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Stage Preview: Ann Reinking lets the dances tell the Fosse story
Sunday, January 09, 2000 By Jane Vranish, Post-Gazette Dance Critic
Ann Reinking is still dancing through life, whether choreographing for Joffrey Ballet, doing a Latin-inspired piece for Ballet Hispanico or concocting a commercial for Chic jeans. She also nurses show-biz babies at the University of South Florida in her pet Broadway Theatre Project. And she's still showing off those ever-fabulous gams while performing in shows like "Applause."
But Annie, as everyone seems to call her, is periodically drawn back home. And that means getting in touch with Bob Fosse.
When she's talking on the phone, that distinctively husky voice is riddled with a childlike enthusiasm when talking about her Tony Award-winning project, a compilation of essential choreographic elements that are both Fosse, the man, and "Fosse," the show.
Co-director and co-choreographer of "Fosse," Reinking says of her late mentor, "His choreography is classic. It will never be dated because it has a generational appeal. What he did for Broadway theater dancing is immense. He was one of the first to advocate that a dancer can be a triple threat, therefore elevating a dancer's status in the Broadway hierarchy. He had a great belief in dancers that they were great actors and great singers, too."
Reinking paired up with Fosse, which moves into the Benedum this week, early on. A native of Seattle, she won a Ford Foundation scholarship to study with the San Francisco School of Ballet. After high school, she moved to New York, where she landed her first job in the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall.
Broadway was just a brief hop, skip and jump away. Reinking probed "Tradition" in "Fiddler on the Roof," but quickly did an artistic U-turn and danced her way into Fosse's "Cabaret" by the next year. She would be linked to him personally and professionally forevermore. Reinking would become one of those leggy women that Fosse favored, although she insists that a true Fosse dancer needs "heart -- a lot of it and the desire to work 150 percent."
Although she won accolades in shows like "Over Here" and "Goodtime Charlie," shows like "Pippin," "Chicago," "Dancin'," "Sweet Charity" and the movie "All That Jazz" would make her a Fosse muse second only to the legendary Gwen Verdon.
"A big component of Bob's choreography was that the dancer was as much a part of the creative process as his framework," Reinking explains. "That's why Liza Minnelli is Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey is Joel Grey and Gwen Verdon is Gwen Verdon and Roy Scheider is Roy Scheider -- even though it all has the stamp of Fosse on it. His own particular God-given brilliance was that he had a way of getting that out of you, of making you want to do it and loving to go to work. You were a part of the process."
But "Fosse" was a different story. The man and the inspiration were gone -- he died of a heart attack in 1987. Would the steps stand on their own?
Reinking had learned an early lesson while hanging on that famous dance barre in "Chicago" and singing "Big Spender."
"He has a tremendous use of paradox," she explains. "In this number, you're tired. It's the end of the night, and you gotta dance with more guys. It's the last thing you want to do. But you have to be sensual. Yet inside there is this nervous energy that if you don't pick up enough guys, you won't eat or you'll lose your job. So you're playing fatigue with nervous energy, with dreams still not dead."
Fosse likened it to broken dolls. Says Reinking, "You're all pulled up and elegant from the waist up but, below the barre, the legs are all broken and busted."
Fosse's distinctive choreography came from studying a variety of dance and theatrical sources. Reinking specifies George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, vaudeville, burlesque ("good, not bad"), Agnes de Mille "to a certain extent," African-American rhythms, tap dancing and Fred Astaire. "He was very knowledgeable and was capable of doing it himself," she says. "Out of this vocabulary came his own story."
So Reinking decided to let the dances tell the "Fosse" story. The wealth of material was daunting. "I'm like a kid," she gushes. "It's just like a candy store."
There are his first 45 seconds of film choreography ("From This Moment On" from "Kiss Me Kate"), the slow-oozin' beat of "I Wanna Be a Dancin' Man," a little bit of "Razzle Dazzle," the ever-cool "Steam Heat," the sentiment of "Mr. Bojangles" and the dancing fireworks of "Sing, Sing, Sing."
And that just scratches the surface.
Reinking loves it all. But it's a piece that she had never seen before -- "Cool Hand Luke" from an early Bob Hope special -- that really captured her heart.
"It's a beautiful, minimal, elegant and always sensual Spanish number," she explains. "But I was stunned by the tenderness in it. Then Nicole [Fosse's daughter] explained to me that this was Bob's first choreography for Gwen after the birth of Nicole."
There are no hidden meanings in "Fosse," says Reinking. "It's just great entertainment, and he is the master." And that message, it seems, is part of an unspoken law in the hands-on profession of dance. When Reinking was an "uppity teen-ager," her teacher told her, "I'm not making this up; I'm just passing it on."
"In other words," Reinking adds, "she told me to cut the baloney and dance. It's a great way to live."
Such is the buoyantly sexy, hip-poppin' spirit behind "Fosse."
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Where: Benedum Center.