One singular sensation
By: Jorge Mourinha
Tags: Broadway, Miniseries, Film, Television

One singular sensation

FOSSE/VERDON isn’t about Broadway, but an impressionistic, absorbing take on life as art and art as life, told like a fragmented sensory puzzle

FOSSE/VERDON, US 2019, 8 episodes. Starring Sam Rockwell, Michelle Williams, Norbert Leo Butz and Margaret Qualley. Developed by Steven Levenson and Thomas Kail from the book FOSSE by Sam Wasson. FX Networks

Yes, I know, I’m being evil. One singular sensation is the opening line from One, a song from A Chorus Line, the musical that opened opposite Chicago in the mid-seventies Broadway, out-earned it, out-Tony-ed it and out-ran it.

Maybe a better title should have been All That Jazz — but Bob Fosse himself already laid claim to it for his 1979 openly-but-not-quite-semi-auto-biographical film.

Fosse/Verdon doesn’t dwell for too long on All That Jazz. It doesn’t particularly need to; by then the partnership-slash-marriage between dancer/choreographer/director Bob Fosse and dancer/actress/singer Gwen Verdon had pretty much run its course, after a pretty long run that reached its end in 1975 with Chicago, the John Kander/Fred Ebb musical whose rights she had secured and held on to for years, so she could star in it and he could direct it.

Fosse and Verdon, who married in 1960 and separated in 1971, were a Broadway thing; they first worked together in 1955 on Damn Yankees, followed by the lesser-known New Girl in Town (1958) and Redhead (1959) and reaching its apex in 1966’s Fellini variation Sweet Charity, with a book by Neil Simon. But when Yankees was filmed in 1958 Verdon was directed by Stanley Donen and George Abbott, and when Fosse filmed Charity in 1969, Shirley MacLaine took the lead.

Sam Rockwell as Bob Fosse and Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon. Credit: FX Networks

So Broadway is where the heart of Steven Levenson and Thomas Kail’s eight-part FX mini-series, based on Sam Wasson’s biography Fosse, is: on Broadway, on stage, under the lights. Only for Fosse and Verdon all the world was a stage — or, the other way around, was it the stage that was all the world?

Portraying Fosse, under the traits of Sam Rockwell, as perfectionist, stubborn, insecure and simultaneously cocksure of itself, Fosse/Verdon does not have an opinion on whether the choreographer’s work as a film director held up to his Broadway productions or vice-versa; quality and success are never predictors of each other. But the stage remains purely in the memories of those who attended a performance (the series’ end credits refer to the stage choreographies presented throughout as “reconstructed”), whereas his five feature films traveled the world (none more so than 1972’s Academy Award-winning Cabaret) and are still remembered.

What is certain is that this is a story that could not be compressed in the tight time frame of a feature film. Fosse/Verdon needed a longer expanse, following a fragmented chronology that has the 1969 film version of Sweet Charity as starting point and Fosse’s 1987 death from a heart attack as endpoint, with an inventive rewind/fast-forward structure that fills in the blanks as required. And it’s also a story that is not your traditional biographical portrait of an artist.

If anything, it’s the portrait of a creative relationship that remains unequalled between a director/choreographer and an actress/dancer that literally seemed made for one another and never scaled the same heights on their own, an irony that is not lost on the characters themselves. Verdon (Michelle Williams) points out often how her own career was put on hold on his behalf —helping Fosse on the film sets of Sweet Charity and Cabaret, sharing him with the editing of Lenny so that she could get Chicago going; Fosse is constantly doubting his own abilities to get the work done until she shows up on set or on rehearsal to boost him and lift him up. Verdon never had much of a career outside her work with him (six major Broadway roles in 20 years, and half a dozen supporting film roles other than her Damn Yankees lead), and though his was more visible he didn’t have much of a career either (a dozen stage productions and five feature films in 25 years). But they both knew that only they could bring the best out of each other.

Sam Rockwell as Bob Fosse and Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon. Credit: FX Networks

In Kail and Levenson’s telling, these two monsters of the American musical theatre could also be monstrous human beings, to each other and to those they loved. It’s not surprising, not only because talent doesn’t tend to apologize for being talented or rude, but also because beasts can smell their own kind. Both shared hard-scrabble post-Depression childhoods with hard-luck families who didn’t really protect them, before taking their fates in their own hands. Gwen could “speak Bob” (as she tells producer Cy Feuer, played by Paul Reiser, on the set of Cabaret) and that’s why she could soften his abrasiveness; Bob could see Gwen and ask her to do the unthinkable for the sake of the work (as in the reworked Chicago ending designed as a solo for Gwen that he changed into a duet because that’s what the piece demanded).

Together, Bob and Gwen thrived under pressure until they finally couldn’t anymore; and Fosse/Verdon portrays the relationship as a puzzle whose edges are shown from the start, but where the missing pieces keep filling in details until the very end.

In part, that’s due to the wonderfully matched give-and-take performances by Williams (a combination of guts, slyness and trouper-wrapped frailty) and Rockwell (all wired, nervous energy coupled with an almost unwitting weariness). In part, it’s also due to the nifty structural tricks of the episodes — the constant callbacks to the door-knocking that opens the film, the undefined title cards that replace actual dates with the time to and from key events in the couple’s lives, the lightning-quick flashback inserts that don’t always lead in to actual flashbacks, the abrupt, jarring transitions between time frames in between episodes.

Sam Rockwell as Bob Fosse and Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon. Credit: FX Networks

Impressionistic in nature, Fosse/Verdon is layered in a way that attempts to understand the deeper connection between life and art beyond the usual cliches of artist biographies. Yes, Fosse always made a point of basing his art on life, his or anyone else’s available, and his life could not exist without his art. It shows towards the end of the series, when a seemingly small intimate moment with his daughter Nicole becomes fodder for a scene in All That Jazz. And yet, no one would deny how the art and the life enriched and affected each other. One singular sensation, every little step she takes, one thrilling combination. The rest, as they say, is all that jazz.