Word: director
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lyric short stories and novels, Singer's prose is suffused with drama. In the theater, his work becomes prosaic. The notion of a girl deceived by a man who does not change his costume or his appearance demands a magic that neither the manic cast nor Director Stephen Kanee can sustain. For this tenuous fantasy, an entertainment tax is difficult enough. A credulity tax is insupportable. - Stefan Kanfer
There is nothing unpredictable about Bob Fosse: this gifted director-choreographer has shown the same strengths and weaknesses throughout his stage and film career. As a showman, he has no equal. Music, performers, movement, lighting, costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone. Too often Fosse insists on fusing entertainment with superficially conceived Big Themes. Certainly musicals have a right to be serious, but Fosse's song-and-dance flights into the metaphysical are less illuminating than...
Nowhere is the director's artistic schizophrenia more apparent or disturbing than in All That Jazz, a highly personal film that swings wildly from the sublime to the ridiculous. For half its length, Jazz is a knowing and witty tour of high-powered show biz, with Fosse as the guide. The film's hero, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), is a driven director-choreographer who not only looks like Fosse but also shares his personal and professional history. As Gideon rehearses a new musical that recalls Chicago and edits a new movie that resembles Lenny, he carries on harried...
...ability to sniff out what they delicately call "aristocratic sales of necessity" (translation: the duke needs cash). Even the sophisticated rich often have unexpected treasures on their premises. Before sitting down to lunch at their country estate with the Earl and Countess of Verulam, Christie's Oriental ceramics director, Sir John Figgess, asked his host "if there was a cloakroom [bathroom] handy." There were two cloakrooms, allowed Verulam: "You take this one and I'll take that one." In the John that Sir John took, he found a mid-14th century underglaze copper red-and-white wine...
...into a gallery and look at a work of art without its "value"-which means simply price, real or hypothetical-intruding on their reflections. After Velazquez's Juan de Pareja was bought at auction for New York's Metropolitan Museum for $5.5 million in 1970, the then director of the Met insisted, in his usual peppy, overbearing fashion, that the fuss about the price was all nonsense: in ten years' time nobody would care or even remember what the Met had laid out for this "supreme masterpiece...