FOSSE/VERDON

BBC Two, 9.00pm

BBC Two offers up the perfect high-end treat with this classy, Emmynominated take on the lives, loves and lies of

Bob Fosse, the celebrated choreographer and director behind Cabaret, Sweet Charity and Chicago, and his wife and muse, the Broadway star Gwen Verdon. The difficult, depressive

Fosse is smartly played by Sam Rockwell but this is Michelle Williams’s show. She shines as Verdon, making us see how a woman bursting with talent might find herself losing her way, her light stowed under a bushel as she props up the great man.

“I just know how to speak Bob… it’s my native tongue,” she tells a fed-up producer. She did but she also did so much more from assisting with the choreography to advising the actors to sourcing hard-to-find props. Yet this is not the story of a doormat. Williams’s Verdon is vibrantly alive, a woman in love with Fosse certainly but with Broadway itself more – as, arguably, is this biography. Certainly the best moments come not from a slightly choppy narrative but rather from the loving recreations of some of the couple’s most famous moments, including a full-throated take on Cabaret’s Mine Herr with Kelli Barrett as Liza Minnelli. Sarah Hughes

Off stage: Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon

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