Why All That Jazz Is a Must-Watch Before Fosse/Verdon

FX’s new limited series Fosse/Verdon premieres this week with much fanfare for the musical theater set. The limited series charts the decades-spanning relationship between historically influential director and choreographer Bob Fosse (played by Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell) and Broadway leading lady Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams). Brought to the screen by Hamilton director Thomas Kail, this longform biopic darts across time to show the peaks and valleys of their relationship and combined creative powers.

What’s missing however, is a stronger representation of the vision that made their story the stuff of Broadway legend. For better or worse, depending on your vantage, Fosse/Verdon is inside baseball, relying on sacramental history well known to theatre folks (if not too many others). The show is more fueled by traditional biopic story beats, forefronting the personal story rather than the artistic innovation that defined Fosse’s genius.

Perhaps wide audiences, the kind cable television can reach, shouldn’t be blamed for being more familiar with his touchstones (Chicago, Cabaret, etc.) than the man behind them. But luckily, for audiences seeking a more visceral understand of how Fosse pushed the limits of the stage and screen, we will always have All That Jazz.

That 1979 film, directed by Fosse himself, was an autobiographical and somewhat abstract take on his prowess and human failings. Roy Scheider played Fosse’s avatar, grappling all at once with breathing creative life into a cheesy new musical, taking ownership for the pain caused by his affairs, and warding off impending death. It’s a boldly untraditional musical by even today’s standards, spotlighting his boundary-pushing choreography and his structural risk-taking with the cinematic form.

In these ways, All That Jazz stands as one of the definitive pieces that tell us who Bob Fosse was and what made his work so provocative.

You can see the differences in how All That Jazz and Fosse/Verdons portray Fosse’s impact most squarely in how they encapsulate his filmmaking process. In the Fosse/Verdon premiere episode, Bob Fosse is measured creatively almost exclusively through failure and success. After his directorial debut on Sweet Charity bombed, the episode shows a man driven to an uncompromising and combative approach to Cabaret - a narrative that doesn’t go much deeper than the typical biopic machinations we’re accustomed to. Whereas in All That Jazz, we see him meticulously shaping an undisguised representation of Fosse’s Lenny. Here it’s his creative ingenuity that is the story. The achievement wasn’t in overturning past failures, it was in forwarding an artform with his singular point of view.

While Fosse/Verdon aims to dive deeper into the full history of the titular pair’s union over eight hours of television, All That Jazz does so in comparatively brief time by showing the couple at their end point. Opposite Scheider, Verdon stand-in Leland Palmer brings decades of pain and complicated love to the surface throughout. But her showcase scene is a literal dance with the fictional Fosse, offhandedly calling out their relationship and his behavior for what it is, all while orchestrating her body around him. The film may have other focuses than examining that relationship but it paints a clear picture of their history with incisive brevity.

The closest moment to capturing that creative and romantic connection in Fosse/Verdon’s first installment is one of its opening moments. Almost wordlessly, Fosse sculpts Verdon’s body to his exacting choreography, and Verdon suggests a tweak. On the surface, it’s business, but the information we’re really being fed here is their creative symbiosis.

Where Fosse/Verdon is admirable is how it positions Gwen Verdon as an essential collaborator, bolstering his vision to sometimes unfair sacrificial lengths. But the difference between both narratives is like that of a trivia stat and watching it unfold before our eyes. Fosse/Verdon tells us things that All That Jazz shows us, one of them being Verdon’s role in Fosse’s creative success. And crucially, it shows it through Fosse’s distinct artistry.

All That Jazz ultimately serves as a bypass from the trivia and easter eggs that Fosse/Verdon throws at us. It’s a cheat sheet of sorts to understand what made Fosse such an envelope pushing artist and the emotional toll of his shortcomings, particularly if the biopic bench-posts of the series’ premiere are more familiar to viewers than its central artists might be.

Chris Feil is a freelancer writer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His previous work can be found at Vulture, Vice, Paste, and The Film Experience. Follow him @chrisvfeil on Twitter.