‘Fosse,’ Beyond Nostalgic, Shows His Style Has a Future

Famed director-choreographer Joe Gideon lies dying in an operating room, and his mind isn’t filled with passages from the Bible, Shakespeare or Mozart but old show tunes performed by the women in his life as ironic, Broadway-style epitaphs.

This sequence forms the finale to “All That Jazz,” the brilliant, quasi-autobiographical 1979 Bob Fosse film-musical, and it also represents the deepest, truest excerpt in “Fosse,” the plotless, 1999 Tony Award-winning compendium of his work that opened a 3 1/2-week run at the Shubert Theatre on Thursday.

Fosse, who died at age 60 in 1987, built his career on show business-as-metaphor, and even if the greatest Broadway musicals on that theme (“Gypsy,” “Cabaret,” “A Chorus Line”) went to other directors and choreographers, nobody matched him at reshaping the traditions and cliches of vaudeville, burlesque, Broadway and Hollywood to depict the energy, edge and evasions of contemporary America.

As conceived by Richard Maltby Jr., Chet Walker and Ann Reinking (with Maltby and Reinking co-directing and Walker re-creating the choreography), “Fosse” not only incorporates his greatest hits (“Big Spender” from “Sweet Charity,” for instance, or “Steam Heat” from “The Pajama Game”) but breaks his dance vocabulary into its components and reassembles them in new combinations as “Fosse’s World” and other transitional sequences staged by Reinking. This innovation takes the show out of the category of nostalgia musical and presents Fosse-dancing as something with a future: a distinctive, fully evolved style ripe for development.

However, the concept seemed more plausible when the original cast performed the show at the Ahmanson in 1998 prior to Broadway. No dance-driven musical since “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” had been in preparation longer, and the level of dancer control, nuance and detail was astonishing. The current touring-company members work hard to entertain, but they merely perform Fosse style; they don’t own it in the manner of their predecessors.

Indeed, there are enough energy lapses, smudged unisons and soft approximations to keep you from getting caught up in the dancing as much as before. Instead, repetitions loom large, and you remember Fosse used to say he had only 10 steps. Though the show runs about two hours and 15 minutes instead of the three hours at the Ahmanson, there seems to be more opportunities to count steps from Fosse-one to Fosse-10, over and over.

Those who disagree--who cherish each reiterated pelvic bump, wrist curl and shoulder shrug--will regret that the Shubert version is shorter than the Broadway edition, and not merely because the second intermission has been replaced with a pause. Gone are “Shoeless Joe,” “Nowadays,” “The Hot Honey Rag,” and the fragmentary “I Love a Piano,” with “Glory” shortened as well.

But there are pluses as well as minuses, and the biggest is lead singer Reva Rice, who reinvigorates the show even after the lachrymose “Mr. Bojangles” number by delivering “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” as a glorious gift from her voice to your ears. She also makes “Mein Herr” genuinely dangerous, reducing the evening’s other attempts at predatory sexuality to mere kids’ stuff.

Looking like a cross between Fosse and the young Gower Champion, the versatile Greg Reuter is another plus (especially when dancing Fosse’s role in “From This Moment On”) and, without outclassing their 1998 counterparts, the large, attractive cast also boasts engaging soloists in Linda Bowen, John Carroll, Jennifer Savelli, Darren Gibson, April Nixon, Terace Jones and Rick Faugno. But some of the ensembles definitely need sharpening, starting with the soggy “Bye Bye Blackbird” (snap those backs).

As before, Santo Loquasto’s sets create stages within stages and his black-on-black costumes a somber glamour, with Andrew Bridge’s lighting designs complementing both resourcefully. Musical director Don York sustains vitality throughout, but there’s still a sense that this show never did find its ideal shape--that, despite the abundance of major talent on and backstage, it’s less a statement about Bob Fosse’s achievements or legacy than a grab-bag of glittering loose ends.

* “Fosse” runs through July 9 at the Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; also Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. $40 to $70. (800) 447-7400.