Fosse/Verdon - the (limited) series

[scenicdesign71]

So.
This series undoubtedly must have flaws that I'm just willfully ignoring.  (Ed.: it's not long enough, does that count?  see next post)

And who knows: if I looked at it with a less-forgiving eye, perhaps last night's episode (4) might even seem especially flawed, as compared to the preceding three.
(I suppose someone's bound to complain that it lifts most of its best effects a little too neatly -- as in verbatim -- from Pippin).

Or not; maybe it's one of the better episodes so far.  (It uses that borrowed material shrewdly -- and if the result seems a bit self-consciously on-the-nose, well... perhaps Fosse's own handling of Pippin was, shall we say, rather flagrantly overdetermined by his own specific perspective at that point in his [actual] life.  I certainly wouldn't be the first to suggest as much, even if his none-too-subtle takeover of Schwartz and Hirson's show ultimately improved it).

I'm honestly not sure one way or the other.  (Although, yes, I'm downplaying just how good I actually suspect this series is, partly out of a superstitious fear of jinxing it with premature gushing).  But I did get actual goose-bumps.

Next week must be the episode (5) that many of the reviewers have touted as being especially interesting: a weekend in the Hamptons with the Fosse/Verdons, the Simons (if Joan is still with us for a little longer?), Chayevsky, Reinking et al.  I can't wait.

[scenicdesign71]

Michelle Williams is really gonna need an Emmy for this.  Even when throwing a Classic Twentieth-Century Showbiz-Diva Meltdown (or two, in a single episode [7], no less!) that veers woozily toward parody, her Verdon is just spellbinding.

And Margaret Qualley's Ann is adorable.  Beneath the distinctive Reinking purr she's affected for this role, I recognized Qualley from The Leftovers (and from the Spike Jonze-directed Kenzo World perfume ad); she'll also be playing a Manson girl in Tarantino's upcoming Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood.  But I hadn't known, until Wikipedia-ing her just now, that she's the daughter of Andie MacDowell.

Trained as a ballerina, Qualley is also the only one of the three leads whose lack of a dance double hasn't yet put an awkward dent in her performance: Williams is game and hardworking but underequipped -- "Who's Got The Pain?" ended up being visibly beyond her (not too surprisingly, given the bravura athleticism of the choreography) -- and Rockwell doesn't even seem to have made much effort: what was that lame little Charleston that had to pass for Fosse-esque noodling in last week's episode?  The problem seems all the more pronounced (though still not a dealbreaker, for me anyway) in a series that gets so much else gratifyingly right.

I'm starting to wish Fosse/Verdon would actually go on longer -- twelve or fifteen episodes, say, instead of eight -- as show after show goes by (Yankees, Charity, Cabaret, Pippin, and Chicago so far) getting broken down and reconfigured, perhaps just a little too slickly and efficiently, as so many neat refractions of the protagonists' personal dramas.  There's an undeniable pleasure in watching them pull this off more or less successfully week after week -- and, to their credit, the writers for the most part haven't yet let those shows get entirely engulfed by on-the-nose real-life soapsuds.  But I wish the shows themselves were given a little more breathing room: if anything, I suspect their dramatic value in relation to Fosse/Verdon's personal lives would only be enhanced -- especially for non-connoisseurs -- by allowing us to spend more time inside rehearsal rooms and creative discussions and backstage, watching these musicals come together in a bit more detail.  There's a reason Wasson's book, even with only a single nominal subject on whom to focus, is such a doorstop; not only were these people's lives complicated, but theirs was a sizable body of work to compress into just eight episodes.

Plus, it would be nice to see more of Chita and Liza and Hal and all the rest; with so much to cram into eight hours, they become the merest of cameos (not to say glorified extras), which, even given the necessary focus on the two leads (with excellent support from Ann, Paddy and Joan), has a way of subtly distorting the collaborative nature of the enterprise at the heart of all this drama: notwithstanding their own titanic personalities, Fosse and Verdon "just couldn't do it alone," but it's easy to lose track of that fact as we're sprinting from one milestone to another.

Side note:  I've been enjoying the Vulture and Entertainment Weekly recaps -- there are others out there, but these are the most thoughtful and well-written I've found.

