A dear friend of mine died suddenly this week and suddenly nothing else mattered.
David Arthur was so many things. An actor, a dancer, a singer, a songwriter, a novelist and the single person in my life who knew the most about Broadway and the American musical theatre.
Our Dear David
Now, being a gay man of a certain age, I do not say the latter lightly. Of course, I have MANY friends who excel in this area, many of whom read this blog and will be quite upset at this statement.
However, none had the breadth of knowledge over so many shows over so many decades. Or still hung on to rare recordings of Bea Lillie, Tallulah Bankhead, Mary Martin, Julie Andrews, et al in _________ or performing __________ on the radio, or performing their nightclub act where they did patter and a song that was cut from ________, or… well, you get the picture.
I met David in the late 1970s through one of the most caring, memorable and certainly most talented people I knew at the time, or ever, the late Brian Lasser. We were walking on the west side of Manhattan to meet this guy who he claimed “is the funniest person I know.”
Funniest?! I’ll be the judge
Now, being a gay man of the certain age, in the 1970s, I can tell you there were A LOT of funny people. But Brian, as usual, was correct.
Can I remember a single thing David said at that first meeting? Certainly not! Only that somewhere there was a story about either Noel Coward or Elaine Stritch (Note: Probably both) mixed with a diatribe of backstage gossip about pretty much every show that was playing at the time on Broadway.
Man, we had so much fun. And neither one of them are around anymore to remind me of exactly what we talked about.
Of course, they are still here…somewhere.
But it’s not quite the same.
Miss you both
Though I do remember Brian telling me about the time he went to see David play Captain Hook in a summer stock production of Peter Pan somewhere in the Midwest and regaling about how hilarious he was.
And how many liberties he took with the “character.”
At one point he had Hook dancing the Charleston back and forth across the stage doing jazz hands.
This reminds me of the time some years later David took pity on me – soooo not a professional dancer – and granted my request for him to teach me how to tap dance.
All my life I wanted to tap dance and was too embarrassed to try it.
I even invented a character for it – the gangster Jimmy DeMarco.
Go ahead with it Chairy!
Jimmy was not tall but somewhat more, well, diminutive, like me – think George M. Cohan adjacent with a tommy gun and a black and white suit. But he had a heart of gold underneath. And he could really, REALLY dance.
It is not a lie to say that for two f’n hours David stood on the linoleum floor in my kitchen and tried, tried and TRIED to teach me to tap.
I was absolutely AWFUL! I mean, like appallingly bad. I could hear what he was telling me to do but my feet just wouldn’t friggin’ do it. He told me eventually they would. And that suddenly I’d “get it.”
I did not have faith
So he stayed with me, kept at it and eventually, EVENTUALLY I managed to do something that approached… not even a time step.
Though he was kind enough to tell me I was….getting it. And would’ve kept going long past those two hours. But now I decided to take pity on him and say we should stop before Jimmy had a heart attack.
This brilliantly funny man, who was flown in to teach honors high school students with three left feet at New Trier High School in Chicago year after year for their big musical, and toured all over the world in Bubbling Brown Sugar, would have stayed in in that hot apartment in West Hollywood coaching a fictional character to dance for as many hours as it took just because I wanted to.
Gosh, it was so……psychotic!
Not at all how I looked, but how David made me feel!
And yeah, I was really, really, REALLY Baaaaaad.
Here’s one of David’s favorite Broadway performers – the great Gwen Verdon – who, of course, he met a bunch of times and also had funny stories about I will tell to one of two of you privately – in a clip from The Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s.
Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon were special talents. He is still the only artist to win the Oscar, Tony and Emmy awards all in one year (1973) and she was the first musical theatre actress to win four Tony Awards.
More to the point, it’s not every estranged married couple who kept working with each other years after their estrangement that has an eight part miniseries aired about their lives decades after their deaths.
When you watch Fosse/Verdon on FX, and everyone should, it’s difficult not to marvel at the sheer breadth of their work that will forever live on long after all of our deaths. Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Damn Yankees, Chicago and All That Jazz, to drop a handful of legendary landmarks, are only a few highlights.
Both director/choreographer Fosse, and Broadway star, muse and behind-the-scenes facilitator Verdon did all kinds of work in a wide variety of genres. But what unites them, more than anything, is their dedication to a disciplined, single-minded type of artistry that seems to have disappeared from the cultural zeitgeist these days.
Let’s not get it wrong; there are contemporary artists with the type of discipline that both Verdon and Fosse shared with us all through their lives. But in both their cases they left far more than that, as the miniseries shows us.
OK yes, him (and he’s producing Fosse/Verdon… go figure)
In a sense, Fosse/Verdon, and their lives, gives us a timeless roadmap to the world pre #MeToo. It was an existence where men consistently had the upper hand, the best opportunities AND usually got sole credit for ALL of the work even when that wasn’t necessarily the case.
When females actually managed to shine in their own spotlight far brighter than their male counterparts, it was in the midst of the age-old expectation that they would eventually dim their bulbs and take time off from doing theirownthing in order to help the guy’s light to shine just as bright (and often brighter) on a project of their own without basking in the glory.
