Based on the story of the Supremes, Dreamgirls continued Broadway’s long love affair with backstage stories and showbiz as a metaphor for America, even its seamier side. (Jersey Boys is its cheap knock-off.) Michael Bennett’s spectacular daring expressed itself on many levels—not least in the show’s inner dynamic and heat, its mesmerizing sense of movement and quick changes of image, musical styles and fate. There was Henry Krieger’s smashing score—36 numbers reflecting the musical fashions of a decade—and lyricist Tom Eyen’s surprisingly hard-edged picture of corruption in the music world and what it took for black artists to cross over into the white mainstream.

And there was also the show’s now-legendary showstopper, which brought Act I to its unforgettable close when Effie is dropped from the group for a prettier, blander girl. As sung by Jennifer Holliday, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” was a five-minute aria and cry of protest of such anguish and emotional power that the audience was taken to the point of explosion. Some would be so overcome they even called out to the stage, “No more! No more!”

Yet, for all those peaks, when I wrote about the premiere for the London Times all those years ago, this is what I concluded: “The most thrilling breakthrough of the extraordinary show is that whereas in A Chorus Line Michael Bennett choreographed the cast, in Dreamgirls he has choreographed the set.”

Four towers with Plexiglas veils and kliegs, enhanced by bridges that descended on the action, amounted to an apparently simple architectural set by its brilliant designer, Robin Wagner. The towers could turn 360 degrees with ease. But it was Bennett’s use of them that was revolutionary. The towers moved to create constantly changing perspectives and space, like an automated ballet. They created stages within stages. They energized the action, driving it forcefully along. It’s why there were no set-piece dance routines in the show: Dance and movement were organic to the entire action. But Bennett had made the mechanical set his dancers.

It had been over half a century since the great Russian stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold created the first sets to use machines. By extraordinary coincidence, the day after I saw Dreamgirls, I caught a re-creation of Meyerhold’s The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922). With its innovative machine imagery, that play became known as the original example of Constructivist theater: It created a kinetic set designed to activate the actors and free the stage.

Within the glittering commercial Dreamgirls could be found the link to Meyerhold’s early experiments. Like Bennett, Meyerhold had been a dancer. But whereas Meyerhold’s radical departure in design and stage movement seemed to me like man’s early attempts to fly, Dreamgirls was like a space rocket. Bennett’s musical was the first theater piece to merge technology successfully with art. In its showbiz way, it was a work of genius.

When Michael Bennett—the street kid from Buffalo—read my review of Dreamgirls, he was impressed at being hailed as a genius in The Times of London. He invited me to dinner at his chic penthouse, which looked like a stage set overlooking Central Park. I soon learned that he’d never heard of Meyerhold: “Who’s this guy Shmeyerhold?” he asked me happily. Also at the dinner were Donna McKechnie of A Chorus Line, Henry Krieger and Robin Wagner. When I congratulated Mr. Wagner on his amazing Meyerholdian set, this unpretentious man said to me sweetly, “Well, maybe. But have you ever been to Studio 54?”

So much for theater intellectuals. The set was inspired by a Manhattan disco!

At dinner that night, Bennett said that for him the best moment of Dreamgirls came when he first heard Jennifer Holliday sing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” He played a recording of her singing the marathon song in rehearsal—as I recall, she was accompanied only by a piano. Even that rough tape was enough to blow us all away. Bennett said he’d played it often before Dreamgirls opened: It reminded him of the exact moment when he knew he had a show.

He told me, too, that just as he was going into the Dreamgirls opening-night party at Tavern on the Green, his father had said, “It’s great, but not as good as A Chorus Line.” Those were the devastating words he dreaded hearing for the rest of his short life. Bennett was a man who was destined always to compete with his own shadow.

“Now tell me,” he said, changing the subject. “You don’t want to be a drama critic, do you?”

For the mischievous, Machiavellian Michael Bennett, nobody in their right mind would want to be a drama critic—and perhaps he had a point. “What do you really want to do?” he asked. Michael was also someone who made anything seem possible.

