The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
HOW TO GET THERE’ FOSSE & VERDON ON BROADWAY
quarters of Times Square”. Then they would talk through steps “in a fevered pingpong of what-ifs and maybes…” collaborating on the subtle, twitching, calculated vamping that was Fosse’s forte. Later, “they’d throw off their blankets and dance out the solution on the mattress”. They shared a passion for paying attention to detail, then cramming that detail in, with Verdon leading on the technical side.
“He knew what he wanted; she knew how to get there.” originally suggested that the 1926 play Chicago by
Maurine Dallas Watkins, who had covered the 1924 trials of accused murderers Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, could be turned into a musical. Fosse collaborated with composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb to do just that.
Verdon was cast as the lethal Roxie Hart, reuniting her with Fosse for the first time since their separation four years earlier (by then he was dating the much younger dancer Ann Reinking) and had approval of all the creative elements. They worked on the show for a month before he allowed his assistant in, rejecting preconceived ideas of the roaring Twenties and flapper dances and aiming for something mechanical and hollowed-out. Fosse had a heart attack in November 1974, which kept him out of action for more than four months, so Verdon held the fort, throwing parties to keep up the cast’s spirits. Although the original production received mixed reviews, a 1996 revival – choreographed by Reinking “in the style of Fosse” – became the longest-running American musical in Broadway history. Dominic Cavendish life since (and I am instructed not to ask about it), but, in September last year, she told Vanity Fair magazine that she and Phil Elverum, an American songwriter, had married in a secret ceremony in upstate New York. “I never gave up on love,” she said. To me, she makes no comment on her marriage, but a couple of weeks after we meet, it is reported that she and Elverum have separated.
Fosse/Verdon marks Williams’s first appearance on the small screen since her Dawson’s Creek days – a stratospheric 16-year stretch during which she picked up three further Oscar nominations (for Blue Valentine, My Week with Marilyn and Manchester by the Sea) and appeared on Broadway, first as Sally Bowles in a 2014 revival of Cabaret then, in 2016, as the victim of a sex offender in the David Harrower play Blackbird.
“The medium doesn’t really factor in my decision-making so