NEW YORK, NY.- Karli Dinardo never imagined that, at 5 feet, 5 inches, she was tall enough to be a Bob Fosse dancer. Broadway veteran Dylis Croman was introduced to the Fosse style by Ann Reinking, one of his most influential dancers, when she was just 14 at a summer dance program in Florida; she thought, “Where has this been all my life?”
Kolton Krouse, originally trained in ballet, left Juilliard before graduating to perform as Tumblebrutus in the revival of “Cats.” And Yeman Brown, who performed in “Jagged Little Pill,” has also danced with Reggie Wilson, a contemporary choreographer who has slyly referenced Fosse in his work for years.
The cast of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” isn’t cookie cutter, and neither is Fosse’s choreography. There’s more to it than fishnet tights, bowler hats and thrusting hips. Fosse’s dance language — subtle and internal — is fueled not just by the physicality of the body but by the intention behind it. It’s precise, but it’s not about pushing to an edge; it’s about vibrations. Gwen Verdon, the celebrated dancer who was Fosse’s third wife, used to say it was like putting a car in neutral while flooring the gas.
“You’re not moving,” said Nicole Fosse, their daughter. “But everything inside of you is buzzing with energy.”
Now 22 dancers are getting the chance to feel the buzz, and to let it out. The thrill of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’,” a revival of the 1978 musical, is, aptly, its dancers: 16 cast members and six understudies. All are principals. No two are alike, not even a tiny bit. And that’s the way Fosse wanted it.
They range in age from 19 to 45. The men aren’t all short, and the women aren’t all tall. They understand the difference between sexiness and sensuality, how to bridge the gap between stillness and explosiveness. The director, Wayne Cilento, an original cast member, wants to show Fosse’s range — his vaudeville roots, his humor, his fluidity, his wit.
“He wanted to do a show where he had absolutely nothing pinning him down to anything specific, like a story,” Cilento said. “He wanted to do any kind of dance he wanted and to just be free.”
The revival, which begins performances Thursday and opens at the Music Box Theatre on March 19, has been streamlined from three acts to two. Material has been added — including a montage from “Big Deal,” Fosse’s final show, in 1986, and a reenvisioned number, “Big City Mime,” which was cut from the original “Dancin’.” For that section, Cilento is following Fosse’s scenario for the number but has assembled movement from different shows — including “Pippin,” “Sweet Charity” and “Liza With a Z” — to replace its lost choreography. So, like all the movement in the show, it’s by Fosse.
“It’s not about me being a choreographer,” Cilento said. “I’m staging it, I’m directing it, I’m putting the pieces together. It’s really about his style, his essence, the way he moved. If I can execute that, if the audience gets a feeling of who he was as a man, as a choreographer, as a director? That’s my job.”
There’s been talk about a revival for years, but the show’s return to Broadway — after a run at the Old Globe theater in San Diego last spring — comes down to Nicole Fosse, the founder and artistic director of the Verdon Fosse Legacy, which preserves and copyrights the works of her parents. She gave it her blessing.
“It’s a real testament to my father’s creativity and ability in the dance world outside of the constructs of musical theater,” she said. “He always had doubts about himself as a choreographer. And so this was his attempt at — a successful attempt at — proving that he could hang with the big guys in the world of choreography.”
The shadow of Jerome Robbins looms large now as it did then. Like Robbins, Fosse abided by the idea that less is more. Dancing without pandering.
Christine Colby Jacques, who reproduced Fosse’s choreography for the new “Dancin’” and was in its original cast, recalled Fosse’s words on opening night: “He said: ‘All I can say to you now is, this is yours. Just work as we have been rehearsing. Don’t try to make the audience love you. Let them come to you.’”
He wanted them to perform as they had in rehearsal, which however admirable is tough on Broadway. For the cast, there are other considerations, too.
“The one way that you could really get in trouble in this show is if you approach it as a dancer doing dance steps,” Cilento said. “You have to do a scenario for ‘Why am I doing this number? What’s the intention behind it?’”
“Dancin’,” which ran on Broadway for more than four years, isn’t a really old show, but little exists on video. The creative team has mainly worked with a grainy film from a Japanese touring production. Colby Jacques used notes she saved — it helped that when the show first opened, she was a swing and responsible for all the female parts — to reconstruct material for preproduction.
“She’s levelheaded, and she’s a beautiful dancer,” Cilento said. “I think she could approach it without making them machines.”
Cilento does not want his dancers to look like machines. There is precision, and then there is brittleness. He is only too aware that Fosse is a pop culture fixture whose choreography has been, in recent years, reduced to a tough minimalist look or copied — you see it in Michael Jackson, Beyoncé and even the recent Wednesday Addams dance — and, often, overly simplified.