So I told him I’d like to write the book for a great American musical. “Oh, goody!” he exclaimed, and truly seemed to mean it. He sensed a convert to the cause—for him the only worthy cause, the American musical. But suddenly he expressed an unexpected doubt: “What if Frank Rich tells me he wants to write a musical, too?” he asked. Mr. Rich was then the chief drama critic of The New York Times, and his review of Dreamgirls had also been a rave. “If Frank Rich says he wants to write a musical with you,” I advised solemnly, “treat him with utmost respect and then kick him down the stairs.”

He laughed so much I thought the tears would roll. Michael offered me a studio at his headquarters at 890 Broadway on the strength of my chutzpah, and I worked there on his next great American musical for several years. He didn’t live to make it happen.

It seems to me—as it did 25 years ago—that when Dreamgirls opened, the gypsy-genius of Broadway, Michael Bennett, achieved the miraculous. He followed one musical that showed us the future, A Chorus Line, with another that showed us another future, Dreamgirls. The pity is we’ll never know where else he might have taken us.

Right! Let’s do the whole combination, facing away from the mirror.

From the top,

A five, six, seven, eight!

I have only to hear that “a five, six, seven, eight!” heralding the scintillating first number of A Chorus Line, and I’m happy; I’m exactly where I want to be. In some way that I can’t explain, I’m home.

Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line (1975), now happily back with us on Broadway in a loving revival directed by Bob Avian (Bennett’s original co-choreographer), was the formative musical of my theatergoing life. When I saw the original production in London, I thought then—and still do—that it was the most innovative modern American musical I’d ever seen.

The seven-minute opener is one of the greatest ever choreographed. For one singular sensation, it introduces us to every character and the world of a dance audition—“God, I hope I get it / I hope I get it”—in the same masterly way that the wordless overture to Carousel conveys an entire world in music.

The surprise for me about the revival is that A Chorus Line still moved me after all this time. Perhaps I was nostalgic for my younger self, for what was once contemporary and has now become a period piece. Yet that isn’t quite it. A Chorus Line is still smashing and very much alive because it remains a great, irreplaceable, timeless show.

It continues America’s long love affair with backstage stories and showbiz as a metaphor, from Gypsy to 42nd Street to Follies. (Bob Fosse’s Chicago, which also premiered in 1975, is A Chorus Line’s cynical showbiz underbelly). The book of A Chorus Line, by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, rings truer than most because it’s largely based on the life stories of the original cast members. To be sure, the show has a dollop of honest sentimentality, as backstage musicals must (“What I Did for Love”). In that sense, A Chorus Line is the showbiz heir to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic ballet film, The Red Shoes (1948).

Marvin Hamlisch’s richly evocative score—the best that Mr. Hamlisch has written—and particularly Edward Kleban’s edgy lyrics are a perfect expression of a dancer’s hard, short-lived life (“Play me the music / Give me the chance to come through”), with bodies that are possibly fixable (“Tits and ass / Bought myself a fancy pair”) and an inescapable fate. “I’m a dancer,” protests Cassie, the show’s nearly star, begging to return to the chorus line. “A dancer dances.”

Has there ever been a major musical sequence that can top the sustained brilliance of A Chorus Line’s “At the Ballet”? The excellent Baayork Lee (who played Connie in the original A Chorus Line) has restaged Bennett’s choreography wonderfully. “At the Ballet” touches greatness in a sublime synthesis of dance and music and light, as mirrors turn in space. We want to cry out at the wonder of it all: “How beautiful! How beautiful life can be.”

It’s quite an irony that “One,” the show’s now-famous finale, when everyone in the cast comes out to take their bow in their gold top hats and identical costumes, inevitably compels us to cheer them for surviving. But, in truth, it’s no victory. Every individual has been reduced to characterless anonymity, a Rockette in a chorus line.

Theoni V. Aldredge has recreated her original costumes (thankfully resisting the temptation to update); Natasha Katz has adapted Tharon Musser’s lighting; and set designer Robin Wagner has exactly recreated his empty space to represent the rehearsal studio. (There are only two props: a stool and the dancers’ bags). Peter Brook built an entire aesthetic, and a renowned book, around theories of theater as an empty space. In its apparent simplicity, Mr. Wagner’s set for A Chorus Line conjures up a miracle with mirrors.

