Fosse

by Wasson, Sam

  Fosse asked Allen to run it again. She began. Then he stopped her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m dancing.”

  “That’s not dancing.”

  “It’s not?”

  “What are you saying with this dance?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean story.” He got up. “Let me show you.”

  One dancer recalled, “He did the whole dance, every movement, and as he was doing it, he said, aloud, every piece of the story. I can’t believe my luck . . . I’m going to see the girls . . . I’m going to tell them everything.”

  Fatigue alternately softened and exasperated him. “God, I can’t do this anymore,” he said aloud one day, seemingly with feeling. Speaking with Christopher Chadman before the show’s LA opening, he conceded, “Well, I’m probably not going to be around that much longer anyway.” The Fosse of the 1970s would have delivered similar remarks with a bitter flash. In the 1980s, he dropped them like feathers. Once hell-bent on souring Sweet Charity, Fosse now lightened the ending, one of the show’s cruelest moments. “It used to get a little ugly,” said Michael Rupert, the new Oscar, “and people would be turned off, start to hate Oscar. Bobby didn’t want that.” Far slighter than Verdon or MacLaine, the easygoing Debbie Allen brought 1985’s Sweet Charity closer to the sort of musical-comedy cheer Fosse’s 1960s self had tried to avoid. “Everyone seems a little younger and nicer than in previous Sweet Charity casts,” noted the Los Angeles Times, “adding a certain freshness to the cynicism without which no Bob Fosse musical would be complete.”

  While on Sweet Charity, dancer Tanis Michaels, who had fallen ill years earlier, on the road tour of Dancin’, was diagnosed with AIDS. Most of the Charity company knew about AIDS from reading the headlines and hearing rumors from friends, but at that time, so early in the epidemic, few had had any personal contact with it, and even fewer understood the facts. Crucial details were unavailable—save for one: it meant death. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Donna McKechnie said. “It was like a black wave poured over us.” Keeping victims from emergency care, abandoning them in dishonor and neglect, President Reagan refused to publicly acknowledge the AIDS crisis, perpetuating the lie of a gay cancer, leaving open the door to ignorance and allowing death to spread. “By the time I was thirty-nine years old,” dancer James Horvath said, “I had buried a hundred and eight people. And these were my friends. There were weeks when we were losing five or six people.” Afraid for their own safety and feeling guilty for being afraid, the Sweet Charity company held on to Michaels in confusion and love. Could they wash their clothes with his? Was it okay if they danced with him? Could he dance? “Cast members would drink out of Budweiser bottles, and so Tanis had his own Budweiser bottle,” recalled Bebe Neuwirth. “He had his own prop, which must have been really, really devastating for him.” Michaels, on his day off, would go for radiation treatment. “He would come back the next day,” Lanier said, “and his tongue was severely burned and swollen. It was horrible, but he never complained and would dance full out.” Days after Sweet Charity opened, on July 25, 1985, Rock Hudson issued a press release from Paris—he had AIDS. Reagan’s first mention of the disease was still months away, but Hudson’s revelation had an immediate impact, generating worldwide attention and transforming the perception of AIDS from an exotic, shameful condition to an immediate threat, dangerous to all. Michaels was given three months to live, but Fosse refused to take him out of the show. “Because Bob said yes to Tanis, I think more of us did too,” said dancer Fred Mann III. “He made it okay, for all of us, and somehow for Tanis too. He let him work.”

  Where once he fought for cynicism, the Fosse of Big Deal defended his innocence. Six months before he began casting, he met with Gordon Harrell as he had on Dancin’ to talk songs. Their long list of Depression-era standards included “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” “Pick Yourself Up,” “Ain’t We Got Fun?,” and “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which Fosse intended to update with an electronic score. Andrew Lloyd Webber had been composing electronically for well over a decade, but building a whole show on synthesizers was something else entirely—and not entirely welcome. “We used six synthesizers in the pit,” Phil Ramone explained. “The musicians union called me up on charges of taking away work from the musicians. But these were sound effects. They weren’t replacing what a band or orchestra would do. It was like what they used to do on old radio shows: squeaky doors, slides, foot patters, rain.” Electronic capability allowed Fosse to mix audio on Broadway the way he had in films. “Even though the unions were against it, he was afraid not to break tradition,” Ramone said. “He wanted to use sound like Big Deal were a live-action movie.” He put speakers in the back of the house, creating cinematic surround sound live in the theater.

