Fosse
Created by a cadre of Fosse’s friends and colleagues–including dancers Ann Reinking (his lover and protege) and Gwen Verdon (his wife and lifelong muse)–Fosse is much more than a simple recap of its subject’s prolific career. The show delivers plenty of what most viewers might expect: the snappy, strutting, sexy routines familiar from stage, screen, and TV successes like Sweet Charity, Chicago, Cabaret, All That Jazz, and Liza With a Z. But Reinking, Verdon, and their colleagues–Chet Walker (who choreographed the Goodman Theatre’s Pal Joey with Reinking a decade ago) and director Richard Maltby Jr. (whose knack for concept revues was also displayed in the 1970s Fats Waller tribute Ain’t Misbehavin’)–have sorted through the flops as well as the hits, the forgotten efforts as well as the famous ones. (“Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” for instance, was used by Fosse in Big Deal, his short-lived 1986 stage version of the 1958 movie Big Deal on Madonna Street, an Italian crime comedy Fosse relocated to the black ghetto of 1930s Chicago.) Though the show includes a few of Fosse’s signature pieces–notably the comically sleazy “Big Spender” from Sweet Charity and the goofily exuberant “Steam Heat” from The Pajama Game–it omits a slew of crowd pleasers. “Whatever Lola Wants” from Damn Yankees, “Magic to Do” from Pippin, “Coffee Break” from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This” from Sweet Charity are among the rousing routines one might have expected to see here. But their omission makes room for less well-known–and more personal–Fosse works, including several from the 1978 Broadway revue Dancin’ whose loving lyricism isn’t usually associated with the mischievous master of razzle-dazzle.
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Eschewing the chronological format of traditional tribute revues, the creative team has chosen a free-association approach, retracing the footsteps that Fosse left “in the sands of rhythm and rhyme,” to quote Johnny Mercer’s lyric for “I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man,” used here not only as a Fred Astaire salute (as Fosse intended) but as an epitaph for Fosse himself. The show skips, struts, and slides through almost 40 years of impressively varied output by an artist who started out in Chicago at north-side nightclubs like the Cuban Village and ended up at the top of the ladder in New York and Hollywood.
This explosive ending is preceded by several haunting numbers suggesting Fosse’s cynical, self-destructive side and prophesying his death. The sequence begins with Greg Reuter–very Fosse-like with his insouciant attitude and scruffy blond beard–prancing in front of a glittery curtain as he sings “Razzle Dazzle” (from Chicago), whose theme is that audiences are suckers who deserve to be conned by showbiz trickery, subsequently illustrated by an all-girl chorus waving white feather fans in a campy Ziegfeld spoof. But the sneering, self-deprecating hucksterism of “Razzle Dazzle” is quickly contradicted in a passage on the ephemerality of dance and dancers: “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” from the autobiographical All That Jazz, features a female trio in disjointed slow motion (reflecting the choreographer’s heart-attack-induced hallucination) urging the artist to curtail his feverish pace. That leads into “Mr. Bojangles,” from Dancin’, in which a beat-up, burned-out old black dancer (Cassel Miles) is partnered by the graceful ghost of his younger self (Terace Jones) before shuffling offstage, literally and metaphorically heading “toward the light.” In such passages, Fosse becomes at once terrifying and uplifting, transcending the traditional showbiz expectations that Fosse himself at once mocked and reveled in.
at the Blue Rider Theatre
The proof is in her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict, first published in 1946 and revised twice. This tome is so full of trivialities it’s a marvel Guggenheim managed to keep her own interest and finish it. By her own admission, her life was a string of impulsive trysts, adolescent emotional outbursts, drunken spats, buying sprees, new hairdos, and extended vacations. Here is a woman so bored during her first cruise down the Nile that she bought a pregnant goat in hopes of watching it give birth. Here is a woman who gives the reader a clearer picture of her dogs than of her children. And here is a woman who imagines that people will be interested in the most mundane aspects of her life, like this description of a day spent with a lover: “After lunch we went to buy a rug for our entrance hall….He had to finish a quarterly article he did for an art paper. We had dinner together and went to see For Whom the Bell Tolls. Afterward we went home and read some poetry.”
Sadly the production’s rather grandiose design feels like an attempt to inject excitement into the evening. Jeff Bauer and John Boesche have transformed the semidumpy Blue Rider Theatre into a clean, multifunctional modernist playground: images are projected on blank canvases suspended in midair around a huge multilayered stage. But in keeping with Guggenheim’s life, this ambitious design nearly does itself in. Boesche often lights Bauer’s grand stage in such a harsh, white wash that it loses all its allure. His lights even wash out his own projections at times, making some of the greatest masterpieces of modern art look like pastel wallpaper. Through it all, the live performer seems too often an afterthought.