The set is the reverse of a Broadway musical dominated and swamped by too much design and too many special effects. The mirrors have since been widely imitated, down to Anthony Minghella’s production of Madama Butterfly currently at the Met. But in a musical where the dancer and the mirror are inseparable, I have yet to see mirrors used so well—or more naturally.

Bennett would go on to direct and choreograph Dreamgirls, but he topped A Chorus Line only once: On one of the most amazing nights in showbiz history (Sept. 29, 1983), Bennett celebrated A Chorus Line’s record-breaking 3,389th performance by staging a gala production with a cast of 332 alumnae performers. As a concept director, he was never small. The Booth Theater, next-door to A Chorus Line’s former home in the Shubert on Broadway, served as a dressing room.

Bennett staged the gala after just four days of marathon rehearsal. The one-night-only performance, with wave after wave of chorus liners from different companies over the years joining each scene, literally brought the audience to the point of delirium. I knew then, of course, that the performance would belong to memory and storytelling and that it could never be repeated onstage. Nor could the first time I saw the original cast of A Chorus Line all those years ago be captured again with wide eyes.

It’s bound to be so, as time passes. The good old days never were as good as the good old days…. It was inevitable that in the current revival, two or three of the performances can’t quite match up to the legendary originals. But not where it counts most, in their hearts. What more could the wonderful Charlotte d’Amboise do as Cassie (the role that Donna McKechnie made famous)? Ms. d’Amboise all but leaves her blood on the stage in the exceptionally demanding dance sequence, “The Music and the Mirror”—and she triumphs.

But yes, the world has changed a great deal in the three decades since the premiere of A Chorus Line. In 1987, Bennett himself, like so many gifted children of Broadway, died tragically of AIDS. (He was 44.) What the revival confirms marvelously for us is that A Chorus Line is now as much a classic piece of musical theater as Gypsy or West Side Story.

The young, unknown Bennett was coincidentally in the chorus of a touring production of West Side Story, and his god of dance was its director, Jerome Robbins. Bennett was born in Buffalo, N.Y. (“To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant”), and he secretly studied all of Robbins’ dances and ballets. He would become Robbins’ heir on Broadway, and that’s why Bennett’s work—unlike Bob Fosse’s—cannot be pastiched. Bennett took his choreography beyond the traps of a personal style into the higher realms of an artless art.

The chance to see his masterpiece again, or for the first time, shouldn’t be missed. Bennett did not seek—as Mr. Brantley at The Times insists—“to paint in kinetic strokes a group portrait ... like the inhabitants of densely peopled canvases by Velazquez or Rembrandt.” Oh, my. If Michael Bennett had been as pretentious as that, we’d never have heard of him or A Chorus Line. In fact, he borrowed and adapted film technique—dissolves, fast cuts and close-ups. He was an instinctive street kid, not an intellectual—a gypsy-genius of Broadway who loved dance and dancers and lived for the American musical.

When I first saw A Chorus Line, I thought I was seeing the future. And now, seeing it again so lovingly restored, I feel the bittersweet sense of both loss and possibility. Loss, because the American musical has for a generation lost all confidence in itself; possibility, because A Chorus Line is not cynical, nor a pseudo-opera, a special effect, a puppet show, an infantile spelling bee or a jukebox.

Stop and look around you! Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia!, Hairspray, Avenue Q and the rest. For my money, A Chorus Line is still the best musical in town.

Right! Let’s do the whole combination, facing away from the mirror.

From the top,

A five, six, seven, eight!

I have only to hear that “a five, six, seven, eight!” heralding the scintillating first number of A Chorus Line, and I’m happy; I’m exactly where I want to be. In some way that I can’t explain, I’m home.

Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line (1975), now happily back with us on Broadway in a loving revival directed by Bob Avian (Bennett’s original co-choreographer), was the formative musical of my theatergoing life. When I saw the original production in London, I thought then—and still do—that it was the most innovative modern American musical I’d ever seen.

The seven-minute opener is one of the greatest ever choreographed. For one singular sensation, it introduces us to every character and the world of a dance audition—“God, I hope I get it / I hope I get it”—in the same masterly way that the wordless overture to Carousel conveys an entire world in music.

