Martin Gottfried - All His Jazz: The Life And Death Of Bob Fosse

Bob Fosse would have loved it. Decades after his death, this cynical and mordant man in black had the first blockbuster hit of his life. The hit, moreover, was a revival of Chicago, a stage musical that he had never wanted to do in the first place and had done only as a guilty favor for the wife he loved but had forsakenGwen Verdon. It was also a show he had staged in a mood even blacker than his usual, for he was suffering post-operative depression after open-heart surgery. In that respect, at least, the tough and ironic Chicago was a pure expression of this profoundly talented, self-loathing, and brutally morbid song and dance man.

When first produced in 1975, Chicago received mixed reviews and barely eked out a two-year run. Twenty years later Broadway, once the proud birthplace of American musical theater, had become its mausoleum. Yet even as producers were scavenging for old shows to revise, Chicago was deemed worthy of only a four-performance staging in a New York series called Encores! Great Musicals in Concert.

With the plays opening number, however, audiences were electrified. Stripped of scenery and performed with actors in black costumes before an on-stage orchestra, Chicago was set free to bare its nasty power. Indeed, the production provided a split picture of Fosse. One revealed his self-image in the bitterly trashy, show business glitter of Chicago as first produced. The other picture reflected Bob Fosse as Ann Reinking chose to see him, a touch-up that presented her late lover and dance master as choreographing for her alone.

Gwen Verdon had been the original model for Bob Fosses choreography. He designed dances especially for her in shows like Redhead, Damn Yankees, and Sweet Charity. Reinking, who succeeded her as his mistress (he never divorced Verdon), was also her replacement as dance model. He used Reinkings body to perfect the grinding, swivel-hipped style that evolved in the 1972 Pippin and the 1979 movie All That Jazz.

By then, however, Bob Fosses enthusiasm for dance numbers had waned. Indeed, even as early as 1966s Sweet Charity he was showing greater interest in musical staging than in choreography. That shows Hey, Big Spender, for instance, is usually taken for a dance number when in fact it has no dance steps. Such choreographic direction culminated in Fosses brilliant film Cabaret, with its thorough line of musical stagingand no dance numbers at all.

Such a development had to be painful for a dancer like Reinking, but she tried to have the last word. Nine years after Fosses death, when she was engaged to play Roxie Hart in the 1996 concert version of Chicago a show that he had made virtually dancelessReinking revised history by creating additional choreography in the style of Bob Fosse. That translated as a mimicry of the style he had suited to her, and it resulted in a choreography of clichespelvic grinds, tipped derbies, and Fosse lookalikesoften effective but inevitably repetitive and ultimately a travesty of the original style.

The damage was not crucial and the concert version of Chicago, with its wonderful overall direction by Walter Bobbie, went on to spectacular and deserved success. Even after the release of Chicago, the movie that won the 2002 Academy Award, the Broadway revival remained popular, continuing into an eighth year. Indeed, it was only the enormously successful revival of the stage show that finally made the movie of Chicago possible. It was a movie twenty years not in the making but in the failing to make casting proposals over the years ranged from Goldie Hawn to Bette Midler, from Kevin Kline to Kevin Spacey, and from Madonna to Britney Spears. Meanwhile, Fosse had been treated to yet a second posthumous hit.