Fosse - a new book?

[Marlothom]

Posted: 11/14/13 at 12:16pm

I did a quick search and did not find anything on this yet. I was at the airport yesterday looking for "Double Down" when I saw this on the Bio section. Has anyone read it - I am trying to get through "Double Down" as fast as possible so that I can get my hands on this. it's a fairly thick book - not a lot of photos but seems to be very comprehensive.

[indytallguy]

Posted: 11/14/13 at 12:17pm

There was a pretty detailed review in the Times earlier in the month in case you didn't see it.

[tazber]

Posted: 11/14/13 at 12:31pm

Also, Ethan Mordeen did a review for the WSJ in last Saturday's Review section.

He loved it. I'll see if I can find a link.

ETA: well that was easy. See link below
WSJ

Updated On: 11/14/13 at 12:31 PM

[tazber]

Posted: 11/14/13 at 12:36pm

Ugh, apparently you can google the article, but to open my link you need to sign up.

Here's the (lengthy) review for your reading pleasure:

_________________________________________________________________________________


By
Ethan Mordden
Nov. 8, 2013 1:21 p.m. ET

He was blond and slim, with a disarmingly boyish smile and the belief that everything interesting was about sex. And he had perfect timing, becoming one of Broadway's outstanding choreographers in the mid-1950s, just as the power in the making of musicals had begun shifting from directors to dance masters. Then, too, the musical, an at times bawdy affair, was now turning openly erotic; this gave him the opportunity to experiment with taboo, creating the signature style that would make him famous.

He arrived on Broadway just in time to hook up with Gwen Verdon, a captivating personality and the greatest woman dancer in the musical's history. She became not only his third wife but the icon of the "Fosse look," something like a broken puppet with a wicked idea of fun and no conscience to speak of. They first teamed up on "Damn Yankees" (1955), and when he assumed full title as director-choreographer, he built "Redhead" (1959) around her, then had a string of hits—"Sweet Charity" (1966), "Pippin" (1972), "Chicago" (1975)—celebrated as much for their staging as their writing.
Fosse

Meanwhile, Broadway choreographers were directing in Hollywood, and he distinguished himself there as well, even in non-musicals. In "Lenny" (1974) and "Star 80" (1983), he pushed his characteristic edginess to worry the screen with unpleasant characters, louche tales from life. "Lenny" told of the controversial comic Lenny Bruce, and "Star 80," too, was reality film, recounting the savage murder of a Playboy model.

And yet, for most of his career, he worked under the shadow of Jerome Robbins, the most established of the director-choreographers and, with the added prestige of his ballet background, one king to rule them all. Still, both men started, age 20, as mere chorus dancers in musicals. So his life is another of those very American stories of rising from nowhere to storm the halls of fame on a talent so intense that one becomes a national treasure—even part of the Zeitgeist. In the long view, Robert Louis Fosse (1927-87) embedded himself in the performing arts with such presence that, as with George M. Cohan and Florenz Ziegfeld, the words "Bob Fosse" have become a summoning term for show business itself.

In Sam Wasson's fascinating and exhaustive biography, we meet the man behind the style—a micromanaging perfectionist and a reckless womanizer, a cultivator of friendships and a despotic showrunner. A terror. Mr. Wasson quotes Stephen Schwartz, the songwriter for "Pippin," telling book-writer Roger O. Hirson, "Isn't this terrific? We have Bob Fosse !" Mr. Hirson replies, "This is our last happy day on the show." In another part of the forest, composer John Kander leads lyricist Fred Ebb out of a stormy "Chicago" session before it's over, saying: "No show is worth dying for."

Fosse was as vital a character in his life as in his work, and Mr. Wasson accordingly narrates as if his book were a novel, a Faustian tale in which the protagonist is so gifted that he is bound to succeed even without supernatural help. But then, Fosse was the driver of the bargain as well as its victim. As Mr. Wasson observes: "He was Faust and Mephistopheles." He wasn't under a curse. He just needed to think he was, for the usual mysterious show-business reasons. A Chicago native, Fosse had an unappreciative father and worrisome medical conditions, including the "jalopy heart," as Mr. Wasson phrases it, that was to fell him at the age of 60.

So Fosse never quite absorbed the message of his renown: that he was a genuine original. Think of the "Steam Heat" number in "The Pajama Game": two men and a woman in black suits and bow ties over white shirts and socks, all three gaming with black derbies—a Fosse trademark—as they shuffle and creep in synchronized precision. Or the line of beckoning dance-hall "hostesses" in "Big Spender," from "Sweet Charity," the opposite of "Steam Heat" in its individualized players, its erotic disorder. It is as if Fosse delighted in encapsulating traditional showbiz tropes even as he transformed them with wanton come-hither.

