Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Former Women's Wear Daily drama critic Gottfried traces the life and career of director/choreographer Fosse (1927-1987), who rose to fame with The Pajama Game , Damn Yankees , Sweet Charity and other shows and films. Fosse's life was full of conflict--a desire (unfulfilled) to star as performer as well as director, painful personal relationships, obsession with sex and a preoccupation with death that led him to recount the details of his heart attack in the movie All That Jazz . Basing his text on interviews, Gottfried examines Fosse's numerous unsatisfactory marriages and love affairs, and his tense dealings with collaborators and colleagues, revealing much about the backstage intrigues and vicissitudes of show business, but offering little of substance about either the shows themselves or Fosse's talent. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Drama critic Gottfried, author of Broadway Musicals (Abrams, 1989), brings a wealth of Broadway lore to his biography of choreographer/director Fosse, who made a lasting impact on the dancing style of Broadway musicals. Fosse was a driving perfectionist who had such mega-hits as Broadway's Sweet Charity and the movie version of Cabaret , and such colossal failures as the movie version of Sweet Charity and his last movie, Star 80 , which combines his lifelong obsessions, sex and death. Three times married, the last to Gwen Verdon with whom he had his string of Broadway hits, Fosse was a compulsive womanizer. He remains a likable character despite this and other negative traits which Gottfried does not soften. Gottfried gives a more complete psychological portrait of this contradictory man than Kevin Grubb's Razzle Dazzle ( LJ 10/1/89), which was heavily illustrated. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 8/1/90.-- Marcia L. Perry, Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Celebrity bio the way it should be done--brilliantly paced and shaped; by the author of Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius (1984), etc. Gottfried's Fosse compares favorably with Kevin Grubb's Razzle Dazzle: The Life and Work of Bob Fosse (1989), which was thorough and satisfying, particularly about dance, while not getting any inside dope from Fosse's still-grieving daughter Nicole and wife Gwen Verdon. Gottfried, a chief drama critic for Women's Wear Daily, The New York Post, and Saturday Review, doesn't get to Nicole or Verdon either, but that's little loss set beside the pluses. Gottfried sees Fosse as ""a modern man of shadow, texture, and energy to contribute to the human pool. . .a man not always certain of his manliness. . .and. . .convinced of his own fraudulence."" A child prodigy as a dancer, Fosse worked in sleaze joints, a virgin among stark naked women who often sat on his lap and taunted him. This lent his later productions as a choreographer and film director a heated eroticism and sleaze--he saw all his dancing (and even nonmusical shows such as Star 80)--as semiautobiographical and felt he could not honestly avoid the rich sleaze that made him most alive. As Gottfried shows, this vice carried over into Fosse's love life: he was endlessly unfaithful, saw himself as incapable of lasting sexual love for any woman, often carried on several affairs at once while married to Verdon. His deepest love was for Nicole. Infidelity coupled with drugs, booze, and a sense that he had stolen many of his best stage effects at last made him mean-spirited and often terrifying to his coworkers. His tireless attack on work, however, produced on film the best performances ever given by Liza Minnelli (Cabaret), Roy Schelder (All That Jazz), and Eric Roberts (Star 80), and won him the triple crown: an Oscar, Emmy and Tony all in one season. Nonetheless, Gottfried demonstrates, Fosse remained death-haunted and even filmed his own death as the main theme of his autobiographical masterpiece, All That Jazz. A fabulous life, profoundly revealed. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
