Bob Fosse: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Decorated Choreographer

“The time to sing is when your emotional level is just too high to speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.” – Bob Fosse

By the turn of the 20th century, American entertainment was still preoccupied with European-style operetta, as embodied in the works of cellist-composer Victor Herbert. Traditional dance forms moved from European stories to the American prairie in Oklahoma by the late 1940s, and what was once the property of Bavarian princes became the singing standards of cowboys riding through the corn fields in Oh What a Beautiful Morning and Out of My Dreams.

In terms of original choreography, it was the age of Jerome Robbins that marked the first real departure from traditional dance on stage and in film. Robbins, born in 1918, became a five-time Tony winner and twice winner of an Academy Award. It was into this environment, featuring his West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, The King and I, and countless other productions, that an intriguing new choreographer made his entry riding the advent of American jazz. Only 10 years Robbin’s junior, Robert Louis Fosse, better known as Bob Fosse, followed his colleague’s example by mixing daring new jazz forms with virtually every traditional and popular genre to produce previously unseen modes of dance expression on Broadway and in film.

In the 1960s, Fosse emerged as one of the leading dancers, actors, choreographers, directors, screenwriters and film directors on Broadway and in Hollywood. He became famous for conquering several fields on the musical stage and film simultaneously in a way that no one has before or since. It is said that “only Busby Berkeley compares” to Fosse despite the fact that Berkeley was never a dancer, and that Fosse enjoyed eight Broadway hits to Berkeley’s one.