Fosse (75 page)

Reproducing the original dances down to the quickest twitch of the tiniest dancer in the farthest row, Fosse expert Christopher Chadman and Verdon kept 1985 looking like 1966. “Gwen had a photographic memory,”
Ann Reinking said. “It was unreal. She could tell you all the cues. She knew everything.” She was a library.
You’ll need to rest here; you’ll need to blow smoke up into the garment bag so it ricochets down here; you’ll need to breathe here.
Why did they need Fosse? He flew to LA to supervise the transition and then returned to New York.

Though
Sweet Charity
had done right by Fosse in the past, he had a great deal at stake in reviving it. He was thinking now as much about hits as he was about legacy, how—
if
—future generations of theatergoers would receive him. Of course,
The Pajama Game,
Damn Yankees,
and even
Little Me
had been revived, and
How to Succeed in Business
would forever be a touchstone of the American musical, but none of those claimed to be Fosse from the ankle up, inside and out, as
Sweet Charity
was. Classic status, if it could be conferred on
Charity,
would show Fosse razzle-dazzle to be, at last, more than razzle-dazzle—more than an extended fad. But no one could say for sure if
Sweet Charity
would work without Verdon in the leading role and twenty years later.

As planned, Fosse returned to LA early in June 1985 to put the finishing touches on the show
.
The day he arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, site of
Cabaret
’s Oscar sweep, his dancers bubbled like red-carpet movie fans watching the door of the longest limo as it begins to open. To this current crop of dancers, many of whom had grown up sleeping under
Charity
posters, Fosse was Elvis. And his name was synonymous with the kind of good, hard choreography that the Broadway of late, overrun by spectacle and expensive scenery, had almost abandoned. In 1985, for the first time in its thirty-nine-year history, the Tony nominating committee actually scrapped the award for best choreography (as well as the awards for best actor and best actress in a musical), leaving one to surmise that when Fosse and Bennett took off from Broadway, Broadway took off from dance.

Excitement was very high. Fosse took his seat beside Gwen, and
the
Charity
run-through started. But Verdon and Fosse were the real show that afternoon, drawing more attention, and more concern, than anything onstage. Watching them from the wings, dancer Jane Lanier remembered that Gwen seemed to experience the run-through as Charity, practically dancing the part in her seat. “She was going through everything Charity was
going through,” Lanier said. But Fosse didn’t move. In a matter of moments, word of his dissatisfaction filled the theater. Dancer Dana Moore recalled, “Fosse just sort of sat there,
his chin down, looking at us over the tops of his eyes, kind of nodding his head, sinking lower in his seat.” All the steps were there, the characters were there, but the burn was missing. Director John Bowab had missed the show’s innermost core, which gave
Charity
the air of nothing but an expert routine.

Act one ended. Fosse asked the stage manager to call for lunch—a break that went on a little too long to quell the worry. When the company returned to the theater, Fosse made no speeches, offered no explanations or pronouncements; he merely asked to see
Sweet Charity
from the top, and then proceeded to break it down, from scratch, one moment at a time. “After that day,” Moore said, “we never saw John Bowab again.”

It would take a Fosse, with his encyclopedic archive of erotic buttons, to push his dancers to the burn. “He followed me around as I was rehearsing [the Frug] and he would whisper suggestive or provocative questions in my ear while I was dancing,” Moore said. “It was to get me thinking about who I was and where I was and what my life was at that moment, [a reference to] something he learned about me the evening before.” As Gwen watched from the house, Fosse slid next to Mimi Quillin,
one of the “Big Spender” girls, and whispered, “Pick me, pick me, pick me,” in her ear. Then he turned her and made her say it, and mean it, back to his face. “I know that people think it’s strange
that I thought it was fun to watch Bob flirt with other women,” Gwen said, “but he would get so jaunty and he would do such funny things and—I mean, he could be fascinating and you could see the women going for it hook, line, and sinker. I mean, sometimes it was because they wanted a part in a movie, but in spite of that, they would start to be absolutely charmed by him . . .” His kind of sexy had to be got at indirectly; he didn’t tell them to seduce but to
expect
the seduction. He would say, “Don’t go to them, make them
come to you.” It’s in the eyes, not the groin, and it doesn’t ask to be wanted. It knows—it’s the Know. (“Bob is more sensual than sexual,” Reinking said. “It’s one of the biggest mistakes I see when people do Bob’s work.”)

Rebuilding the ensemble was only half of what Fosse needed to accomplish before he could open the show, two weeks after his arrival, on July 16, 1985. The other half—Debbie Allen’s performance—Fosse and Gwen revised in relative isolation. Her “If My Friends Could See Me Now” tested Allen and Fosse both; it had from the beginning
and would to the very end. When he first saw the number on Allen, Fosse snapped. “It’s awful!”
he said. “I didn’t choreograph
that!
” Verdon responded defensively, and, Quillin remembered, “It was like a fight was going to
break out.” But Fosse was reacting more to his work than hers. It had been twenty years since he’d taken the tweezers to
Charity.
Gwen might have predicted this sort of reaction, for large selections of his 1960s trunk occupied that transitional halfway between apprenticeship and maturity, before the watershed years of 1971 and 1972, when Fosse’s influences shone brightest. Showing both seed and bloom, “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This” (borrowed partially from
West Side Story
’s “America”), sections of “The Rich Man’s Frug” (thick with 1960s dance vogues), and the particularly frustrating “Rhythm of Life” (classic ensemble choreography by the yard), which had never satisfied him, described both how far he had come and how he’d gotten there. But “If My Friends Could See Me Now” was especially vexing. The number’s dense marriage of speed and emotional nuance—a sure thing for Verdon in her heyday—would be hard work for almost everyone else.

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?’”