Fosse/Verdon: Giving ‘em the Old Razzle-Dazzle

It’s no secret that I love musical theatre, whether on stage or on the screen. Thanks to the pandemic, I haven’t attended a stage musical since early in the year, and some of the award-winning productions to which I was enthusiastically looking forward are now, I guess you could say, gone with the wind. This past summer, the skillfully-made video version of Hamilton helped remind me how much I love literate stories that are fueled by song and dance. Basically, though, I’m reduced to watching old movies from my childhood in order to feed my theatregoing habit.

 But of course there’ve been some dividends from my recent hours of TV-watching. For one thing, I got to catch up with a mini-series that had always intrigued me. Fosse/Verdon first aired in eight parts on FX, beginning in the spring of 2019, back when the world was considerably saner than it is now. It’s a close-up look at two giants of stage and screen: director/choreographer Bob Fosse and his everloving wife, Gwen Verdon. I had read about the personal lives of these two—their turbulent marriage, Fosse’s chronic philandering along with  his dependence on drink and drugs, Verdon’s struggles to assert her independence of her spouse—in Sam Wasson’s excellent Fosse biography, published in 2013. But a book can’t convey the impact of Fosse’s landmark choreography, nor Verdon’s incandescent stage presence.

 Thanks to the well-staged mini-series I got to relive some of the pair’s theatrical highlights. These include Fosse creating Verdon’s sexy solos as the temptress Lola in Damn Yankees; Verdon communicating to the Sweet Charity taxi-dancers Fosse’s radical vision of the “Big Spender” number; Verdon flying to Berlin on short notice to help Fosse launch his screen directing career with Cabaret (and discovering upon arrival that he’s sleeping with someone else). One of my favorite moments shows how Verdon’s softer approach succeeds in conveying to performers the staging ideas that Fosse’s truculent manner can’t communicate. As she modestly explains it, “I just know how to speak Bob. It's my native tongue.”

 The acting is strong. I admired the highly malleable Sam Rockwell (credible here as the slim, graceful, and hugely troubled Fosse) and particularly Michelle Williams, who had me almost convinced she was the incarnation of the distinctive-looking and -sounding Verdon. The restaging of famous numbers was done with care and love. Only problem: the series tries too hard to emulate the funky surrealism of Fosse’s own semi-autobiographical film, All That Jazz. And, frankly, it’s easy to be weary of the usual showbiz tropes: the guy who craves fame but carelessly squanders his talent,  the co-dependent wife, even the adored  daughter – growing up too fast --who barely survives her parents’ legacy. (Nicole Fosse, now clean and sober, was a series producer.)  My favorite episode is one that focuses, for a change, on Verdon’s own life challenges. It  cleverly uses “Razzle Dazzle,” a song from her musical hit Chicago, to show her knowingly charming the head of an adoption agency when a natural-born baby doesn’t seem like a possibility.

 The timeline in the mini-series is creatively scrambled, so that we aren’t trapped by the occasional tedium of strict chronology. The cast is chock-full of near-lookalikes playing Fosse friends and protégées, including Neil Simon, Paddy Chayefsky, and Liza Minnelli in full Cabaret mode. Special kudos to Margaret Qualley (daughter of Andie MacDowell) whose career has taken a big leap forward recently, between her sympathetic performance as Fosse’s main squeeze, Ann Reinking and her role as a Manson groupie in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. About her there’s more to come.

            

Beating the Damn Yankees in Living Color

Play ball! I’m glad the Washington (D.C) Nationals are in the 2019 World Series, given that they beat my home team, the L.A. Dodgers, to advance into the National League finals. There’s also the fact that this team, which until 2005 was known as the Montreal Expos, had never before won a pennant. It’s a shame, though, that when the Nationals come to bat this evening, their opponents will be the Houston Astros, not the New York Yankees. The Yankees did come close to making it into the World Series, until the Astros defeated them in game six with a walk-on homerun. I have nothing against the Astros, but the Nationals versus the Yankees would certainly have been poetic justice.

You see, once upon a time there was another D.C. baseball team, the Washington Senators. They were American Leaguers, and year after year their success was stymied by the presence in the league of the formidable New York Yankees. That was the era (circa the 1950s) when the Yankees—the best team money could buy—seemed impossible to beat. So Senators fans annually ate their hearts out. Author Douglass Wallopp, born and bred in Washington, D.C., took matters into his own hands in 1954, publishing a little novel called The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant. The cover image, which showed a pin-striped Yankee player being hoisted on a pitchfork by a demonic-looking creature, hinted at the novel’s imaginative take on this classic baseball rivalry. Borrowing from Faust and the whole “deal with the devil” meme, the novel establishes that a middle-aged diehard Senators fan makes a pact with the mysterious Mr.  Applegate that turns him into a handsome young baseball phenomenon, one capable of singlehandedly winning the pennant for the Senators.

If this novel sounds familiar, it’s because it was quickly turned into a hit 1955 Broadway musical, Damn Yankees. The role of the demonic Mr. Applegate was played by Ray Walston, but what most people remembered was the female lead, a temptress named Lola who shows up to keep the newly-minted Major Leaguer Joe Hardy from straying from his satanic pact. I’ve discovered that the stage role was offered to Hollywood’s Mitzi Gaynor and  to French ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire (whom I remember from the first big movie I ever saw, Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye). But it ended up being played by a redheaded dancer, Gwen Verdon. When she met the show’s choreographer, Bob Fosse, sparks flew, both onstage and off. They married in 1960, and their lives and careers were intertwined from that time forward.

Of course the Broadway hit about baseball quickly became a movie. Most of the stage cast was retained, so that little boys (and big ones too) could watch in astonishment as Verdon strutted her stuff with “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets.” Ray Walston, who up to that point had been mostly a stage actor, went on to have a long movie and TV career, ending up as “My Favorite Martian” before passing away two years later in 2001. The one big change from the stage company was that the leading-man part went to Hollywood hunk Tab Hunter, who did no harm in his key role. I should also mention that one of the smaller roles, that of an enthusiastic female fan, was played on both stage and screen by Jean Stapleton, the future Edith Bunker.

I know the cinematic Damn Yankees very well indeed. When it first aired regularly on television, my parents had just purchased a color TV set. Wow! Copper-curled Lola and handsome blond Joe made color TV essential.