For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this preview with Fosse/Verdon showrunner Steven Levenson from Issue 37 of Backstory.
If you enjoy what you’ve read – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by buying Issue 37 as a single issue or subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
TV DVR’d: Fosse/Verdon
Tony winner Steven Levenson on the new FX miniseries that traces the intertwined lives and careers of theater legends Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon.
By Danny Munso
The legend of Bob Fosse is so large it engulfed his most meaningful relationship. That was the key discovery made by writer Steven Levenson and director Thomas Kail as they researched a miniseries about the theater legend. Levenson and Kail had become part of Broadway lore themselves as recent Tony winners for two of the most successful musicals of all-time: Kail directed Hamilton, and Levenson wrote the book for Dear Evan Hansen. After meeting at a screening of La La Land in 2016, the pair decided to join forces on a project, but it was Kail who knew the perfect one. A few months earlier, he had been approached by Hamilton creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda, who asked if Kail would be interested in coming aboard to produce a television adaptation of Sam Wasson’s biographical bestseller Fosse for FX. Kail signed on, brought in Levenson, and the two took to shaping the story. They particularly wanted to speak with Fosse’s daughter, Nicole, herself an actress and producer, who had not participated in Wasson’s book. Through their research and conversations with her, Levenson and Kail realized this was actually a story about two people: Fosse and Nicole’s mom, Gwen Verdon.
A beloved Broadway icon in her own right, Verdon won four Tony Awards for Best Actress in a six-year span and was a groundbreaking performer and dancer. She was also essential to Fosse’s creative process, even for projects she didn’t star in or had her name on in any shape or form. The pair married in 1960 and had Nicole in 1963, and though they separated in 1971 after the latest of Fosse’s numerous infidelities, they remained creatively entwined and stayed married through Fosse’s death in 1987, where he passed out in Verdon’s arms before succumbing to a heart attack at the hospital. Hearing tales of the couple, Levenson and Kail knew doing a series on their relationship was a much better story than one centered solely on Fosse’s career. “You can find a lot of information about him where she is portrayed as a supporting character in the story of Bob, but we didn’t find a lot where she was her own person,” Levenson says of the opportunity the project afforded. “There is no authoritative biography of Gwen Verdon out there, yet there are several of Bob.” Nicole was essential to filling in some of the gaps for the creators, and she now serves as the series’ executive producer. “We thought it was interesting to explore not just her contribution creatively and artistically but also the relationship between them over this huge span of time. The question that pulled us into their story specifically was how in the world did these two people stay married, keep working together, keep raising a child together over that span of time through all the pain that was mostly caused by him. That was fascinating to us.”
Speaking of the pain he caused, Fosse is an interesting character particularly when viewed through the lens of today’s #MeToo movement. His creative genius is almost unparalleled—in 1973, he became the first and only person to win an Oscar, Tony and Emmy in the same year. Yet he was a notorious and shameless womanizer, regularly using his power as a show director to take advantage of the many ladies he cast. That the encounters were consensual doesn’t hide the ugly truth that Fosse abused his power. As the showrunner, Levenson had to tackle these truths head on in any series about Fosse, and he didn’t shy away from that. “It was incredibly important to us to be honest with the way Bob treated women,” he says. “We did not want to sugarcoat any of it. The other part that was equally important to us was we wanted to be truthful to the time that the story takes place. To us, rather than making it feel like an excuse of, oh, it was a different time, by putting his behavior in its context, I think you see how insidious this behavior was and how everything was set up to allow it to flourish.” Yet it was also crucial not to just label Fosse a monster. He was beloved by all the women who worked with and for him, even the ones he took to bed. His friends were devoted to him, and maybe most complicated of all, Fosse was self-aware, acknowledging these realities in his memorable 1979 autobiographical film All That Jazz, which won four of its nine Oscar nominations. “That’s what’s most disturbing about Bob and what makes his story so important. He was such a charmer and so sweet, and he knew all the right moves and all the right things to say, and the people in his life really loved him. That, to me, is a much more complicated story and a harder story to feel innocent about. We wanted to make it difficult. We wanted to make the audience ask questions rather than answer for them. That’s one reason we structured the series the way we did. The beginning is incredibly seductive and roaring. The first episode is filled with dancing, and it’s sexy and flashy and fun. But as the series goes on, the lights get turned on more and more and you see the darkness underneath. That was intentional on our part.”
