Eulogy

By Herb Gardner

Aside from being the best American dancer-actress of the 20th century, GWEN VERDON, in every cell of her body, held the moves and spirit of her great collaborator, Bob Fosse. In her 70s, Gwen created the musical Fosse, willing his work into immortality through new dancers, not so much teaching as illuminating them, lighting each like a candle, startling and inspiring with a sudden and impossible whirl, a back-arched, hip-winked, sly-smiled thrust of her hands in which each finger had a job and a mind of its own, not so much defying time and gravity as making them seem irrelevant, burnishing the Fosse moves into the classic permanence of a Van Gogh swirl or a Beethoven crescendo. In preserving Fosse's spirit, she preserved her own. She knew that they were both creatures of the living theater, of the lightning that struck but once, inevitably reduced by film and electric furniture. "Watch him move," she'd say of Bob. "He knows the joke." Clearly, so did Gwen. Remember her astonishing finish to Sweet Charity's If They Could See Me Now, laughing at her own impossible finale, knowing that this moment was gone as you watched it, immortalized only by the presence of you both: now you see it; now you don't. She knew the joke, and the joke was life.

--Herb Gardner, playwright and a longtime friend of Verdon and Fosse