Moving Past the ‘Singular Genius’ Version of the Bob Fosse Story

Forty years ago, the director-choreographer Bob Fosse made All That Jazz, his semiautobiographical meta-statement on the meaning of life, death, dance, love, and the ecstatic, addictive emptiness of show business. The film was a surreal blend of styles and genres—“Meet Me in St. Louis meets Citizen Kane,” as Fosse’s biographer, Sam Wasson, wrote—and it ended with the corpse of Fosse’s alter ego, Joe Gideon, being zipped in a plastic body bag at the apex of a fantastical production number. It won four Academy Awards and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

So any filmmaker daring enough to dramatize Fosse’s actual life story for the screen could fairly be said to face a daunting challenge, one perhaps akin to creating a biopic of Federico Fellini in the shadow of his film . What to do? For a platinum-pedigreed team of Broadway veterans—led by the writer Steven Levenson (librettist of ) and the director Thomas Kail (of )—the answer is a sprawling, eight-episode limited series, , which debuts on FX this month. It tells the tortured