Word: show
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...virtually undisguised portraits of Gwen Verdon and the real-life Reinking. The hero's artistic associates are scabrous caricatures of past Fosse collaborators. Through a series of gritty backstage scenes and razor-sharp dance numbers, these players dramatize all the tensions, hard work and neuroses of idiosyncratic, inveterate show people. In Jazz's spectacular opening sequence, a Broadway audition, Fosse even creates his own capsule version of A Chorus Line...
Unfortunately, the fun comes to a screeching halt when Gideon re-enacts Fosse's heart attack. Though it is daring for a film maker to dramatize his own brush with death, Fosse does not so much confront his own mortality as trivialize it. His usual grab bag of show-biz metaphors is not equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body...
...eddies of this confluence, the work of art, battered and sucked this way and that by incompatible necessities, becomes simultaneously prominent and invisible. It can no longer speak as it once spoke. It is asked to become not an object of contemplation, but a spectacle. In the show-biz world that replaces the more subtle processes of art appreciation, there are two kinds of artwork, Treasures and Masterpieces. Anyone can tell the difference. Treasures have gold in them, Masterpieces...
...form of Tut-style blockbusters and Pompeian frolics. Meanwhile, the proper functions of the museum will receive proportionately less support, because they are not "sexy." As corporate public relations firms insert their flackery into the curatorial arena, diminishing the museum's own control of what it shows while encouraging clients to favor exhibitions with guaranteed pull, the situation will not improve. Eventually, we may be reduced to the Ultimate Art Show, a display of all the gold in Fort Knox relocated to the Whitney Museum or some other institution, stacked up as a minimal sculpture. By then, price will...
...mound of cotton-candy hair? And who is that in such an enormous wedding dress, balancing the cake, complete with bride and groom, on top of her head? Isn't the answer obvious by now? She is, as she announces in the opening number of her new Broadway show, "the big noise from Winnetka." She does not, in fact, come from Winnetka, but Bette Midler is the biggest noise-and one of the biggest talents...