Fosse (76 page)

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
Michael 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
while
s,
however
s,
we believe
s. 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?”

W
HEN 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 every 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.

“
Big Deal
was ahead of its time,”
Kathryn Doby said. “It was cut like a movie with a multilayered setup in the right and up in the left. He’d do a big number on the main part of the stage and then have something going on up in one of the corners. You couldn’t focus fast enough to get to all of those different places. On a movie, you could do that. But onstage, he hadn’t figured out how.” E. L. Doctorow saw the makings of a new form. He explained, “What he did was compose a folk opera
in operatic time using the found materials of American standards.” Not quite sung through,
Big Deal
is not quite danced through either, which is to say it’s almost a folk opera, almost a jazz ballet, and, saturated in cinematic visual and audio techniques, almost a movie—an epic multifront assault on the Broadway musical, like
Dreamgirls.
But where Bennett founded his vision on flesh-and-blood characters, Fosse’s people are soft pretexts for song and dance. To hold up all the music and moving around—far more than any other Fosse musical—he needed a stronger book.

Ticket sales stayed low, but there was solace in history: A Bob Fosse show had never flopped on Broadway.
The Conquering Hero
was de-Fosse’d before it opened, and
Pleasures and Palaces
closed out of town, which was another thing entirely—that’s what going out of town was for. Every other Fosse show had gone on to be a hit, save for
Little Me,
which went on to be a classic. Showing their faith, Schoenfeld and Jacobs went the
Pippin
route, buying up commercial airtime on TV. But the
Big Deal
spots, directed and edited by Fosse, produced tepid results. Some hoped the strong opening of
Sweet Charity
at the Minskoff could reroute attention to
Big Deal
at the Broadway Theater; failing that, its surprise five Tony nominations might help, or perhaps even
Sweet Charity
’s five.

Oddly, the combined total of ten nominations encouraged an alternate reading of 1986, heralding Fosse as a kind of king, if only by default (who else was there?). And Fosse won best choreography for
Big Deal,
and
Charity
took best revival, leading people to wonder where, exactly, his career was heading. Were things slightly better than they seemed? Or were these Tonys, like certain lifetime achievement honors, a good way to say goodbye? Two days later, the answer came. Happy from the win, clumps of
Big Deal
dancers arrived at the Broadway Theater to find the notice had been posted.
Some said the Shuberts had hastened the closing to make way for the highly anticipated show to follow—
Les Misérables.

On closing night, June 8, 1986, Gwen came with Nicole and handfuls
of veteran Fosse dancers. The audience met “Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar)” with a standing ovation nearly three minutes long, and onstage, the dancers broke their final poses to embrace one another. Some in the back yelled out, “One more time!,” and soon the whole theater was chanting, “One more time! One more time!” At the end of the evening, when the curtain finally came down, a young man appeared at the front of the house, a rose in hand. He placed it on the lip of the stage, turned to face the applause, and left the Broadway Theater. At barely seventy performances,
Big Deal
—a Bob Fosse show—had flopped on Broadway.

He threw a thank-you/goodbye party at Quogue, hiring a boat, putting up a volleyball net, and laying out his traditional fabulous spread. The dance studio Fosse turned into a kind of museum, hanging pictures from the show. All generations of Fosse dancers and collaborators were invited, for they were also there to celebrate stage manager Phil Friedman’s retirement after forty years in the theater, thirty of them with Fosse. Despite the valedictories, it was a joyous afternoon, free of sadness and pity. Friedman explained why: “You know how show folks are
when you haven’t seen each other for a long time. You pick up the friendship as if it were yesterday.” By the party’s end, the hundred had cleared out, and
Big Deal
’s Loretta Devine, Cleavant Derricks, and Valarie Pettiford found themselves at the front of the house,
lingering—when Fosse appeared to say a final goodbye. He was crying. “I wanted to make you all stars.
I really did. I feel”—his voice caught—“just so bad.”