[Chris L]

Ann Reinking on Her Life as Bob Fosse's Muse, Lover, and Friend

[Chris L]

I found the final episode very affecting and an effective capper for the entire series. Oddly, except for the flashbacks, it played out exactly like I'd envisioned it when I read about Fosse's death in The Washington Post. I'd been going to the National Theater since I was 10 and pretty much knew exactly where they must have been standing (though I'm not sure they were actually that close to the marquee except that it gave them the opportunity to pan up to Fosse's credit at the end).

If Michelle Williams doesn't win an Emmy...well, enough people have already said this that I don't feel the need to chime in.

[scenicdesign71]

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/05/little-gold-men-fosse-verdon-thomas-kail

Kail, acknowledging the tableau as one of those "if you wrote this, no one would believe it" moments, says that Fosse really was "like 10, 15 feet outside of the theater" when he died.

In my own mind, I had always pictured him being a little further away, maybe one or two hundred feet: close enough to see the destination, but far enough to make getting there hopelessly out of the question (when one is having a heart attack).

In any case, the closer vantage did allow that effective pan up to Fosse's (pointedly solo, Gwen-less) marquee credit, which annoyed and saddened me for several seconds until I realized that that reaction was presumably precisely the point.

Michelle Williams, WTF.  I just can't...  she's so good.

At some point early on (even before the show began airing), I had wondered whether executive producer LMM might also turn up onscreen.  And some time later, after a few episodes featuring the likes of "Minnelli" and "Grey" and "Hoffman" and so on, I had also wondered who would play Roy Scheider in the likely event that they were gonna do any behind-the-scenes stuff about All That Jazz.  But it never occurred to me to put those two questions together, so the fun of that casting (and the unexpected resemblance, at least given the right wig -- or, uh, wigs) ended up taking me delightfully by surprise.

[Chris L]

According to Wikipedia, he collapsed outside the Willard Hotel, which is a couple of blocks away from the National, around a couple of corners so it doesn't have sightlines to the theater. However, it's possible they meant that he collapsed on his way from the Willard to the National, thus justifying my three decade belief that he really did collapse in front of the marquee.

[scenicdesign71]

17 Emmy nominations including Williams, Rockwell and Qualley in their respective performance categories; outstanding limited series; writing; direction; editing; period production and costume designs; hair; both makeup categories (prosthetic and non-); editing; music direction and supervision; sound mixing; and casting.

[MartinG]

Now it's arrived on the BBC I've been catching up over the past few nights and agree that it's brilliant, compelling and gratifyingly rich on the nuts and bolts of the rehearsal process.

I'm up to E5 (of S1, as these things amusingly get tagged these days - as if these could be an S2...) and the one thing that hit me as possibly a little contrived, unusually so far for the series, was handsome, dull college-boy Ron's prowess as a pianist, (well, OK - "lessons from the age of six" - maybe...) and sufficient familiarity with showtunes to be able to pull the score of Sweet Charity out of the hat flawlessly from memory. (OK, two things.) Do we know much about 'Ron'? Presumably someone tagged along with Gwen to the house in Southampton. He isn't mentioned in Gwen's Wiki entry, and while a long-time boyfriend could conceivably have spent many cosy hours accompanying her on her back-catalogue while poor little Nicole tried to sleep, it seems questionable. He may have been a superfan to start with, of course, whose obsession with her performance as CHV inspired his determination to woo her, and...  

Well, anyway...

This is my only quibble though. I'm generally pretty well hooked.  

[Chris L]

We cheered, at least in our heads, when Michelle Williams won the Emmy for playing Gwen Verdon. Her speech was moving and heartfelt, though I'd really have to find a transcript to remember everything she said. I'm pretty sure it was the only award the miniseries, er, limited series won, though it may have picked up additional Emmys at the technical awards presentation.

[scenicdesign71]

For lack of anywhere better to put this:  here's almost an hour and a half of Liza Minelli's put-in rehearsal for Chicago in August 1975, while Verdon was out having vocal-node surgery after accidentally inhaling a feather during the show's finale.  Rivera and Orbach are on hand, and if you listen with headphones/earbuds you can hear Fosse out in the auditorium directing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP6wf-RaXh8

It's exactly as fascinating, and also as numbingly repetitive and detail-focused, as sitting in on any rehearsal; any stargazing/time-machine thrill is partly mitigated by the recording's audio-only nature.  Which is simply to say that theatre really is hard, unglamorous work (if anyone was in doubt), in most ways a job like any other, even at its highest level.  But it's still kind of awesome that someone recorded this.