Fosse/Verdon

A biographical drama every bit as daring and razzle-dazzling as the best of Fosse. [1-14 Apr 2019, p.12]

From a storytelling standpoint, the back-and-forth choreography is not without stumbles. Performance-wise, though, FX’s eight-part Fosse/Verdon is never less than all that jazz.

Ultimately, this is a show about the making of entertainment, and the producers do a brilliant job highlighting the individual struggles the process entails, as well as how the people who devote their lives to it are affected.

Fosse/Verdon can never quite escape its deteriorating orbit, plunging closer and closer to the black hole that is its central subject, because it knows, deep down, how essential he is to American art. That could have tanked the whole project. And yet ... it doesn’t. Because, deep down, this is a fantastic show about a marriage.

There’s nothing Michelle Williams can do, no lines written for her to say, that can dim the luster of her performance in this series, which owes everything to her and to Sam Rockwell, and to the exhilarating, if all too brief, musical numbers.

Seeing them portrayed on the small screen by two major movie stars, Michelle Williams and Sam Rockwell, feels like a stunt at first. But Williams especially makes her vulnerable, defiant Verdon come alive--a gladiator in a little black leotard. [5/12 Apr 2019, p.91]

An alluring and thoughtful eight-episode biographical drama.

Sam Rockwell is excellent as the passionate, manipulative, adulation-seeking Fosse. As Gwen Verdon, Michelle Williams is very nearly perfect. ... The bigger issue, and I’m not sure how much it could’ve been avoided, is that the “destructive artist and long-suffering helpmeet/muse” trope gets really freaking old.

Williams is magnificent. ... It’s a small miracle that “Fosse/Verdon” never loses sight of its goal — capturing the love and frustrations of two talented people who could never let each other go. “Fosse/Verdon” is “Scenes from a Marriage” — with none of that jazz.

Stick with it, though, and this limited series provides not only a fascinating snapshot of its time but of the unique qualities of the central duo's relationship.

In its whirling, time-fractured narrative, “Fosse/Verdon” is as ruthless and truth-seeking about its principals as the couple were about the shows and films they worked on together and separately.

It’s all sumptuously produced but heavy spirited, and perhaps too immersive for its own good. It proves the miniseries’ Broadway-and-Hollywood-geek bona fides, but as it powers through the postwar era, it settles into a boozy, smoky, prestige cable groove that’s like a glitzier, slower, less thematically on-point cousin of Mad Men.

The average viewer unfamiliar with these stars and their joined and dueling legacies might struggle to find a way into the soul of “Fosse/Verdon,” though. But what can I say? Not everyone can dance or wants to. Those who can are advised to be patient and find the beat of this story, if only to bask in the performance of an outstanding actress due for a little more recognition.

When this limited series focuses on that relationship, it’s gripping, not least because Rockwell and Williams are remarkable performers doing unsurprisingly great work (Williams in particular is exemplary). And the series does, for the most part, keep its focus there. ... The problem is, Fosse/Verdon doesn’t need the razzle-dazzle, or at least, not this much.

Williams and Rockwell are fantastic (Patricia Arquette might not want to be clearing mantel space for her Escape at Dannemora Emmy just yet), and there are moments when Fosse/Verdon really sings. But it feels like too much talent and potential not properly presented in an eight-episode format.

With little to no attempt at overture or background, viewers must sort themselves between those who’ve done the homework and those who haven’t. ... Thankfully, Fosse/Verdon can be savored entirely through Rockwell and Williams’s compelling pair of performances, which, as you would expect from two of the best actors working today, are achingly layered.

Fosse/Verdon proves to be a darker, more sorrowful meditation on the personal and professional lives of artists, but the eight-episode series benefits from Broadway tunes and re-created dance numbers from the pair’s many successful productions.

Fosse/Verdon has some things going for it that held my interest even when the basic plot didn't. The scenes in which the two break out the dance steps for their productions, are fascinating, even if—maybe especially if—you don't give a tinker's dam about scissor kicks or jazz hands.

Both Rockwell and Williams hold up their end of the bargain, even when the show’s jumbled structure nearly sabotages the whole thing.

If Fosse/Verdon lacks the obsessiveness and sensual fanaticism of Fosse and Verdon’s art, though, it nevertheless gives ample space for Rockwell and Williams to inhabit their characters.

Fosse/Verdon is a study of the possibilities and limitations of marriage. It has all the right notes, but they’re in the wrong order. It doesn’t need all that jazz.

Ultimately, I wished Fosse/Verdon was more focused, that it could bring all its fascinating parts into tighter alignment. But to those who appreciate the art of performance, the strongest piece of the series and the ingredient of entertainment about which it’s smartest, I say: Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!

The series is certainly competent, one collaboration that changed the face of American theater telling the story of another. But you’re looking for more of a Fosse shoulder roll, the extra tap in the time step, the unexpected contortion in the jazz number--the kinds of quirks that made Fosse and Verdon singular and unique. Their relationship was anything but by the book, and you wish this dramatization wasn’t afraid to go a little more off-script.

The eight-part series is simultaneously in thrall to Fosse as a legend of musical theater and critical about his excesses. It’s a tricky high-wire to walk, and Fosse/Verdon tries to manage it by positioning Verdon as Fosse’s counterforce, the backward-and-in-high-heels feminine yin to his fiery masculine yang. In reality, though, her character is less equal and more reactive.

Ignore its distractions and Fosse/Verdon is a savory, decadent treat, but ignoring Michelle Williams means depriving yourself of a show-stopping performance.

If you're familiar with Bob Fosse's choreography — obligatory "jazz hands!" jokes need not apply — and the who's who of '60s and '70s Broadway and can sing along to the entirety of Sweet Charity and Cabaret and Damn Yankees, there's a lot to enjoy here, starting with Rockwell and Williams. Beyond that, however, the early installments of Fosse/Verdon lean way too heavily on familiar genre tropes relating to self-destructive geniuses and the long-suffering women who love them. The love story of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon should open up as something bigger than just another well-cast prestige TV antihero saga. So far, it hasn't.

Rockwell and Williams are shoo-ins for Emmy nominations this summer, it’s true, but the material they’re given here never quite rises to meet their level.

The ambition of the piece rises to the level of those vaunted credits, if not necessarily their quality. In a chronologically scrambled tale of its titular subjects coming together, splitting apart, and forever driving one another to new creative highs, Fosse/Verdon mimics the former’s cinematic panache, while occasionally moving with the grace of the latter.

Williams never makes a wrong step, but, sadly, the same can’t be said for the writing and direction.

Fosse/Verdon is extremely watchable and totally fascinating. ... But it’s full of the shoddy and cruel compromises it purports to be about. It’s a show in which a grotesque man is made to seem less grotesque than he was, and a brilliant complicated woman seems less brilliant and complicated than she really was.

Fosse/Verdon, at least in the five episodes sent to critics, fizzles, weighed down by good intentions. It’s heavy, but mainly it’s heavy-handed.

For all its technical panache, puts stage center an overfamiliar biopic story of a brilliant, difficult artist.

Fosse/Verdon is a claustrophobic series as opposed to an epic one. What's mostly missing is the thrill of opening night, the chorus line, the music, the whole glorious space of the theater. That's what made these two such vital meta-humans in the first place. ... Disappointing.

As a reclamation project publicizing the influence of Verdon on well-loved pieces of theater and film, Fosse/Verdon is worthy. As television, it can’t find a rhythm that feels like its own.