The surprise for me about the revival is that A Chorus Line still moved me after all this time. Perhaps I was nostalgic for my younger self, for what was once contemporary and has now become a period piece. Yet that isn’t quite it. A Chorus Line is still smashing and very much alive because it remains a great, irreplaceable, timeless show.

It continues America’s long love affair with backstage stories and showbiz as a metaphor, from Gypsy to 42nd Street to Follies. (Bob Fosse’s Chicago, which also premiered in 1975, is A Chorus Line’s cynical showbiz underbelly). The book of A Chorus Line, by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, rings truer than most because it’s largely based on the life stories of the original cast members. To be sure, the show has a dollop of honest sentimentality, as backstage musicals must (“What I Did for Love”). In that sense, A Chorus Line is the showbiz heir to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic ballet film, The Red Shoes (1948).

Marvin Hamlisch’s richly evocative score—the best that Mr. Hamlisch has written—and particularly Edward Kleban’s edgy lyrics are a perfect expression of a dancer’s hard, short-lived life (“Play me the music / Give me the chance to come through”), with bodies that are possibly fixable (“Tits and ass / Bought myself a fancy pair”) and an inescapable fate. “I’m a dancer,” protests Cassie, the show’s nearly star, begging to return to the chorus line. “A dancer dances.”

Has there ever been a major musical sequence that can top the sustained brilliance of A Chorus Line’s “At the Ballet”? The excellent Baayork Lee (who played Connie in the original A Chorus Line) has restaged Bennett’s choreography wonderfully. “At the Ballet” touches greatness in a sublime synthesis of dance and music and light, as mirrors turn in space. We want to cry out at the wonder of it all: “How beautiful! How beautiful life can be.”

It’s quite an irony that “One,” the show’s now-famous finale, when everyone in the cast comes out to take their bow in their gold top hats and identical costumes, inevitably compels us to cheer them for surviving. But, in truth, it’s no victory. Every individual has been reduced to characterless anonymity, a Rockette in a chorus line.

Theoni V. Aldredge has recreated her original costumes (thankfully resisting the temptation to update); Natasha Katz has adapted Tharon Musser’s lighting; and set designer Robin Wagner has exactly recreated his empty space to represent the rehearsal studio. (There are only two props: a stool and the dancers’ bags). Peter Brook built an entire aesthetic, and a renowned book, around theories of theater as an empty space. In its apparent simplicity, Mr. Wagner’s set for A Chorus Line conjures up a miracle with mirrors.

The set is the reverse of a Broadway musical dominated and swamped by too much design and too many special effects. The mirrors have since been widely imitated, down to Anthony Minghella’s production of Madama Butterfly currently at the Met. But in a musical where the dancer and the mirror are inseparable, I have yet to see mirrors used so well—or more naturally.

Bennett would go on to direct and choreograph Dreamgirls, but he topped A Chorus Line only once: On one of the most amazing nights in showbiz history (Sept. 29, 1983), Bennett celebrated A Chorus Line’s record-breaking 3,389th performance by staging a gala production with a cast of 332 alumnae performers. As a concept director, he was never small. The Booth Theater, next-door to A Chorus Line’s former home in the Shubert on Broadway, served as a dressing room.

Bennett staged the gala after just four days of marathon rehearsal. The one-night-only performance, with wave after wave of chorus liners from different companies over the years joining each scene, literally brought the audience to the point of delirium. I knew then, of course, that the performance would belong to memory and storytelling and that it could never be repeated onstage. Nor could the first time I saw the original cast of A Chorus Line all those years ago be captured again with wide eyes.

It’s bound to be so, as time passes. The good old days never were as good as the good old days…. It was inevitable that in the current revival, two or three of the performances can’t quite match up to the legendary originals. But not where it counts most, in their hearts. What more could the wonderful Charlotte d’Amboise do as Cassie (the role that Donna McKechnie made famous)? Ms. d’Amboise all but leaves her blood on the stage in the exceptionally demanding dance sequence, “The Music and the Mirror”—and she triumphs.

But yes, the world has changed a great deal in the three decades since the premiere of A Chorus Line. In 1987, Bennett himself, like so many gifted children of Broadway, died tragically of AIDS. (He was 44.) What the revival confirms marvelously for us is that A Chorus Line is now as much a classic piece of musical theater as Gypsy or West Side Story.

