Something to watch tonight: Thursday 24 August

Fosse/Verdon (2019) is streaming on Disney+

Looking back through my vari­ous archives I see that it is three years this week since I reviewed the mini-series Fosse/Verdon for RNZ.

A bio­graphy of the great cho­reo­graph­er and dir­ect­or Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) and his star, muse and some­time part­ner, the per­former Gwen Verdon (Michelle William), the show is the cre­ation of two theatre kids: play­wright Steven Levinson and dir­ect­or Thomas Kail (reg­u­lar col­lab­or­at­or with Lin-Manuel Miranda and dir­ect­or of the ori­gin­al pro­duc­tion of Hamilton as well as the Disney+ filmed ver­sion of the show).

If you are at all inter­ested in music­al theatre and can handle a little – actu­ally a lot – of highly strung, self-destructive cre­at­ive beha­viour, this series is for you.

Always totally anchored in emo­tion­al and char­ac­ter real­ity, [Williams] holds Fosse/Verdon togeth­er and it needs some hold­ing togeth­er as the struc­ture is inspired by music­als them­selves – their abil­ity to move freely in and out of time, dreams and real­ity, among oth­er things. Lots of the great dir­ec­tion in the show (led by Kail who dir­ec­ted epis­odes 1, 2 5, 7 and 8) is the kind of stuff that great theatre dir­ect­ors do: mis­dir­ec­tion, light­ing effects, showstop­ping numbers.

Each epis­ode takes an event from the life of the couple rather than flow­ing in lin­ear fash­ion which also makes each one like its own short film, the col­lec­tion adding up to a remark­ably sat­is­fy­ing whole.

Some the duo’s best-known num­bers are recre­ated here and the tempta­tion will be to go and find cop­ies of Damn Yankees, Sweet Charity, Cabaret and All That Jazz imme­di­ately. It cer­tainly was for me.

My full review of the show goes into slightly more depth and I’m reminded that, back then, Disney+ didn’t exist and shows like Fosse/Verdon found a home at Neon.

I’d like to take this oppor­tun­ity to wel­come new sub­scribers and thank those of you who are spread­ing the word about this relaunched ver­sion of Funerals & Snakes. You can find all the ori­gin­al pieces from my Capital Times and FishHead days at the old site where there used to be an explan­a­tion of the site name.

I’m not sure why it dis­ap­peared but the short ver­sion is that “funer­als and snakes” is a quote from the great Fritz Lang in Godard’s 1963 film Contempt. Discussing the new-fangled widescreen formats like CinemaScope, he dis­misses them say­ing they’re only good for shoot­ing funer­als and snakes (or snakes and funer­als depend­ing on your translation). 

Contempt was, of course, shot in the very wide 2.35:1 ratio, and looks mar­vel­lous as a result.