
Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ at the Music Box Theatre. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.
Truth in advertising: the selling points of Bob Fosse’s Dancin’, revived on Broadway, in slightly different form, for the first time since its 1978 premiere are, indeed, Fosse and dancing. (The original production was just called Dancin’; the overlap between that and this is about 80 percent.) And on both points, it delivers. It’s a joy to see sixteen exceptional Broadway dancers at the top of their form doing almost nothing but dance, with unparalleled technique, unbridled joy, and the expansiveness of a show actually designed to do nothing but showcase them. And it’s thrilling to see Fosse’s choreography in all its shadings and varieties, reminding us how his vocabulary became foundational to not just Broadway or musical film dance, but the various idioms of modern dance in all its settings: music videos and concert backup dancers (the debt of the best number in MJ: The Musical to Fosse is even clearer here than it was in MJ itself), competition dance, even modern ballet.
The prologue promises no plot and no message–though they do backslide from that promise a bit (in one of the show’s weakest segments). (As Fosse himself famously said about the show, “When you have collaborators, you have all those midnight meetings. I’m tired of those… So I just decided to meet myself at midnight.”) Dabs of monologue and singing give a sketch of scaffolding to the different segments, and there’s a hint of story imposed on some of the longer sequences, notably “Big City Mime,” but what we’re here for, again, is the titular dancing.
And that dancing delivers all you expect from Fosse: The flicked feet and the sharp knees. The precision in the fingers and the little extra shot of extension at the end of every arm movement. The crisp head rolls and instantly recognizable way of positioning a hand on a hat brim. The center isolations and the angular shoulders. The intentionally broken lines and explosive jumps. The debt to classic tap (nodded to in a quick snippet of video of the Nicholas Brothers, and in one section of “Benny’s Number,” a deceptively low-key tap duet performed by two of my favorite of the male ensemble members, Jacob Guzman and Manuel Herrera).
One clever thing about the choreography is that the first number, “Crunchy Granola Suite,” is done in the idiom of modern classical ballet–you might see it at the Joffrey. It’s a showcase for the pristine technique of the dancers, but it’s just the littlest bit…boring. Once we drop into Fosse’s language, the energy picks right up.
It does sometimes feel like director Wayne Cilento (who performed in the original production) and his team are a little trapped between a ballet-style beat-for-beat remounting and a reimagined revival. (Which makes sense—once they decided to bring back “Big City Mime,” a major sequence cut from the original production, sweetened by some snippets from famous numbers like Sweet Charity’s “Big Spender,” and add some material from Fosse’s final musical, Big Deal, they weren’t doing a straight remount. But who would have wanted them to mess with the showpiece to “Sing, Sing, Sing” that opens Act II?) Where they attempt to split the difference, by keeping “The Female Star Turn,” set to “Here You Come Again,” but update the gender politics with new dialogue, is probably the least successful number in the show–but that’s also because it has the least dancing.
And that inability to quite decide what the show is means that the elements surrounding the dance–as inessential as they are–are hit-or-miss. The big scaffolding towers of Robert Brill’s set add a nice vertical dimension, but the staging doesn’t make all that much use of it. The singing and the talking feel like they didn’t get a whole lot of Cilento’s attention. The orchestra (arrangements by Jim Abbott and David Dabbon, with Justin Hornback as musical director) handles the transitions from genre to genre with aplomb (special kudos to percussionist Gary Seligson, who anchors “Sing, Sing, Sing” from onstage), but I found Peter Hylenski’s sound mix muddy. Finn Ross’s video design adds visual zip when it works–the neon backdrops in “Big City Mime”; the dizzying maps in “Big Noise from Winnetka”–but some of the more geometric projections distract from the dancing. Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung’s costumes, too, range from striking–the glittery flapper vibe in “Sing, Sing, Sing”; the mod attire of “Big Noise”; the lingerie of “Massage Parlor”–to baffling, oddly layered leotards in discordant colors. The transitions from segment to segment can be rickety. But truly, none of that matters.
What I’m going to take away from the show is nothing but the dancing: Guzman and Herrera in their subtle, angular tap duet. Guzman again in “Recollections of an Old Dancer,” embodying a character that’s part Mr Bojangles, part Fosse himself, and perhaps a dash of Sam Rockwell as Fosse in the recent Fosse/Verdon. Mattie Love, Tony d’Alelio, and Nando Morland in a daffy, almost comically loose-limbed trio in “Big Noise from Winnetka.” Two trios–Love, Karlo Dinardo, and Ida Saki; then Yeman Brown, Jõvan Dansberry, and Herrera–dancing to nothing but percussion instruments, taking the rhythm into their bodies, in “Percussion.” The slinky, seedy vibe of “Big City Mime.” Ioana Alfonso and Manuel Herrera’s duet in “Joint Endeavors.” Saki’s fiery solo that opens “America.” The way that a Fosse ensemble is never a corps de ballet, with everyone doing the same thing, for more than a moment: your attention is always being pulled to this dancer, then that one; to this corner of the stage, then up to another level on the scaffold, then back to the other side.
Someone sitting behind me said, “I feel bad for all the other Broadway shows who need dancers right now, because all the best ones are right here.” I couldn’t agree more. Is this show essential theater? Probably not. Would it have been revived at all without the recent success of the streaming show Fosse/Verdon? Maybe not. Was I delighted by it? Yes, indeed.