Choreographer, dancer and their relationship easily fill 8 hours

Choreographer, dancer and their relationship easily fill 8 hours
He was the famous choreographer and she was his interpreter, but the relationship between Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon was much more than that.
Married and the parents of a daughter, the pair set records with musicals like “Sweet Charity,” “Chicago” and “Damn Yankees.” And although they separated, they never divorced. Their love story is the subject of FX’s new eight-part series, “Fosse/Verdon,” premiering Tuesday.
The producers enjoyed a triple advantage in creating the show: They had Sam Wasson’s book, “Fosse”; the couple’s daughter, Nicole Fosse, now 56; and Fosse’s autobiographical movie, “All That Jazz,” to work from.
But Nicole Fosse says the film depicts only a partial truth.
“‘All That Jazz’ was his version,” she said. “I mean, he never claimed it to be autobiographical. It’s sort of a bit of a whitewashed, sort of romanticized version of his life. I think this really goes much more deeply into what was really going on in his relationships with Gwen and all of the people in his life. And you get eight hours of this, that story. ‘All That Jazz,’ was told in an hour and 45 minutes."
The series stars Sam Rockwell as Fosse and Michelle Williams as Verdon. Rockwell said Fosse was a tricky role to play.
“He’s a very complex guy, Bob. I think that there’s maybe a little bit of narcissism, but it’s also ... I think a very kind man; a very charming man. But I think there was an addictive thing with him. And Gwen was obviously his muse. And Ben Vereen was one of his muses, and Ann Reinking.”
Reinking, also a dancer, was one of the women who supplanted Verdon in Fosse’s affections. While Fosse was quixotic and a philanderer, Verdon never gave up on him, explained executive producer Steven Levenson (“Masters of Sex”).
“This really becomes the story of this marriage, which never actually ended,” he said. “Bob Fosse actually died in Gwen Verdon’s arms on the way to the opening night of ‘Sweet Charity,’ the revival in Washington, D.C.”
Executive producer Thomas Kail, who directed “Hamilton” on Broadway, said the series was a chance "to address the narrative of the lone genius and to try to look beyond that and see what’s happening — where your eye is not supposed to go."
“And it felt like this was a couple, it was certainly maybe the most crystallized example of that kind of collaboration of a woman who, in her prime, was the greatest dancer of her generation, of a young man who wanted to be Fred Astaire, and then was not allowed to be Fred Astaire," he said. "And he found her. They found each other. And watching that partnership evolve as he started to accelerate, as she had to find a different way to grapple with something that I think is very human, what the dancer does often grapple with, which is, who are you when you can’t do the thing that defined you?
“So the dancer dies twice. They die when they stop dancing, and they die when they die. And that was something that felt really rich for us to explore.”