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Jun. 4th, 2019 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsHas anybody else been watching FX's Fosse/Verdon miniseries -- or as attractivegeekery and I have been calling it, "Snaps, Butts and Hats"? It's the story of Legendary Broadway Choreographer Bob Fosse and Legendary Broadway Dancer Gwen Verdon's wildly unhealthy, codependent, and painfully fracturing partnership!
In all honesty, there are a lot of times when I am neither ready nor excited to sign on for eight beautifully-shot hours of 'unhealthy, codependent, and painfully fracturing.' Fosse/Verdon, however, is a special case; my parents were theater nerds in the seventies when Fosse was at his Fosse-est, and I was just old enough to start being a theater nerd in the nineties, when Broadway decided actually it was time to Fossify all over again; Cabaret and Chicago were seminal texts for me, and don't get me started on my my middle school production of Pippin. When Sam Rockwell's Bob Fosse and Michelle Williams' Gwen Verdon disintegrate repeatedly at each other onscreen in Fosse/Verdon, they do so not only in Style but in a very specific style that it's very difficult for me not to sing along with.
("Who even is this show for besides huge theater nerds?"aquamirage asked me at some point after the first episode, and I was like, "I DON'T KNOW, I'm pretty sure it was written specifically for my mom and possibly not anybody else.")
Also, Michelle Williams inhabiting Gwen Verdon is such a phenomenal work of acting that it's worth the price of admission just to watch her.
Anyway, the whole thing just finished, and I have strong opinions about the ending -- which is to say that while I understand the temptation to close on Bob Fosse dying in Gwen Verdon's arms on their way to a revival of one of their most iconic collaborations, because it is such a beautiful narrative element to have conveniently happened in real life, I'm ALSO still mad enough that the show ended without showing us anything of Gwen Verdon's future post-Bob that I had to make this entire DW post to complain about it!
"Okay, Becca, if you're so smart, how would you have done it?"
Well, SINCE YOU ASK, I, personally, would have split the last episode, which zooms over like twelve years of complicated emotional developments, into two episodes? at least?? They could have paralleled All That Jazz and the way Fosse mythologized his own life with the work that Gwen Verdon and Ann Reinking did on the Fosse revival they collaborated on after his death; they could have devoted a lot more time to the rebuilding of the Bob/Gwen collaboration on the Sweet Charity revival, shown us Gwen training Ann Reinking on the '75 Chicago, Ann Reinking's work on '96 Chicago, Gwen doing TV and Emmy work throughout the eighties and nineties, and THEN back to Bob's death, sure, end on that climactic beat if you want, but Gwen Verdon's story absolutely did not end with Bob Fosse's death. And if you're going to say "oh, but the show is the story of their partnership," well, that arguably didn't end with Fosse's death either.
All that said, our household YouTube history is now completely full of clips from legacy Fosse productions, so I guess the show did accomplish its mission really!
attractivegeekery and I have been calling it, "Snaps, Butts and Hats"? It's the story of Legendary Broadway Choreographer Bob Fosse and Legendary Broadway Dancer Gwen Verdon's wildly unhealthy, codependent, and painfully fracturing partnership!In all honesty, there are a lot of times when I am neither ready nor excited to sign on for eight beautifully-shot hours of 'unhealthy, codependent, and painfully fracturing.' Fosse/Verdon, however, is a special case; my parents were theater nerds in the seventies when Fosse was at his Fosse-est, and I was just old enough to start being a theater nerd in the nineties, when Broadway decided actually it was time to Fossify all over again; Cabaret and Chicago were seminal texts for me, and don't get me started on my my middle school production of Pippin. When Sam Rockwell's Bob Fosse and Michelle Williams' Gwen Verdon disintegrate repeatedly at each other onscreen in Fosse/Verdon, they do so not only in Style but in a very specific style that it's very difficult for me not to sing along with.
("Who even is this show for besides huge theater nerds?"
aquamirage asked me at some point after the first episode, and I was like, "I DON'T KNOW, I'm pretty sure it was written specifically for my mom and possibly not anybody else.") Also, Michelle Williams inhabiting Gwen Verdon is such a phenomenal work of acting that it's worth the price of admission just to watch her.
Anyway, the whole thing just finished, and I have strong opinions about the ending -- which is to say that while I understand the temptation to close on Bob Fosse dying in Gwen Verdon's arms on their way to a revival of one of their most iconic collaborations, because it is such a beautiful narrative element to have conveniently happened in real life, I'm ALSO still mad enough that the show ended without showing us anything of Gwen Verdon's future post-Bob that I had to make this entire DW post to complain about it!
"Okay, Becca, if you're so smart, how would you have done it?"
Well, SINCE YOU ASK, I, personally, would have split the last episode, which zooms over like twelve years of complicated emotional developments, into two episodes? at least?? They could have paralleled All That Jazz and the way Fosse mythologized his own life with the work that Gwen Verdon and Ann Reinking did on the Fosse revival they collaborated on after his death; they could have devoted a lot more time to the rebuilding of the Bob/Gwen collaboration on the Sweet Charity revival, shown us Gwen training Ann Reinking on the '75 Chicago, Ann Reinking's work on '96 Chicago, Gwen doing TV and Emmy work throughout the eighties and nineties, and THEN back to Bob's death, sure, end on that climactic beat if you want, but Gwen Verdon's story absolutely did not end with Bob Fosse's death. And if you're going to say "oh, but the show is the story of their partnership," well, that arguably didn't end with Fosse's death either.
All that said, our household YouTube history is now completely full of clips from legacy Fosse productions, so I guess the show did accomplish its mission really!
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Date: 2019-06-05 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-06 01:29 am (UTC)