Bob Fose’s students carefully cultivate their “Dansin”.

For 40 years since Dance Closed on Broadway, it has come and gone with many revivals and tours of Bob Foss shows, sweet charity, Yankees from hell s Pippin, between them. 1996 revival Chicago That’s it again in a hurry. DanceHowever, there was always the MIA, despite her equally sexual sparkle.

Now, years after a false start, Dance He finally heads to revive his first Broadway. On view since March at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater, the show just opened there for a preview that ran until June 5th. The producers plan to open in New York in the fall or spring of 2023.

The return of this comprehensive 1978 dance magazine reignited a wave of interest in the lone choreographer and filmmaker whose exaggerated lives were (mostly) exposed in the 2019 FX Limited series. Fosse/Verdon.

Nominated for 17 Emmy Awards and four winners, including one for Michelle Williams as Foss’ wife and muse Gwen Verdon, the series explored the duo’s status as Broadway’s top fashion designers.

From the mid-1950s to the 1980s, the two collaborated on cinematographic, theatrical and television works so unique that they created their own genre, which is still known today as “Fosse”.

As her daughter Nicole Foss points out, her work endures because the list of choreographers who “created something so stylistically innovative it influenced pop culture to thrive forever” is short.

Despite DanceA profitable four-year run, a two-ton jackpot, its initial world tour, and Foss’ ubiquity at the time, he didn’t think this particular show would ever return to Broadway.

“We’ll see some of my best work,” Fose said. ✓ New York Times March 1978. “There is no way to restore it.”

Admission Dance Standing up was really a job. Numbers that could never exceed today’s flavor standards. Others are so physically demanding that the original production was based around a full-time spare chair with eight players.

The dialogue of the time, although minimal, needed to be renewed. Casting meant finding at least 20 of the same, as the nine-time Tony winner Foss insisted that all dancers be the leads, which was the first Broadway.

And without the professional recordings of the show, was there anyone out there who knew all about this? (An era in the not-too-distant past when teachers didn’t remember their jobs? It’s unimaginable now.)

More importantly, the new actors and creatives did not want to build a museum.

“I wanted to go through that wonderful line,” says director Wayne Silento, alumnus danceOriginal Actor and Tony Award-Winning Choreographer who is tommy In 1993.”Dance It was sophisticated and amazing at the time, but I wanted to take it to another level and keep it like Bob would today.

Silento started looking for the program’s video; Which came out almost empty. “We got everything we could,” he said of several vague records that were circulating. “So we called Christine Colby Jack, who was an original Broadway actress who knew every role.

As Jacques filled his old three-ring binder with 44-year-old essay notes, he finally got hurt. Dance Memory together again.

“I didn’t know I knew that,” he said of some of the footsteps that “just flowed” after playing the song. “When you do something for so long, it’s so ingrained that the music will tell you.”

Nicole Foss, who created Verdon/Fosse Legacy in 2013 to preserve and protect her parents’ work, said hollywood reporter This movie or video might not have been the best guide anyway.

“My dad knew that when you record performances on video, you lose intention, you lose energy. It’s flat and you can’t see the patterns. “But he loved dancing with the film because he could direct the viewer’s gaze,” he said of the man who won the Oscar for Best Director in 1973. Cabaret.

After Fosse’s death in September 1987, at age 60, the transfer of his work became a calling for Verdon, who often collaborated closely with Anne Reinking, another important Fosse muse, and Dances rising star.

With an encyclopedic knowledge of her husband’s work, Verdon believed he could recreate all of his work, even the one that had never been done.

“It’s pretty close to the truth,” says Nicole. “He was the ballet master of the National Travel Company Dance“At one point, Fosse asked for quality control.

After a long departure (Verdon died in October 2000 at age 75) and Reinking’s death in December 2020, Foss’ back catalog now falls to the last generation who worked with him.

For his part, Silento aspired to respect, with a shot. He remade a ballet called “The Big City Mimi”, which Fose cut at the time. DanceThe preview goes through Boston. The work now includes cult sections from various Verdun and Fose films and shows, including kiss me katia, all that jazz, Cabaret, Pippin s Lisa with “Z”, that were rebuilt Dance Associate Director and Music Director Corinne McFadden Herrera.

The centerpiece of the evening, the 18-minute piece with Benny Goodman’s classic arrangement of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” remains the same as it was in 1978, save for a scroll or two.

Nicole thinks dancer,’ With a wide mix of songs (Neil Diamond, Dolly Parton, Jerry Jeff Walker and John Philip Souza, among others), it will be “visible”, especially for an audience that mostly knows “Derby, White Gloves, Totally Black”. And laughs.”

“My father had no style,” he says. “There’s an eye on your shows and movies. There was an approach. it’s sensitivity. But he had a lot of styles.”