No other director-choreographer, from Agnes de Mille to Gower Champion, married show business's past and future as suavely, as gleefully, as Fosse did. Still, he persisted in thinking himself a fraud: The raves must be mistaken, the long runs phantoms. I'm fooling them, and they'll catch on sooner or later. One of the numbers from "Chicago" offers a First Rule of Showbiz: "Give 'em the old razzle-dazzle, bead and feather 'em." One year, Fosse won the triple crown: a Tony, an Oscar and an Emmy. It had never happened before, yet to Fosse—"Job without God," as Mr. Wasson puts it—decorations could only postpone the inevitable unmasking. "This guy wanted so desperately to be an artist," Dustin Hoffmann, the star of "Lenny," tells Mr. Wasson. "And that was his tragedy—because he already was."

Thousands have used the performing arts to relieve emotional insecurity; it's the American dream. Otherwise, try trudging through life without attention. It's a challenge—"You try to make meaning without show business," as Mr. Wasson phrases it, in a key line. But Fosse's razzle-dazzle wasn't a cosmetic cover for a lack of vision: It was a way of sweetening a drastically cynical worldview. "Redhead" started with a thrill killing, a fiend's strangling of a showgirl. The audience saw him sneak up behind her in her dressing room, fondling the purple scarf with which he was to end her life—extraordinarily bold for a musical comedy in 1959. It anticipates the horror of "Star 80." But much of Fosse bears that mixture of the worrisome and the playful. He doesn't profane the sacred: He sanctifies the sinful, glorifying our evil secrets with razzle-dazzle.

Mr. Wasson has taken complete control of his subject. His catalog of interviewees, which allows him to reconstruct events and conversations in real time, includes an astonishing number of Fosse's colleagues and confidants. And his writing style mediates between the authoritative and the hip, as in this description of dancer Carol Haney: "With a punky Beat-girl haircut and a whiplash spark, she looked like jazz sounded." This book knows its subject's loves and his friends and his needs and, ultimately, his despair. Bob Fosse reconstructed the American musical, led Hollywood into a more honest depiction of life as lived, and created a dance style still exploited today. "More Fosse!" the director tells the choreographer when the show isn't playing well. He means, "More life!" Yet Fosse thought someone else was earning all that acclaim. One might call it art, but really it was hunger: for acceptance, praise, the belief that behind the erotic gamesmanship and the baleful jests, behind the sheer genius flash of the born entertainer, someone was actually there.

—Mr. Mordden is the author of "Anything Goes: A History of
American Musical Theatre."

[jv92]

Posted: 11/14/13 at 4:47pm

I devoured this masterful (and big) book last week. It is a must read for ANY musical theater fan, and something any showbiz aficionado ought to enjoy. It's really quite brilliant, and FAR superior to Martin Gottfried's book on Fosse, ALL HIS JAZZ.

[uncageg]

Posted: 11/14/13 at 6:09pm

I am reading it now. Very detailed and very good, so far. I am at the part where he is working with Gwen in the part of Lola.

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 11/15/13 at 12:43am

This is the book being adapted by HBO Films and which is being directed by Bryan Singer. No word when this will be going into production but it was confirmed over a year ago.

[tgrabon2]

Posted: 11/15/13 at 12:09pm

Updated On: 5/6/14 at 12:09 PM

[jemjeb2]

Posted: 11/17/13 at 5:52pm

Sam Wasson is an excellent writer! I just finished his book, "Fifth Avenue 5 a.m." which in some detail covers the making of the movie version of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" - so if the behind the scenes stories of Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Henry Mancini, Blake Edwards, Truman Capote, etc sounds like it would be an interesting -read - believe me it is!

[uncageg]

Posted: 12/22/13 at 5:31pm

Finished it. Excellent read. The semi abrupt ending stays with you for a bit.

[jemjeb2]

Posted: 12/23/13 at 2:12pm

I gave myself Sam Wasson's "Fosse" for Christmas - and a BIG (700 pages or so) gift it is. I had read his earlier book on "Breakfast at Tiffany's" so assumed I wouldn't be disappointed and I was right! "Fosse" is a great book for BWW fans - recommend this a a last minute Xmas gift (fir yourself or others). I am compulsively reading my way through it, but wanting to slow down and savor all the backstage stories, interviews,, etc. Great insight into its subject and his show biz impact and legacy.