Who is holding up whom? (hint: It’s Gwen)
It was either that or turn the other cheek when the man brooded and strayed into the arms of many other women because, well, how could HE not when SHEwasn’t around. For those women choosing to go solo, well they might make it alone for a bit but much sooner than later they’d mostly age out and be left alone – a fate few would be able to happily survive when left to their own devices in the real world.
We’ve come a long way from those times, though likely not as far as we think we have, one suspects. As one watches Ms. Verdon endure her husband’s serial infidelities as she bails him out in too many ways to count on Cabaret, it occurs to us, hmmm, and why didn’t I ever know that, how come she never got any credit? As she continues to serve as his creative sounding board on so many other future projects and successes (Note: And notably doesn’t on several of the failures) we become clear of the extent of their partnership, and just how much we DON’T know about who did what and just how much on any uber successful project of any artist or in any artistic collaboration.
Truly a singular sensation #yesiknowthatfsromChorusLine
None of this is to take anything away from the miraculous creative vision and accomplishments a talent of the caliber of a Bob Fosse leaves us. It’s one thing for a chorus boy/dancer to turn expert choreographer and then director of Broadway musicals. It’s another to then become a sophisticated movie director who not only reinvented the onscreen musical with the movie Cabaret (Note: Beating out Francis Coppola’s work on The Godfather to win the best director Oscar that year) but then two years later go on make the critically acclaimed, black and white non-musical, biopic of Lenny Bruce, Lenny, and use a non-linear narrative from which to tell it.
Not to mention the release of the autobiographical biopic All That Jazz five years later, a thoroughly original multi-Oscar nominated film success he co-wrote and directed that pretty much presaged the reasons behind his own death (Note: 12 years later) for all the world to see in glorious living color on movie screens all across the world.
JAZZ. HANDS.
Gwen Verdon was at Fosse’s side in various ways all through those artistic leaps and bounds and together they define a certain type of show businessspecial that today too often feels sorely lacking.
Though the special is still there. In fact, you see it every day, all around. But the show business special – hmmm, that’s another story.
I, for one, am soooo tired of hearing young talent is not what it used to be, not special, not on the level of a Fosse or a Verdon anymore.
Well, of course ability like theirs was, indeed, rare, as were their complex sensibilities and intellect for telling a sophisticated yet human story. But there are many people who are special in all kinds of different ways now, some of them even similar to a Fosse or a Verdon, whose work has little chance of gaining recognition. Even when it does, it almost never gets that same kind of mainstream acceptance.
This EXACTLY
For one, there is not the mass attendance for a single form of media that we once had. There was a time when Broadway theatre was IT and it tackled primarily new and exciting subjects, or at least fresh and entertaining/thought-provoking ones that often broke into the cultural zeitgeist.
Movies also told primarily real life human stories sans gaping plot holes, and for decades later it was not unusual for the biggest successes to say something about our lives as we knew them (Note: Or didn’t know them) that year. Sure, there were disaster films, spectacles, horror, sci-fi and mindless comedies, but they were not the overwhelming majority of the work. Yes, they had special effects but to have a really SPECIALaffect on the world you had to do a lot more than simply launch a starship into an infinite universe or create a colorful costumed villain whose one goal in life was an unmotivated ambition to blow up the universe.
I mean.. is it really even the end?
Right, right, we can hear the hiss and boos about this type of grousing from this computer screen already. Well, no one is saying these shows and films shouldn’t exist. Or that it’s a shame that television has expanded to the point where there is so much programming that no one show ever seems to be particularly special to most of us.
But the facts are that in an age when media is so diffuse and so plentiful there is almost no young person that can create the level and sheer amount of narrative work or performance with the same amount of staying power, depth of story and cultural intensity of a Fosse or a Verdon. There isn’t the mass popular audience for that kind of sophisticated worldview, that type of show biz special. It’s just not how the industry is set up these days.
We have international stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and, dare I say it, Jordan Peele?? But can they do the kind of deep or stylized work of Fosse or Verdon and break through? Schindler’s List was 25 years ago. Raging Bull came out FOURDECADES ago.
I’m…. I’m… OLD
Star Wars is not Cabaret, or even The Godfather – it can’t be and wasn’t meant to be. Because the truth is there is no longer a mass-market avenue for the latter two projects. But even fluffier Broadway shows that catapulted Ms. Verdon to stardom like Sweet Charity and Damn Yankees would doubtless be made into theatrical films in the 2000/10s. Chicago, her final starring vehicle finally was, but decades after the original closed on Broadway and barely broke even. It was only when a stripped down, TV/movie star driven revival was launched and kept afloat with a rotating name cast that Hollywood came calling and a film was produced that was safe enough to appeal to mass acceptance.
To look at that film in light of Fosse/Verdon one realizes that despite its Oscar win it’s the anti-Cabaret. Rather than move forward the medium or the film’s story it merely waters it down with an eye towards the present as it pastiches various Fosse-like moves from the past. And it was released a full 17 years ago. Get Out, for all its cultural significance, (Note: And add on Us) is nowhere near the class of storytelling of any of Fosse’s best work, or that of a Scorsese or a Spielberg. #PlotHoleCity
For these reasons and many more, one can’t help but mourn a bit for the past during the Fosse/Verdon miniseries. It gives us so much show biz special in an age when it’s not the thought behind the show, but the delivery system by which it comes to us, that feels the most special to us.
notes from a chair 