The backstage debauchery of choreographer and director Bob Fosse — and subsequent heartbreak of his wife Gwen Verdon — gets a thorough going-over in “Fosse/Verdon,” a new FX limited series about their entangled relationship.
When all is said and done, no one who admires Fosse for his innovative approach to dance and his Oscar-winning panache — he won for directing “Cabaret” in 1973 — will look at him the same way.
Sam Rockwell portrays Fosse, who died in 1987 at age 60 from a heart attack, as a predator who used his power to seduce dancers, actresses and even a German translator hired to help him film “Cabaret” in Berlin.
Even before he became a star in his own right, he was always on the prowl, lining up Verdon (Michelle Williams), with whom he first worked in the 1954 musical “Damn Yankees,” while his second wife, dancer Joan McCracken (Susan Misner), was seriously ill from diabetes. Fosse has such chutzpah that he asks Verdon, the best dancer of her generation, to spring for a nurse while they carry on their affair. Unbelievably, she agrees to it.
“Because that’s what you do at the beginning,” Williams tells The Post. “And you think he’ll love you more than he loved the other woman.”
Although executive producer Steven Levenson stresses that he’s trying to tell “a story without putting our 2019 lens on it,” he doesn’t let Fosse off the Harvey Weinstein hook. “Bob clearly abused his power, but there was nobody around him was calling him out for it,” he says. “These were things people didn’t talk about.”
And God help the woman who turned him down. When a “Pippin” dancer named Sherry (Alexis Carra) rejects his advances with a swift knee to the groin, she is removed from the lineup at rehearsals the next day, replaced by Ann Reinking (Margaret Qualley), with whom Fosse went on to have a relationship for six years.
“When [Sherry] fights back, it’s a real shock to Bob,” Levenson says. “He feels aggrieved. He feels like the victim. Fosse once said, ‘If I could just have a bed next to dance studio.’ To work and have sex was the ideal thing.”
Despite his proclivities, Fosse and Verdon stayed married for 11 years and raised a daughter, Nicole, born in 1956. They enjoyed a rich partnership, working on “Redhead” (1959), “Sweet Charity” (1966) and “Chicago” (1975). They scooped up Tony awards left and right. But Fosse also relied on Verdon behind the scenes, where she helped him articulate his artistic concepts. “He was grumpy and she was graceful. She had tact and diplomacy and she was a people person,” Williams says. “She could see what was in his head.”
“She understood the way he saw bodies and space,” Levenson says. “She saw what he wanted. She could do things with her body that other dancers could not. She could convey darkness and sexuality and then it could turn on a dime into a playful ironic thing. She seemed to be able to nail that.”
Although Verdon separated from Fosse in 1971, she never divorced him. It seems to have been enough, though, that Verdon “broke free,” as Wiliams says.
“She loved him. The heart wants what it wants. But Gwen had to fight so hard to extract herself from that relationship,” she says. “They remained friends and collaborators, but he could no longer break her heart that way.”