But rather than feel angry about how “they’re not doing it exactly the way he did it,” Cilento said, he is choosing to focus on what remains.
“He left this incredible tapestry of work for him to go forward,” he said. “I feel like getting him back where he belongs and representing him in the right way.”
Still, in San Diego, the show had problems; the two acts felt like different shows. The first half flew by with exuberant numbers, including “Percussion,” a four-part section in which the dancers respond to instruments; the zippy trio “Big Noise From Winnetka”; and the galvanizing conclusion, “Dancin’ Man.”
Leading into “Dancin’ Man” was (and is) “Big City Mime,” in which the sleek, elegant Peter John Chursin loosely portrays a version of Fosse — others in the show take on his persona, too — as he lands in New York City and encounters prostitutes and pimps, and eventually finds his dancing body.
“Big City Mime” is fun, like a dream or fantasy ballet that suddenly appears within the arc of “Dancin’.” It features an array of references to Fosse’s repertoire, including “Mein Herr” from “Cabaret” (with different music), “Rich Man’s Frug” from “Sweet Charity” and Fosse’s snake dance from “The Little Prince.” In one moment referring to the snake, the dancers arrive at a bracing stop and extend their arms in a V.
“You really need to be overexaggerated,” Cilento said at a rehearsal. “It’s got to be bigger than you want. Hands. Fingers out, look down at your armpit. Legs wide. This thing needs to be major.”
But the second act, which starts with a bang and the galvanizing “Sing, Sing, Sing,” had pacing problems. “America,” even the dancers agreed, was problematic. In reframing this patriotic number for more modern audiences, the performers spoke about social justice issues; it gravitated toward the pedantic.
“I went back, and I looked at what Bob did, and it was really interesting,” Cilento said. “He made comments, but he never made direct comments. He was commenting on men and women and slavery. But it was all through song and dance, and it was entertainment. So nothing was dry and pointed.”
His version of the number now is in keeping with Fosse’s “America” — told through song and dance. Cilento has also added a coda to the ending, in which several cast members return to bring back a few crucial dancing moments. In San Diego, it ended with a lone dancer evoking the image of Fosse.
“I think I kind of nose-dived,” Cilento said with one of his frequent giggles. “But you only know when you see it. I felt empty and uncomfortable at the end when I was watching it. I just felt like it needed to be a lift.”
He added later: “It can’t be heavy-handed. It’s got to move like fire.”
Again, it comes down to the cast members, who do more than dance in the show; they also act and sing. When, early on, Cilento and Corinne McFadden Herrera, the show’s associate director and musical stager, were discussing possible dancers, she suggested casting in layers — that the performers would span 2 1/2 generations, mixing “the young, fresh, raw energy of the people in their early 20s” with “the polish and the style and the acting chops of the people that we have in their late 30s and early 40s.”
Brown, who, at 30, falls somewhere in the middle, loves the richness of the diversity of skills and experience.
“I’m not used to dancing with jazz shoes on, but we’re all dancing together,” he said. “I mean, it’s me dancing next to Peter Chursin. What?”
And he’s making connections about his own dance history, linking Fosse’s choreography, which was influenced by Black dance, and his work with Wilson.
“It goes back to rhythm, and it goes back to the pelvis,” he said. “In Reggie’s work, he talks about when we came to the Americas, the slave masters took our drums and our ability to communicate, but they couldn’t take the rhythm because it’s in the body and the body holds the power. I feel like Mr. Fosse gives the body and the rhythm power.”
Manuel Herrera, 39, who started out training in dance at his family’s studio in North Carolina before attending the School of American Ballet, has focused more on acting than dancing in recent years.
“Dancers get very pigeonholed,” he said. “A lot of people don’t want you to step out of that lane.”
And on Broadway dance is often seen as a footnote, an interlude. Dancers in musical theater, Herrera said, aren’t exactly celebrated. When he was performing in “Sweet Charity” in 2005 — choreographed by Cilento — actor Denis O’Hare told him that he had natural acting ability and suggested that he shift his focus. Herrera did. But then “Dancin’” happened.
“I was not in the best shape of my life,” he said. “I hadn’t been in a room with dancers in years.”
But he has found the experience exhilarating.
“It’s a shame that in this business I had to turn off a side of me that was such a part of my life to get to the next place,” he said. “How full circle it is that I’m getting it back in a show where I literally do every single thing I’ve ever done in my entire training and career at once?
“It’s a dream show. I feel like I’ve been waiting for this show my entire career.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
