Theatre in Review: Bob Fosse's Dancin' (Music Box Theatre)

	The company. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Dancin', a blockbuster hit in 1978, was the chef d'oeuvre of Bob Fosse, choreographer, director, and control freak extraordinaire; one wonders what he might make of the current revival, which adds his name to the title sometimes misses his spirit. "The moves he invented. Reinvented," says the oddly honest ad copy: The result is a peculiar school-of-Fosse exercise that preserves the original's weaknesses while occasionally minimizing its strengths. Bright, loud, and in your face, it often dazzles without fully satisfying.

To be sure, Dancin' always was a hodgepodge of the good, the bad, and the head-scratching, featuring a title that told all. Never a great collaborator, Fosse spent the 1970s extending his creative oversight over each new project until he alone was in charge. Dancin' dispensed with writers altogether, being a plotless dance revue that drew on existing music ranging from Bach to Neil Diamond. (Fosse took over book-writing duties on his next, and final, new project, the disappointing Big Deal, constructing a score out of 1930s-era standards; it may be the first jukebox musical.)

The revival at the Music Box is heavily adulterated; large chunks of the original have been removed, replaced with new material staged by Wayne Cilento. Gone are, among other things, "The Dream Barre," a vulgar, unfunny erotic reverie, and "Fourteen Feet," a gimmicky piece featuring dancers in shoes stuck to the stage deck. Replacing them is a raft of Fosse-retrospective material. A new sequence, "Big City Mime," centers on a male out-of-towner, lost in a gritty, pre-Disney Times Square, who gets dragged through a series of seedy dives populated with louche characters. It's a kind of revue-within-a-revue, offering bits of "Hey, Big Spender" and "Rich Man's Frug" from Sweet Charity and, of all things, the war sequence from Pippin. (Also featured is "Let Me Entertain You" from Gypsy, a show to which Fosse had no connection) It's sketchy, disjointed piece that leaves one yearning to see the originals in all their glory.

Also featured is a lengthy sequence, complete with plot summary, from Big Deal, which opened eight years after Dancin'. If it seems curious to devote so much time to a flop, the show's signature number, "Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar," provides one of the evening's genuine showstoppers. Other highlights include a pair of original Dancin' pieces: "I Want to be a Dancin' Man," a silky-smooth exercise featuring the high-kicking company decked out in ice cream suits and straw boaters, and "Sing, Sing, Sing," a nervous breakdown in swing time set to the Louis Prima classic. In the latter, the spectacle of angular bodies twitching to the music's driving rhythms is a pure distillation of the Fosse style.

Next to these, the patriotic salute "America" -- set to "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," and "The Stars and Stripes Forever" -- is more baffling than ever. In 1978, it was hard to tell if Fosse was kidding; in 2023, it's still not clear. Even more mysterious is the decision to retain "The Female Star Spot," in which five performers (including the male Ron Todorowski) fool around vocally with the Dolly Parton hit "Here You Come Again."

As you can see, it's an evening of this, that, and the other thing, and you can't fault it for being incohesive because that's all it ever was. Anyway, the talent onstage is abundant. Todorowski excels in "Ionisation," arguably the show's most challenging solo. Ida Saki and Dylis Croman leap vigorously through the "America" sequence, making it seem better than it is. The nonbinary performer Kolton Krouse makes a big impression in the "Spring Chicken" section of "Big City Mime" and the "trumpet solo" of "Sing, Sing, Sing," the latter originally performed by the late Ann Reinking. (It's interesting to wonder what Fosse would have made of the current discussion about gender-nonconforming identities; something tells me that he, a natural provocateur, would have made hay with it.)

The Music Box stage already feels a little small for a company of nearly two dozen dancers, and the enormous rolling towers of Robert Brill's set design add to the cramped, hulking atmosphere, even if Cilento deploys cast members on multiple levels and ladders. Even when it relies on abstract color combinations, Finn Ross' video, mostly focused on the enormous upstage screen, is so vivid and bright that it often threatens to overwhelm; the jazzy trio "Big Noise from Winnetka" suffers from being staged in front of a scrolling street map front-projected on a downstage screen. The attention-grabbing video also diminishes the effect of David Grill's lighting, which relies on the classic use of saturated side washes. The costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, are a real grab bag; those medieval soldier outfits from Pippin are especially hard to explain. Peter Hylenski's sound design is pitched at an unpleasantly high level throughout; this is unsurprising given the production's hard-sell tactics, which suggest a lack of trust in the material.

It's endemic to the revue format, I suppose, but no other current Broadway show combines such a broad range of highs and lows. Maybe it doesn't matter: Of all the golden-era Broadway director/choreographers -- including Michael Bennett, Gower Champion, and Jerome Robbins -- only Fosse became a commercial brand. Even non-theatergoers are familiar with the relatively limited vocabulary -- the turned-in knees, teacup fingers, and shoulder rolls -- on which he built his style. Perhaps because his work is so identifiable, audiences seemingly can't get enough of it: The original Dancin' ran 1,774 performances. Fosse, another revue, logged 1,093 performances starting in 1999. And the revival of Chicago, choreographed by Reinking in the Fosse manner, is apparently destined to run until the solar system shuts down. Maybe this odd hybrid will continue the winning streak. --David Barbour