Word: verdon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gideon's estranged wife and current lover (played by the quicksilver dancers Leland Palmer and Ann Reinking) are virtually undisguised portraits of Gwen Verdon and the real-life Reinking. The hero's artistic associates are scabrous caricatures of past Fosse collaborators. Through a series of gritty backstage scenes and razor-sharp dance numbers, these players dramatize all the tensions, hard work and neuroses of idiosyncratic, inveterate show people. In Jazz's spectacular opening sequence, a Broadway audition, Fosse even creates his own capsule version of A Chorus Line...
CHICAGO. A corrosive dance of decadence that Bob Fosse has choreographed into an electrifying musical, helped no end by Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach...
...book is as full of holes as some of the bullet-sieved characters. Roxie Hart (Gwen Verdon), a honky-tonk '20s entertainer, murders her lover and beats the rap, thanks to a slick mouthpiece, Billy Flynn (Jerry Orbach). This scarcely matters. What matters is the erotic poetry in motion that uncoils whenever Verdon and her sister in crime Velma Kelly (Chita Rivera) do their solos and duets. They pace the show with spunk incarnate. The chorus is jazzily bacchanalian, and Patricia Zipprodt's eye-riveting costumes swirl right out of a decadent Brechtian Berlin. Chicago is a cinch...
...National Ballet next week. Appearing as Princess Aurora in a sequence from Sleeping Beauty, Fonteyn will be supported by a quartet of amateur ballerinas but professional scene-stealers: Film Star Paulette Goddard, 62, as the Queen, TV Panelist Arlene Francis, 65, as the Lilac Fairy, Broadway Dancer Gwen Verdon, 47, as a comical Little Red Ridinghood, and Actress Julie Newmar, 38, as the White Cat. Newmar rises to a majestic 6 ft. 10 in. on her toes, towering over her National Ballet partner Dean Badolato, 5 ft. 4 in. Said Julie regretfully, "I wanted John Lindsay to partner me. After...
...Damn Yankees. The unlikely mixture of music, baseball, and the Faust legend is sheer delight. Gwen Verdon demonstrates why Lola gets exactly what she wants, and a pre-Martian Ray Walston makes a slippery devil. Natives of Washington, D.C., enjoy this film more than any other viewers, for it is only those maligned sufferers who have spent hundreds of nights listening to the Senators lose and waiting for the cool Canadian air masses to move in who have considered selling their souls for an air conditioner and just one win over the Yankees, not to mention a pennant. Channel...