Seamy and Steamy

By TERRY TEACHOUT

The old razzle-dazzler has done it again--posthumously. Eleven years after he dropped dead of a heart attack at 60, Bob Fosse has two shows running side by side on Broadway. Fosse, a retrospective of dances from such musicals as Sweet Charity, Damn Yankees and The Pajama Game, opened last week right next door to the long-running revival of Chicago, the 1975 show that sealed Fosse's reputation as the most gifted musical-comedy director of his generation. Not bad for a self-doubting perfectionist who, even though he was the only person ever to win an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy in the same season (in 1973, for Cabaret, Pippin and Liza with a "Z"), never quite managed to shake off the nagging suspicion that he was merely a purveyor of glitzy trash.

Fosse may be glitzy, but it is also an inevitable hit, a galvanizing eruption of energy, panache and arrogantly sure-footed stagecraft that comes at a time when theatrical dance is in the doldrums. There hasn't been anything like it in years--10 years, to be exact, for it was in 1989 that Jerome Robbins put his ballet career on hold to direct Jerome Robbins' Broadway, a song-and-dance spectacular that theater buffs still recall with awe. The comparison is inescapable: Fosse was the only other Broadway choreographer with anything like Robbins' stylistic individuality and clarity of purpose, and he has had no successors.

To be sure, a few contemporary dance directors are doing compelling work. Rob Marshall's sardonic numbers in Cabaret are proof of that. But far more revealing was the failure of the latest revival of On the Town, which closed this week after just 65 performances. It says everything about the current state of dance on Broadway that one of the great dance shows of the '40s (and, ironically, Robbins' very first musical) should be sunk a half-century later by the lackluster choreography of Broadway neophyte Keith Young. No less illustrative of the dearth of fresh blood is the fact that Chicago's dances were staged not by a promising new face but by Ann Reinking, Fosse's former girlfriend, working "in the style of Bob Fosse."

Reinking also co-directed and co-choreographed Fosse, although she had plenty of help. Richard Maltby Jr., who created Ain't Misbehavin', was largely responsible for shaping the production and is billed as its director, while Chet Walker "re-created" the choreography. All three share credit for having "conceived" the show, which originated five years ago in a series of classes on Fosse's dance style taught by Walker and Gwen Verdon, Fosse's ex-wife and the original star of many of his most successful shows (Sweet Charity, Chicago). Exactly who did exactly what will surely be the subject of endless journalistic postmortems, but in the end it doesn't matter. Fosse is all Fosse. No one else could have dreamed up those waggling fingers and twitching shoulders--and no one else would have dared to impose so bleak a vision of human desire on the traditionally cheery world of Broadway dance.

Like most choreographers, Fosse spun his idiosyncratic moves out of the peculiarities of his own body. "He was a bit bent and crooked by nature," recalls Reinking, "and somewhat pigeon-toed." The style that resulted, says Fosse dance captain Brad Musgrove, was the antithesis of the expansive approach of classical ballet: "It's all turned in. You're knock-kneed, you roll over on your ankles, you're sitting into your hip, you're arching your back, the elbows are in, the wrists are flexed. You have to work exactly the opposite from the way you're trained."

Some of the company's best dancers, interestingly, have a ballet background. Desmond Rich-ardson, formerly with Alvin Ailey and now a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, tears up the joint in Percussion 4, while Elizabeth Parkinson, an ex-Joffrey ballerina with legs as long as War and Peace, is volcanically sexy in Sing, Sing, Sing. But the Broadway gypsies are just as satisfying, especially Jane Lanier and Scott Wise, who bring welcome warmth to Fosse without compromising its essential tough mindedness.

If Fosse had a pop-culture counterpart, it was Billy Wilder, Hollywood's cynic in chief. Indeed, his Double Indemnity would have made a perfect Fosse show, for both men were drawn to seamy stories like a fly to manure: Sweet Charity is about a prostitute manque, Chicago two murderesses, and the film version of Cabaret, Fosse's greatest achievement, is a veritable saturnalia of sexual variation. And while the fatalistic Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries is Fosse's unlikely theme song, some of the cherries in this particular bowl are unnervingly sour. Robbins and Fred Astaire may have been Fosse's idols, but he had none of their open-hearted romanticism. Instead, he crammed his dances full of sexual imagery so harsh and loveless that you can't help wondering what made him so successful a womanizer.

Fosse is not completely without heart; Mr. Bojangles, in which Sergio Trujillo gracefully portrays an aged, down-at-heels dancer, is genuinely moving. In general, though, the show's rare lyric moments are as unconvincing as the synthesized string sounds that swirl out of the orchestra pit in I Wanna Be a Dancin' Man. For all its compulsive flair, Fosse is cold and enigmatic at the core, as glittering as a perfect diamond--and hard enough to cut glass. What makes it work is its maker's willingness to stare into the abyss, backed up by the taut, pellucid brilliance of the company's dancing, Andrew Bridge's vibrant lighting and the perfect set and costumes of Santo Loquasto, who has conjured up a hundred clever variations on Fosse's beloved basic black.

It may well be that Fosse's dark sensibility will prove even better suited to the '90s than it was to the '70s. How else to explain why theatergoers are cheering a plotless show without a single love song, an evening-long shudder of disillusion in which the women are hookers, the men pimps and the audience voyeurs, gazing raptly at one primal scene after another? You'll hoot at the zany antics of Steam Heat and weep over the sweet sentimentality of Mr. Bojangles, but the picture that will stay in your mind longest is the sinister image of a pencil-thin dancer dressed in black, arms held close to his body, with a bowler hat pulled low over his eyes so that nobody can see who he really is.

--With reporting by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York