New FX show explores the relationship between Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon.
Choreographer Bob Fosse, Broadway performer Gwen Verdon and their daughter, Nicole Fosse, at the Tavern on the Green in New York’s Central Park in 1978. By Sarah L. Kaufman Sarah L. Kaufman Dance critic covering arts and entertainment Email Bio Follow April 5 at 8:00 AM Nicole Fosse, the daughter of obsessive, trailblazing director and choreographer Bob Fosse and legendary Broadway dancer Gwen Verdon, grew up in rehearsal studios and smoke-filled editing rooms.
Nothing stopped them, not Fosse’s pill habit, depression or heart attacks. Not his revolving bedroom door or the collapse of their marriage. Artistic partners from the 1950s through the 1980s , they threw boozy parties, had fascinating friends and cherished their bright, spunky daughter. But candor wasn’t their strength.
It occurs in the 1953 Cole Porter musical “Can-Can,” on Broadway, a role that took the young, ambitious Verdon away from the baby son she’d had with her first husband, a reporter. On opening night, her bawdy, sensual heat and supreme dance finesse stopped the show. The audience erupted, and Verdon, who was changing for her next number, was dragged from her dressing room in a towel to acknowledge the ovation.
Verdon was suddenly a star, recognized on the streets of New York, and with that came the pressure to perform offstage, too. In public, even for a trip to the deli for bagels, she wore makeup and heels, always “Gwen Verdon,” Fosse recalls, her voice putting the name quotes. To escape that continuous pressure, sometimes her mother would rely on a little deception, with a different kind of performance.
That leads Fosse to a second, more difficult scene in a later episode of “Fosse/Verdon” — when Bob Fosse ends up at a psychiatric hospital in 1973. He’d just won an Oscar for directing “Cabaret.” He also had three Emmys and two Tonys that year. Depression dogged him throughout his career; now it overwhelmed him.
She lets out an ironic laugh, perfectly timed; it sounds like the wry amusement her father turned into a style. A thoughtful re-creation If Nicole Fosse’s voice is the soul of the Fosse-Verdon partnership, Andy Blankenbuehler, the choreographer, spotlights the body. His job was to get Williams and Rockwell to move like credible dance artists, at least in small glimpses, and to teach them how Bob Fosse broke the body up into pieces, with a leg going this way and the hips that way, and maybe an arm up but the head down.
For the TV series, Blankenbuehler devised what he calls “a hodgepodge” of Fosse’s choreography. He didn’t re-create numbers step for step.
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