Slick, Sassy, Borrowed and Blue

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Broadway has been hungering for a hit musical. The last real blockbuster, La Cage aux Folles, opened in August 1983. The lone musical survivor of the 1984-85 season, Big River, is still paying back its investors. Of this season's first nine musicals, five have closed, and only The Mystery of Edwin Drood consistently shows a modest profit. So perhaps the most eagerly awaited event of the Broadway year was last week's Big Deal, a splashy, sassy, streetwise show from Bob Fosse. As choreographer or director, Fosse, 58, staged ten consecutive hits, from 1955's Pajama Game to 1978's Dancin'. Since Gower Champion's death in 1980 and Harold Prince's semiretirement after the 1985 fiasco Grind, Fosse has stood alone in his capacity to make movement seem magic. On the strength of his name, ticket buyers gave Big Deal a $1.5 million advance. The Shubert Organization invested $1.1 million co-producing the spectacle and an additional $7.5 million renovating its showcase, the Broadway Theater. With one more musical scheduled before the season ends May 1--Fosse's own revival of his 1966 hit Sweet Charity, starring Debbie Allen--Big Deal looked like everybody's best prospect for a big winner.

The reality proved less seductive than the dream. On the plus side, Big Deal is slick, melodic, harddriving and thoroughly professional. There are nearly two dozen numbers, each with a precise character. The first act is a triumph. The second act unravels and gets sidetracked in silly fantasy sequences, yet is never less than fun. The singers' voices could not be much better.

The main complaint about Big Deal is that for every element that is new, there is something old, something borrowed and something very blue. The plot, about an amiable gang of two-bit black crooks trying to burgle a Chicago pawnshop, is adapted from a 1958 Italian film, Big Deal on Madonna Street. Fosse, who wrote the book, stubbornly resisted advice to simplify the narrative, prune out tasteless jokes involving a urinal and a simulated oral- sex act, add more dance and brighten what he admitted was a "melancholy" ending. The score, too, is recycled: standards from the '20s and '30s have been wittily reconsidered by Fosse and bewitchingly orchestrated by Ralph Burns. I've Got a Feelin' You're Foolin' is sung by a judge to two defendants telling an unlikely tale. Everybody Loves My Baby becomes a father's high- energy romp about his infant son. One number is an instant classic: the upbeat Ain't We Got Fun is rendered with icy irony by a prison-yard crew. Their chant is slow and syncopated, with beats of silence between syllables to underscore the sarcasm; their steps are punctuated by the swish and rattle of chains. The costumes display Fosse trademarks: white gloves, hats, spangled tuxedos. So do the dances, with their hip and shoulder rolls, backward exits and slithering one-hand gestures down the torso. The first-act climax, a mob convulsion set to Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar, recaps the form-in- formlessness trick that Fosse calls "the amoeba." His sultry sexual trio for Me and My Shadow derives from his Tony-winning Steam Heat for Pajama Game.

Cleavant Derricks, who won a Tony in the show-business musical Dreamgirls, finds a kind of heroism as Big Deal's hapless gang leader, a onetime boxer who keeps getting knocked down by life and rising to scrabble anew. His Dreamgirls partner Loretta Devine brings off an almost impossible mix as a housemaid duped into abetting the robbery: she is sexy, touchingly innocent, screamingly funny and, perhaps most astonishing in a feminist era, inoffensively but decisively dumb.

In 1973 Fosse won the Emmy for directing Liza Minnelli's special Liza with a "Z," the Tony for directing Pippin and the Oscar for directing Cabaret. Since that still unmatched feat, he has tested his writing talents in film, with the semiautobiographical All That Jazz, and onstage, with the bookless Dancin' and now the book-heavy Big Deal. Broadway should admire all that daring. Big Deal is not his best work, but it is a powerful reminder that Fosse set the standards others still strive for.

With reporting by Cathy Booth and Jeanne McDowell/New York