Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical

With his training in dance and 20 years as curator and archivist at the New York Public Library, Winkler is the ideal choice to write this exhaustively researched, detailed study of the dancing and directing of a master stylist whose innovations changed American theater and film. (Winkler even claims that the opening sequence in Fosse's 1979 film All That Jazz "virtually made the modern MTV music video.") The author's first contact with choreographer/director Bob Fosse (1927–87) came in 1982, when Winkler danced in the chorus of a revival of Little Me. From 1973, when Fosse won the show business Triple Crown with a Tony for Pippin, an Oscar for Cabaret, and an Emmy for Liza with a Z, he was the man with the "muscle" (Winkler's term) in all his productions. Fosse demanded more and more control of his projects, and as he aged, they sometimes went sour: his final movie, Star 80 and musical Big Deal were critical and box office flops.