What are "Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries," "I Love A Piano" and "Mr. Bojangles" doing in a show about choreographer Bob Fosse -- the one who smoked and drank and worked himself to death? The one known for injecting darkly sexual overtones into every leg extension and finger curl? Well, those songs do have reasons for being in a Fosse-based revue (for example, "Cherries" was in Fosse's last Broadway show, Big Deal; "Bojangles" was a sequence in Fosse's influential, all-hoofing show, Dancin'), but they make an oddly bland approach to the man with perhaps the most alluringly dark persona of all commercial choreographers. It's like doing a show about Hank Williams featuring Minnie Pearl -- in character. Not that Fosse didn't have other facets to his choreography besides slinky hookers and gymnastic exhibitionist, but those were his lures and his specialties, and when they're paraded in a faceless, "and-then-he-dance-directed" procession, against a road-show cheesy set (by Santo Loquasto, surprisingly), the results feel like they should come with a salad bar and $20 in chips.
Of course there are highlights (though the audience's tumultuous reaction to the just-okay "Steam Heat" mystifies), including the aforementioned "Bojangles" number, an oddly welcome bit of schmaltz that has a young and agile dancer acting as the shadow of the titular, bibulous subject. A "Sing, Sing, Sing" finale proves undeniably kinetic (and not just because the song itself is one of the all-time-great rousers), and a Pippin segment does get us hankering for a full-scale revival of that Stephen Schwartz musical. Much of Fosse's dull first act concerns itself with dance-abstract, movement-oriented work (mostly from Dancin'); the second act lumps together disparate movie and commercial theater projects. Only in act three do we sense a connective tissue -- one of the reasons it's by far the best act of the three. Worth waiting for/paying for? Well, if you've already seen Chicago and Cabaret -- twice -- a trip to the Broadhurst would not be a wasted evening.