  With as many as forty-three separate scenes, the book demanded a cinematic treatment far in excess of the norm. If it could be accomplished, devising—through lighting, staging, and scenery—a means of “cutting” from one scene to the next would be a technical triumph, but Fosse imagined Big Deal to be more than merely film-like; he saw the show in his own film style, edited as if by Alan Heim. He spoke to designers Jules Fisher and Tony Walton in terms of crosscuts, close-ups, and fades. “I want the dissolves and softness you get in films,” he said, “instead of the usual musical comedy blackouts you get every time the curtain comes in.” To create the effect of a zoom, he would throw everything onstage into complete darkness save for a tiny follow spot on a little finger. With such a narrow margin for error, hitting those marks every time demanded total precision on all fronts. But even if Fisher and his team managed to execute Fosse’s hair-thin cues, they could not change the physical distance between the audience and the actor, as Fosse and Heim could on film. A spotlight might narrow the periphery like a zoom, but unlike a zoom, it did not appear to bring the subject closer to the audience. To compensate, Fosse rid his stage of as much scenery as possible. The darkness of near vacuity could be modeled like wet clay; with little to move, Fosse and Fisher could move quickly, modifying space and time as if they were making a film.

  Thus did Big Deal herald the supreme Fosse opus, a total fusion of his cinematic, theatrical, and literary selves, an all-in roulette of Wagnerian scope and Icarusian hubris—in other words, he was asking for trouble. “Big Deal turned people against him,” Tony Stevens remembered. “I visited him when he was starting to audition, and he knew what people [were] saying: that he couldn’t do it, that he shouldn’t do it. I asked him why he was doing it and before he could answer he was overtaken by all this horrible coughing and then he lit another cigarette and said, ‘That’s why.’ He was running out of time.” Scared and indignant, Fosse went back and forth, letting his antagonists in, blocking them out, throwing in the towel, then pushing up his sleeves. “At a certain point I feel, ‘I really don’t like what’s around, so I’ll go out and show ’em.’ Then I think, ‘They’ll chop off my head, so why should I?’ And I think, ‘I know who and what I am. Why do I have to go out there and have them say either the terrible things or the good things? Why?’”

  Auditions and callbacks lasted through November. The recent close of Dreamgirls—an undeniable hit after four years on Broadway—freed up stars Cleavant Derricks and Loretta Devine for major roles, and as many as eight hundred others sang and danced for Fosse and casting director Howard Feuer over four long days. “If you know a dancer that’s a little off their game today,” he whispered to dance captain Valarie Pettiford, “tell me, and I’ll try to keep them as long as possible.”

  For six weeks, Fosse rehearsed his cast at the Minskoff Rehearsal Studios, a fourteen-thousand-square-foot space of eight interconnecting studios three floors above midtown Broadway. Rising costs in the Times Square area—once a bargain basement of porno theaters and boarded-up lofts—had priced most rehearsal spaces out of the neighborhood.

  It was a telling metaphor. The only comparable rehearsal venue still in use was Mi
chael Bennett’s storied 890 Broadway, a luxurious downtown complex of bright air-conditioned dance and office spaces, referred to simply as Michael’s. But that too was losing time. After years of workshops, Bennett mysteriously pulled the plug on Scandal, the musical he had intended to be his next. Soon thereafter, a heart ailment reportedly forced Bennett to withdraw from Chess, which he was preparing for London’s West End. Concerns about the fate of Bennett—and his building—followed close behind.

