancers to perform superhuman feats of gymnastics that accelerate Fosse’s more layered, nuanced editing methods to the point of incoherence. (Fosse saw how others had distorted his techniques, commenting in 1983, “I’m embarrassed to say that what’s happening now is part of my doing. I think it’s being carried to the extreme where it’s not interesting anymore.”)15

So thoroughly has Bob Fosse’s dance and theatrical aesthetic been absorbed into the popular culture that it feels as if it has always been here, available to be scavenged without regard for its underlying structure. YouTube is filled with

videos of amateur dance groups performing faux Fosse routines. Dance studios emblazon images of derbied dancers snapping their fingers in white gloves to advertise classes in theater dance. Televised dance competitions like So You Think You Can Dance? offer Fosse-style posturing as “Broadway” routines. Fosse’s work is reduced to a generic category of dance that anyone can do, regardless of skill or training—trading on the image and mystique of Fosse but without the underpinnings of context and intent.

Lately, the Fosse hold on American theater dance has loosened. Acrobatics and spectacle were deemed necessary to the revival of Fosse’s Pippin. Frantic amove-on-every-beat staging and gratuitous gymnastics, much of it popularized by television dance competitions, have found their way into every type of musical regardless of historical or stylistic appropriateness. “TRUST . . . RELAX . . . ARTISTRY,” Fosse advised in a note to the cast of Chicago. 16 Reviving Fosse in today’s frantic dance environment requires both dancers and audiences to slow down and savor the nuances.

Maintaining the integrity of his work is the driving force of the Verdon-Fosse Legacy LLC, established by Fosse and Verdon’s daughter, Nicole. The organization sponsors master classes of classic Fosse repertoire taught by a core group of final-generation Fosse dancers. A new generation is learning his key works from those who are Fosse’s primary source material: the dancers who hold within their bodies his unique choreographic language.

Yet while his original dances are being preserved and passed on, in postmodern fashion others are harvesting and repurposing key elements of them. Beyoncé sifts “Rich Man’s Frug” through a gaudy hip-hop sensibility in her video “Get Me Bodied,” while her “Single Ladies” is an aggressive, twenty-first-century translation of Verdon’s “Mexican Breakfast” (1969). Hip-hop dancing captures the tiny movement slivers associated with Fosse and, when performed in unison by dance crews, takes on a hypnotic quality similar to that of Fosse’s trio numbers. Andy Blankenbuehler’s densely layered hip-hop-inspired choreography for LinManuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015) is built on isolations and surprising start-stop rhythms that a new-century Fosse might have created. Young Charles “Lil Buck” Riley is an influential proponent of “Memphis Jookin,’ ” a form of street dance that in his interpretation combines Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk (itself a reincarnation of Fosse) with both Fosse’s isolations and his slithering, liquid movements. These artists reference Fosse in innovative new ways that make their work feel fresh and forward-looking.

Three decades after his death, Fosse’s “Muscle” shows no signs of weakening. He remains both a touchstone for American theater dance, recognizable around the world, and a continuing source of inspiration for new artists.