Levenson and Kail made a particularly brilliant choice in their planning. Rather than start at an obvious point for the famed couple—the day they met—they open the series as their marriage was dissolving. That’s why the first episode, “Life Is a Cabaret,” tracks the making of Sweet Charity, Fosse’s directorial debut that was a massive flop, and his next film, 1972’s Cabaret, which was in creative trouble until Verdon showed up on set in Germany and helped Fosse see his vision through. It would ultimately take home 8 of its 10 Oscar nods. Unfortunately, while all this was going on, Fosse fell for the production’s German translator, and that led to Verdon finally leaving him. “We were really fascinated by this sequence of time,” Levenson says. “Bob is directing Sweet Charity but there’s also the incredible backstory of the Broadway production, which was created and written as a star vehicle for Gwen. But when it came time to turn it into a movie, she was replaced by Shirley MacLaine, who was a huge movie star. So we have Gwen going to Los Angeles with Bob to help teach Shirley MacLaine how to be Gwen Verdon. That was fascinating. Then on Cabaret, that was the movie where he began to establish his own visual aesthetic as a film director. But if you switch the perspective back to Gwen just as Bob is becoming one of the biggest directors in Hollywood, her career is on the complete opposite trajectory because of her age. She’s watching this as her star falls. The fact that those two things were happening at the same time seemed like a great place to start as a storyteller.”
Starting the series there also allowed the creators to focus on the duo’s output in the 1970s. While the ’60s featured many Verdon stage productions where Fosse was the choreographer and/or the director, it didn’t hold the amount of drama or historical importance of the latter material. “It was their most fertile period by far,” Levenson says. “It was the decade in which they created the thing together that would have the most lasting impact, which is Chicago — something that is still running on Broadway today. It’s by far the most successful thing they created either together or individually.” The years saw Fosse’s creative peak as a director as well, both onstage with Pippin and on film with Cabaret, Lenny and All That Jazz. But those projects also coincided with personal upheaval, including his first near-fatal heart attack. “That period is the most mature and complicated for them both from a relationship perspective. They separated after Cabaret but then formed this really professional relationship together.”
The only episode not centered on that period of time is the series’ second, “Who’s Got the Pain?” which goes back to the day Fosse and Verdon met in a dance rehearsal studio before a stage production of Damn Yankees. Verdon was already cast but Fosse insisted she audition for him anyway. That tryout leads to one of the best and most fascinating exchanges you’ll see on television this year. The near 10-minute scene has Fosse and Verdon (portrayed by Oscar winners Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams) doing a physical—and metaphorical—dance around each other as they choreograph the sultry “Whatever Lola Wants.” Levenson recalls, “We saw a big challenge and opportunity with that scene. They fell in love actually making work together by watching each other dance, so it felt like a great opportunity to show it happen in real time and watch these two huge forces collide. Though some of it was in the biography, we really have no idea what happened in that room, and that’s such a great invitation to a writer.” He credits the success of the scene to the fact that Rockwell and Williams were given an extensive rehearsal period, particularly for the first two episodes, so the creative team could hone in on their chemistry. For this scene, Levenson, Kail (who was directing the episode), choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, Rockwell and Williams worked together to iron out everything from the dialogue to their nonverbal interplay. “That was fun and a really collaborative scene in that we all shaped and figured it out together. It felt like a play rehearsal. We were really crafting it together. Part of the magic of that scene is to see how brilliant Sam and Michelle are. You do get the sense they’re falling in love physically. They’re reading each other’s bodies in a way that only choreographers and dancers do.”
The creators made an important decision early on when they decided to include Nicole as a central figure, even though there are numerous examples in biographies of children shunned to the side. She’s there when Fosse is in the studio choreographing moves (and putting moves on the dancers), and she’s there for a crucial weekend at a beach house where her parents and their friends are debating the future of Fosse’s career after a mental-health scare. “As we began to talk more with Nicole, we realized the heart of the story was this family element,” Levenson says. “This was a family that never went away. They were always in each other’s lives no matter what they all went through together.” Nicole’s inclusion also allowed the writers to play to a thematic motif as well. Through quick flashbacks, we see that Fosse’s and Verdon’s lives were shaped by early traumas when they were teenagers. Now we see Nicole’s traumas play out onscreen with her parents present. We see her try her first cigarette at the age of 10, and she gets in trouble for bringing some of Fosse’s pills to school, among other things. “We felt that at the heart of this series was a story of trauma and patterns of behavior and cycles repeating themselves. Bob’s father was a drunk. Gwen’s father was a drunk. They all smoked. These behaviors got passed down clearly from their parents to them. The open question for us throughout the series is, Is Nicole doomed to repeat the cycle? That cycle also includes getting into show business and the allure of that lifestyle. We really wanted to follow that story of whether people can escape these patterns. If Bob and Gwen can’t, can their child?”
Thankfully for fans of his work, Levenson is moving on to more musical-based material. He’s penning the script for Miranda’s directorial debut, an adaptation of Pulitzer-winning Rent writer Jonathan Larson’s musical Tick, Tick…Boom! and when the time comes, he is attached to write the feature version of Dear Evan Hansen. He’s also working on an original movie musical with Mary Poppins Returns songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. “It’s about industrial musicals,” he says. “Between the ’50s and before they died out in the ’80s, big corporations used to commission composers and writers to make original musicals to be performed for their employees at staff meetings and retreats, and all these incredible talents got their starts doing that. So we’re diving into that world, and we’ll see what happens.”
If you enjoy what you’ve read – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by buying Issue 37 as a single issue or subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
For more info about all the other amazing articles in issue 37, view our Table of Contents.