Fosse by Sam Wasson

Eighty-Sixth Street, near the old ladies of the West Side. All day they sat on benches in the median along Broadway. But only along Broadway. Columbus was too far in the wrong direction. Before white flight—highways ushering the rich into the suburbs—Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, fat bankers, and politicians poured in together, climbing the crumbling walls along the Hudson, fighting for space, watching the other guys’ acts, learning them, absorbing them, topping them. The whole town was a mongrel work in progress.
    All that cohabitation, all that bumping around, and it was only a matter of time before the right bumps begat a new species, only a matter of time before Richard Rodgers bumped Oscar Hammerstein II, who bumped Agnes de Mille, who bumped Rouben Mamoulian, and out came
Oklahoma!,
the first great musical. “In a great musical,”wrote Richard Rodgers, “the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look. That’s what made
Oklahoma!
work. All the components dovetailed.” The reason for dovetailing music with lyrics with dance with story seems obvious today, but by 1943, it happened only piecemeal—a little in
Show Boat,
a little more in
Pal Joey,
and even more in
Lady in the Dark
—because a musical didn’t have to be good to be fun, and before
Oklahoma!,
fun was really all a show needed to be.
    At long last, the musical was no longer a bauble; it was an art form. Prescient, focused, and seriously assembled, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Oklahoma!
brought content to the routinely replagiarized flapper vaudevilles of the twenties and thirties. Most of those shows’ songs, many of them lovely Porter and Gershwin numbers, were unrelated to what was going on onstage, which wasn’t much to begin with (mistaken identities, rags-to-riches stories), and had even less to do with what was going on in real life.
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
put a stop to that; they made singing about the world a very serious, very dramatic thing, and they turned choreography—once just a fancy word for dancing around—into an integral part of the story. Witness the
Oklahoma!
dream ballet, “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind.” Make that
Agnes de Mille’s
dream ballet; fusing character and movement, traditional ballet and colloquial ease, it could have been no one else’s. The choreographer had a point of view: her own. And it was about something. As the ballet’s title implies, Laurey makes up her mind
in
the dance, so the number is, like any good dramatic scene, an essential and revelatory part of the musical. “Many a somber problem play,”wrote
New York Times
dance critic John Martin, “has been built on just such a question of emotional compulsions and has failed to illuminate it half so clearly after several hours of grim dialogue. Yet this is a ‘dance number’ in a ‘musical show’!”
    In those days, there was a theater with a big Broadway musical on every corner, and on every corner, there was a bevy of chorus girls looking for fun—good odds for a twenty-one-year-old sailor back from the war, and better odds for a sweet and sexy one like Bob Fosse, who could pivot between a “Geez, I dunno . . .” and a “Whaddaya doing later?” in a single motion. He was that good. “When he talked to you,you just felt,
Oh my God. He’s in love with me,
” said casting director Lynne Carrow. “He had a personality that drew you in. He could just click with you and pull you into his world. The touching, the looking, the little smiles as he’s talking to you. I don’t want to call it flirting because I think that’s just how he naturally was, but maybe that’s why he was such a good flirt. Just talking to him was a sensual experience.”
    In his cupcake way he mastered the art of not taking no for an answer. Even the girls who saw it coming were caught off-guard. That’s how good he was; he could sell without selling. The girl would be upstairs with him, not knowing how she got there, and downstairs the next day, hoping to see him