Broadway Dance

The move away from modern dance and ballet to jazz dance as the prominent movement lexicon employed on Broadway is explored. I examine Katherine Dunham and Jack Cole’s influence on a generation of choreographers and Bob Fosse’s fusion of the dominant paradigms established by de Mille and Robbins. I give special attention to Fosse’s choreographic influences, including his early exposure to nightclubs and strip joints, comic/eccentric dancer Joe Frisco, Fred Astaire, and Jack Cole. Beginning with his work in The Pajama Game (1954) under the mentorship of Robbins and examining selected works from Damn Yankees (1955) and Sweet Charity (1966), I study Fosse’s choreographic development. My close reading of the musical number “Big Spender” reveals Fosse’s dramaturgical process. I examine the number in relation to the 1960s sexual revolution; representations of the female dancing body in both commercial theater and concert venues; and in relation to de Mille’s “Postcard Girls” from her Oklahoma! dream ballet, “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind.” I also consider Fosse’s post-Sweet Charity objectification of the female body; his late career disregard for the precepts of time and place in relation to character, and his formulation of a distinctly identifiable movement lexicon—the “Fosse Style.” The chapter closes with three more influential director-choreographers: Gower Champion, with his innovative cinematic approach to stage musicals and his standard use of showbiz dance lexicons undisturbed by modernist methods; Michael Bennett, a strict proponent of Robbins methods and the inheritor of the Robbins’ mantle; and Donald McKayle, one of the only African American director-choreographers working in the late twentieth-century Broadway arena.