Fossephorescence

By T.E. Kalem

Directed and Choreographed by BOB FOSSE

Music by JOHN KANDER

Lyrics by FRED EBB

Broadway is in a phenomenal bull market, racking up the largest box office take in its history. The rich variety of the season pans out with two gold-nugget dance musicals, A Chorus Line and Chicago.

Future chroniclers of the New York theater will point to this period as the age of the choreographer-director sun gods. The Apollonian names will be Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse. Fosse makes total demands in the realm of precision. Apart from that, he is the most paganly sexual of choreographers, and Shubert Alley is his mother earth--the source of his awesomely abiding strength.

The book is as full of holes as some of the bullet-sieved characters. Roxie Hart (Gwen Verdon), a honky-tonk '20s entertainer, murders her lover and beats the rap, thanks to a slick mouthpiece, Billy Flynn (Jerry Orbach). This scarcely matters. What matters is the erotic poetry in motion that uncoils whenever Verdon and her sister in crime Velma Kelly (Chita Rivera) do their solos and duets. They pace the show with spunk incarnate. The chorus is jazzily bacchanalian, and Patricia Zipprodt's eye-riveting costumes swirl right out of a decadent Brechtian Berlin. Chicago is a cinch to take a bite out of the Big Apple.

sb T.E. Kalem

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