  Big Deal with a tight back brace under a baggy shirt. “I can hardly move,” he said. “I can’t even tie my own shoes.” When he got up to make adjustments, his troupe’s muscles clenched in sympathetic pain. But no one spoke of it. Airing his agony could panic the dancers, the Shuberts, and the press, and likely slow the rehearsal process, which, bulging with the weight of two dozen performers, many of them principals, already asked of Fosse more time than he could afford to give. “He had such a big principal cast on Big Deal,” Diana Laurenson said, “he’d put us ensemble kids in a room with his two assistants for three days and tell us to figure out something for ‘Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar)’ and he’d give us a few ideas—smoky, thirties, late at night dance club, we’re dancehall patrons already clubbing, showing off—and three days later he’d come back and say, ‘Show me what you got,’ and each one of us, as individuals, put choreography into the number. Bob would say, ‘I like that, change that, add this, do that . . .’”He took dance notes in nine-by-seven-inch composition books tabbed with song titles, one for each act. Stick-figuring had been a part of Fosse’s practice for decades, but never before had he titled a notebook “Steps???” On Big Deal, his uncertainty was contagious. Dancer Stephanie Pope said, “The ensemble didn’t know what was going on, if there were meetings or what.” Full afternoons were spent in waiting. Some sensed Fosse had finally scraped the barrel bottom of his own style; that Chicago, a full decade in the past, had taken his minimalism to its farthest point, and Dancin’ had accomplished the opposite. Creating, from scratch, a wholly new dance vocabulary required more of Fosse than he had to give, especially now that there was no Fred Ebb to revise the book. It was all on Fosse. Once or twice, his back went out and he was carried from the studio on a stretcher.

  Christopher Chadman called Candy Brown; after years of working at Fosse’s side, Chadman was quick to recognize the decline. “Candy,” he said. “We got the best of Bob.”

  In February, they transferred to Boston. “It’s an absolute nightmare of a technical show,” Fosse admitted. Maneuvering over sixty microphones, a low-light scheme verging on darkness, and Big Deal’s centerpiece—a movable platform of hydraulic bridges continually reshaping stage space and time as in a motion picture—Fosse met his match. The book, meanwhile, needed serious attention. Fosse’s characterizations ran thin, and his jokes crossed the lowbrow line. The intrusion of not one but two narrators, rather than smoothing the story, slowed it; four fantasy sequences expunged the urgency from the climax; and at two dozen numbers, Big Deal outstayed its welcome. Herb Gardner kindly encouraged Fosse to drop some of the peeing, nose-picking, and blowjob jokes, and Neil Simon came to Boston to write new scenes. But Fosse only half listened—to them and to the critics. “If it’s a screw-up,” he said, “it’s all my screw-up.” The Boston opening, Fosse claimed, marked only his third time seeing the show in full—it sputtered together that slowly—an indication that, although time was running out, it was still too early to cut. So he cut fractions, seconds, individual lines. “I’ve made a tremendous amount of changes,” he told a Boston reporter, and then in the next breath, “I’ve taken about ten minutes off.” It had little effect. The show—all five million dollars of it—wasn’t selling.

  At some point before the show arrived in New York, Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernie Jacobs put their panic and frustration into a three-page low boil of whiles, howevers, we believes. It made Fosse sick. His Edward Hopper–like effects were stunning, they wrote; however, they were too dark to see. He had a gift for underscore, but they didn’t believe there was enough. No one put buttons on numbers better than Bob Fosse; but any more would diminish the show’s energy. And: “Could you possibly choreograph an acrobatic dance number which could be a sure show-stopper?” Hidden in their Shubertese were more than a few good points, but Fosse was too outraged to parse them. For advice, he went to everyone else.

  “I don’t think they like it,” he confessed to Diana Laurenson. “Do you think they like it? Do you think this is going well? I don’t think this is going well.”

  To pianist Don Rebic: “People are telling me it’s too dark. Do you think it’s too dark? I don’t think it’s too dark.”

