Bob fosse gay
Bob Fosse
Issue 104
b. Robert Louis Fosse, Chicago, Illinois, June 23, 1927
d. September 23, 1987, Washington, D.C.
Although Bob Fosse died at the relatively young age of 60, he had a career in show business extending for almost five decades. Fosse started workout as a dancer at the age of eight at The Chicago Academy of Theatre Arts under the management of Frederic Weaver. Weaver was an eccentric devotee of vaudeville who sported a waxed mustache and always wore formal dress. Young Bobby Fosse learned his first dance steps at the Academy under the tutelage of Marguerite Comerford. When Fosse’s family could not pay tuition, Frederic Weaver offered to keep Bob as a student on scholarship. In exchange, Bob’s father Cy Fosse agreed to sign over 15% of Bob’s earnings over to Weaver until Bob reached the age of 21. Soon Weaver coupled Fosse with fellow pupil Charles Grass and they became the dance sensation “The Riff Brothers”, named after the great boogie team The Nicholas Brothers.
Starting at a young age, Fosse would develop a personal style which was somewhat grounded in his defects as a dancer. “He was always told to keep his fingers together and his hands down, b
Fosse Iconography
The sinuous, snaky, seriously sexy moves of Bob Fosse have got to be the most known choreography in the nature, endlessly quoted and imitated to the point of cliche. In 2013, Sam Wasson wrote a mesmerizing, tell-all biography of him, seemingly leaving out no cigarette, drug, or nubile chorine the complex, hard-living genius ever touched. It exhaustively covered his kaleidoscopic life, and now we have the best guide ever written about Fosse’s work itself: “Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Gyrate in the American Musical,” by Kevin Winkler.
It must be said the Bob Fosse has been particularly lucky in this scribe, as well, for Winkler, a former dancer himself, knows the art form inside and out and has the lucidity and clean, detailed, yet unfussy approach of a real writer to aptly delineate Fosse’s undying contribution to it.
Once executive director of the Fresh York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, Winkler worked on the book for about six years and, happily in this challenging time for publishing in general, never had to arduously shop his plan round.
“I did a presentation about Fosse at a conference in Wa
Cabaret: How the X-rated musical became a hit
A subscribe of the times was that Cabaret was also burdened with the dreaded X rating by the British Board of Motion picture Classification, which meant nobody under 17 was allowed to see the movie in the UK. When re-rating the film as a 15, 40 years later, the BBFC said it contained "strong sex references, violence and drug references". As a product of the initial rating, it was not a commercial hit in Britain but was adored by Bafta, where it picked up seven awards from 11 nominations. A burgeoning moral outcry in Britain about sex and force in cinema perhaps top explains the severity of the rating. Compare the level of explicitness in Cabaret to another X-rated film of 1972 – Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy – which features graphic nudity and brutal violence – and it's very complicated to understand how and why they came to this rating. Conversely, in the US, which re-elected arch conservative Richard Nixon in 1972, the motion picture was granted a PG rating by the MPAA. As a result, Cabaret ended up being the sixth-highest grossing film of the year and won eight Academy Awards (it was beaten to the best picture gong by a little-known film
This weekend brings the annual Gay Pride festivities to West Hollywood, which is arguably the gayest urban area in the country if not the world. As one of relatively not many straight men in WeHo, my preference for women may not be evident as I walk through "Boys Town" on my way to the general pool. Thus I detect myself identifying with Dana Carvey's old SNL nature Lyle the Effeminate Heterosexual. And so might these nine notable men.
- Baz Luhrmann. First, a disclaimer: who knows what any of these guys got up to in their private lives? Certainly, many gay celebrities of the past got married and had children while keeping their same-sex lovers a secret. Anyway, you might assume that only a homosexual could make lavish, over-the-top films like Moulin Rouge! and Strictly Ballroom, yet the dapper Australian director has been married to his costume/production designer Catherine Martin since 1997. They hold two kids.
- LeVar Burton. Considering his soft-spoken personality, his drama geek background, his childhood desire to become a priest, and his involvement in AIDS and gay rights causes, you might be forgiven for thinking the Roots/Star Trek/Reading Rainbow star was gay. But Bu
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