Once we drop into Fosse’s language, the energy picks right up. It’s a showcase for the pristine technique of the dancers, but it’s just the littlest bit…boring.

One clever thing about the choreography is that the first number, “Crunchy Granola Suite,” is done in the idiom of modern classical ballet–you might see it at the Joffrey. The debt to classic tap (nodded to in a quick snippet of video of the Nicholas Brothers, and in one section of “Benny’s Number,” a deceptively low-key tap duet performed by two of my favorite of the male ensemble members, Jacob Guzman and Manuel Herrera). The intentionally broken lines and explosive jumps. The center isolations and the angular shoulders. The crisp head rolls and instantly recognizable way of positioning a hand on a hat brim. The precision in the fingers and the little extra shot of extension at the end of every arm movement. I’m tired of those… So I just decided to meet myself at midnight.”) Dabs of monologue and singing give a sketch of scaffolding to the different segments, and there’s a hint of story imposed on some of the longer sequences, notably “Big City Mime,” but what we’re here for, again, is the titular dancing.Īnd that dancing delivers all you expect from Fosse: The flicked feet and the sharp knees. (As Fosse himself famously said about the show, “When you have collaborators, you have all those midnight meetings. The prologue promises no plot and no message–though they do backslide from that promise a bit (in one of the show’s weakest segments). And it’s thrilling to see Fosse’s choreography in all its shadings and varieties, reminding us how his vocabulary became foundational to not just Broadway or musical film dance, but the various idioms of modern dance in all its settings: music videos and concert backup dancers (the debt of the best number in MJ: The Musical to Fosse is even clearer here than it was in MJ itself), competition dance, even modern ballet. It’s a joy to see sixteen exceptional Broadway dancers at the top of their form doing almost nothing but dance, with unparalleled technique, unbridled joy, and the expansiveness of a show actually designed to do nothing but showcase them. (The original production was just called Dancin’ the overlap between that and this is about 80 percent.) And on both points, it delivers.

Truth in advertising: the selling points of Bob Fosse’s Dancin’, revived on Broadway, in slightly different form, for the first time since its 1978 premiere are, indeed, Fosse and dancing. Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ at the Music Box Theatre.

Music box theater