  Wayne Cilento, warming up before the show, heard a knock at his door. In came Fosse. “Keep going,” Fosse said.

  Head down, Fosse shuffled to Cilento’s dressing table and took a seat. “What do you think we should do about the second act? Is the robbery too long? It’s too long, isn’t it?” Cilento agreed; something was off about it. Despite all the activity, despite the guys sliding down cables into the pit and through the basement, yes, the robbery was anticlimactic. The audience waits and waits and waits for it, then it comes, and it’s long. Cilento said they might try it like a music video, with constant dancing. Fosse said nothing. Then: “Do you think that would work?”

  He had been unwell for months. Reporting from Big Deal rehearsals, journalist Kevin Kelly described his reaction to the angina, the sequence of pain and its neglect: “Fosse makes a sudden gesture, his face creases in pain. He shakes his head, sucks his breath, shifts his weight on the chair. He mentions the heart attack that he presented in living color in All That Jazz. He cups his hand as though trapping motes of energy in his palm. He winces.” He would not discuss it.

  Back in New York, the West Coast production of Sweet Charity had come to the Minskoff Theater, the largest stage in New York. Previews were set to begin April 1. Big Deal opened on April 10.

  “He was in a hyperactive frenzy,” Big Deal musician Dan Wilensky said, “literally running from our show to [Sweet Charity]. It was insane.” Sometimes Fosse left his assistants to carry on the show until he came back; other times, they just had to wait—everyone did. Like a teacher called from the classroom, he’d fire off a round of directives as he zipped away, returning hours later to find the company had completed their assignment only shortly after he left. The Big Deal orchestra, waiting in the pit of the Broadway Theater, kept watch on the smoke cloud in the back of the house. Seeing it disperse, they knew they were alone. When it got big enough to distress the wind section, they knew he’d returned, but only briefly, and he was probably less patient than before. Perhaps accidentally, Big Deal’s God mic had a way of picking up insults. “He would go for the jugular,” Wilensky said, “really quickly, brutal and brief. Each instruction was very clear, and let’s just say powerfully worded with a fair amount of cussing and yelling, and then he’d go into a coughing fit, and his assistant would pick up from where he left off. Then, boom, we’d look up to see the cloud of smoke vanish, and he was gone, back to Sweet Charity.”

  The other woman, Sweet Charity, didn’t need his attention, but he ran to her anyway; some thought he was looking to escape.

  “What if it isn’t any good?”

  “Are you talking about the show downtown?” Chet Walker asked.

  “No, I’m talking about this.”

  They were at the Minskoff; it was Sweet Charity. “They really loved this show,” Fosse said.

  “They did.”

  “But what if they don’t anymore?”

  One Year

  WHEN THE CURTAIN came down on Big Deal’s opening night, Fosse knew where he stood. “The party after was not a pleasant experience,” Alan Heim remembered.

  Frank Rich’s review, a near-pan, read like a double eulogy, for Fosse’s show and the musical comedy. “If for only 10 minutes or so just before the end of Act I, Mr. Fosse makes an audience remember what is (and has been) missing from virtually eve
ry other musical in town.” Those delicious ten minutes, Fosse’s big, bashing “Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar),” Kathryn Doby called “ultimate Fosse, a minestrone of everything he knew, like Dancin’ condensed into a single number.” But like too many other numbers, “Beat Me Daddy” chose showcase over story. One couldn’t help but extrapolate as Rich had. No longer the hope, the lone exception to the rule, Fosse seemed representative, part of a slope, proof of the decline.

  Fosse’s defense never assumed a righteous or contrarian edge. “I heard about a couple of reviews,” he said, “and I thought, ‘Gee, maybe I have deluded myself. Maybe I have really kidded myself and haven’t seen it clearly.’ So after the opening, I didn’t see it for like two weeks. Then I went to see it again with this fear that I was going to see something that was bad which I had thought was good. And you know what? I liked it a lot. I was really proud of it.” It was Star 80 all over again. “He loved that show,” Ann Reinking said.