If I would have discovered Bob Fosse just a few years earlier I would have been a dancer. I first saw All That Jazz in my senior year of college in a Theater in Film class. It was a simple once a week class for theater kids and burned out seniors like myself. We watched it in the school’s playhouse with a large projector screen, not quite the real cinema but a great simulation. I was enthralled from beginning to end, but especially with those dance scenes. The jerky, slow movements so deliberate felt unearthly and mesmerizing.
I was too old to pursue a career as a professional dancer at that point, but was still interested enough to look up everything Fosse did. Sweet Charity, Lenny, Cabaret, Liza With A Z, Chicago, anything and everything he’d had any direct connection with. He was the first, and thus far only, person to be awarded a Tony, an Emmy and an Oscar in the same year. He reinvented theater and made the transition from stage to film and back again flawlessly. He really was a genius.
He was also a huge prick.
Fosse/Verdon is based on the biography of Bob Fosse by Sam Wasson and focuses on the relationship he had with Gwen Verdon, a triple threat actor/dancer/singer in her own right. But much like real life, her story gets overshadowed by Fosse’s. It’s not a knock on Michelle Williams, who plays Verdon perfectly, but Bob Fosse’s shadow falls over everything. Sam Rockwell plays the multitalented Fosse with a surface smoothness that thinly veils an intensity that would define his work, all with a cigarette always hanging from his lips. We can’t help but be drawn to him, even if we can’t pinpoint exactly why.
The show goes through both of their backstories, but Fosse’s is the most abnormal. As a teenager, he danced at cheap burlesque strip clubs at late hours and was molested by middle-aged strippers who used him like a toy while his mother naively thought none of the grime would rub off on her little Bobby. It informed his dark, cynical worldview that came through all of his work. It’s also probably how he learned his manipulative nature.
While Fosse was a known womanizer, going too far on several occasions (one such incident is detailed in an early episode of Fosse/Verdon that ended with a knee to his groin). But it went behind that in many ways. Wasson details how Fosse was a master manipulator, especially with women, on the productions he directed and choreographed, pitting actresses against one another, leading to hurt feelings and heated rivalries and jealous. He often levied these intense feelings and exhausting hours into sexual relationships and threesomes. He had his girlfriends and wives, demanding they stay exclusively to him while he could sleep with anyone he wanted.
He was a talent vampire, of sorts, too. One of the crux issues in the show is that Fosse attached himself to talented people, especially women, and drained them of their abilities to adapt into his own. Verdon could never manage to escape him, as he continuously went back to her for his big projects, taking her feedback and style, and then eventually pushed her out of their dream project, Chicago, when he saw the opportunity.
The film that introduced me to Fosse, All That Jazz, was a testament to this. It was a biographical film about a womanizing director who pushed himself way beyond the limits (though he would profusely deny it was about him), and many of the friends he knew and people he worked with were shocked at characters that were clearly based on them and how he portrayed their roles in his life.
While there’s no major, legacy destroying scandal surrounding Bob Fosse (at least yet, God only knows nowadays), by most accounts he was a pretty miserable person. While those who knew him may disagree, I obviously never met Fosse, it’s hard not to read Wasson’s book or watch Fosse/Verdon, or All That Jazz for that matter, and not see that this man was a deeply manipulative narcissist who drained the life out of most of those around him.
And yet, we still celebrate him, and those far worse, many years after this is all common knowledge.
Fosse/Verdon doesn’t position itself as a celebration of the man. It does go into the flaws of the real human being that was Bob Fosse, along with Gwen Verdon who was manipulative in her own way as she couldn’t quite let go of the spotlight. Yet, we still have some lavish, quasi-surreal dance and singing numbers reminiscent of Fosse and his iconic style throughout the show. Much like how Fosse himself couldn’t help but self-indulge in his own brilliance with All That Jazz, Fosse/Verdon can’t help itself but dip its toes in that genius that was Fosse even as it deconstructs the man’s life and career.
There’s always the idea of separating art from artist, but the two are intertwined in this case, and I think it’s more complicated than that.
Years after Bob Fosse’s death, Ann Reinking (his former lover and appointed ‘protector’ of his style) helped organized a show simply called Fosse. It was a tribute show featuring numbers from his work. It was a decent romp, but there was something missing. No offence to Reinking or anyone else involved, they did their best, but it lacked a certain pop, a certain flash, and a certain darkness that only Fosse could bring. No one else can be him, even the best of imitators can only be imitators.
Therein lies the addiction we have to that genius.
I’m talking primarily about Bob Fosse here, but as I mentioned before there’s people out there that are far worse that tend to get overlooked so we can get another shot of that genius when the chance arises. Because once it’s gone, it’s gone for good and we’ll never get another new bump. And like any drug, there is only so many times you can revisit something old before it loses just a small bit of that kick.
But that’s life, and one of the things that Bob Fosse understood so well both as an artist and as a person. Life always dulls and there’s that never-ending desire for something new, and genius can provide that something just a little new, that small dose of some separate reality from the normal, the average, and you know, all that jazz.