The young, unknown Bennett was coincidentally in the chorus of a touring production of West Side Story, and his god of dance was its director, Jerome Robbins. Bennett was born in Buffalo, N.Y. (“To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant”), and he secretly studied all of Robbins’ dances and ballets. He would become Robbins’ heir on Broadway, and that’s why Bennett’s work—unlike Bob Fosse’s—cannot be pastiched. Bennett took his choreography beyond the traps of a personal style into the higher realms of an artless art.

The chance to see his masterpiece again, or for the first time, shouldn’t be missed. Bennett did not seek—as Mr. Brantley at The Times insists—“to paint in kinetic strokes a group portrait ... like the inhabitants of densely peopled canvases by Velazquez or Rembrandt.” Oh, my. If Michael Bennett had been as pretentious as that, we’d never have heard of him or A Chorus Line. In fact, he borrowed and adapted film technique—dissolves, fast cuts and close-ups. He was an instinctive street kid, not an intellectual—a gypsy-genius of Broadway who loved dance and dancers and lived for the American musical.

When I first saw A Chorus Line, I thought I was seeing the future. And now, seeing it again so lovingly restored, I feel the bittersweet sense of both loss and possibility. Loss, because the American musical has for a generation lost all confidence in itself; possibility, because A Chorus Line is not cynical, nor a pseudo-opera, a special effect, a puppet show, an infantile spelling bee or a jukebox.

Stop and look around you! Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia!, Hairspray, Avenue Q and the rest. For my money, A Chorus Line is still the best musical in town.

unhappily revived at the Belasco, I had a startling sense of déjà vu . The show that's partly about

bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone golden age of musicals encourages our own

fractured memories of the past, and as the Follies

cast took their timeless bow I found myself unexpectedly jolted back into

this childhood memory.

I was at the theater

with my parents, who loved the theater, and we were at a kind of gala

performance in the north of England. I was about 7 or 8 years old and would

always stand up to see better-excitedly clutching the top of the seat in front

of me so that my knuckles turned white. For many years, even in adulthood, I

actually thought a "white-knuckle ride" meant going to the theater. Though it's

long ago, I remember the show vividly because every star vaudevillian seemed to

be in it. Vaudeville-like burlesque, like the Follies-was then on its last

legs, and with it a part of England was dying.

But at the end of the show I saw as a child, something was

wrong as the troupers took their bow. The applause was tepid, the performers

themselves seemed downhearted. I remember how shocked I felt, for I'd loved the

show. To a stage-struck child, all shows are great. I couldn't understand what

was happening and became upset.

"Why are they so sad?" I asked as the cast went off into the

wings and the curtain fell.

And my father explained quietly, "They know the show doesn't

work, Johnny."

As the Follies cast at the Belasco took their

bow, the performers had that same ghostly look about them. A bow is a bow is a

bow. But the reception was cool in a town where a standing ovation is normal

and Sondheimeans usually worship at the shrine. The cast didn't linger, and

some even looked defeated. They know the show doesn't work.

Did it ever? I must be the

only person left in New York who hasn't seen the original Follies production. If all the people who claim to have seen it in

1971 had actually been there, the show would still be running. The fabled

production was co-directed by Hal Prince and the young genius Michael Bennett,

choreographed by Mr. Bennett, designed by the great Boris Aronson with costumes

by Florenz Klotz, book by James Goldman (who wrote The Lion in Winter ), with music and lyrics by Mr. Sondheim (another

genius, who had just written Company) .

On paper, it was a dream team. Yet, contrary to the legend the show became, it

wasn't successful.

It became a cult success, the unwanted first prize of

glorious failure. The legend would have us believe that the original Follies worked brilliantly, but the

evidence suggests otherwise. The reviews were mixed, with two lethal

assessments from the all-powerful New

York Times . "It carries nostalgia to where sentiment finally engulfs it in

its sickly maw" (Clive Barnes). "'Follies' is intermissionless and exhausting,

an extravaganza that becomes tedious …" (Walter Kerr). But other, less powerful

critics disagreed."A pastiche so brilliant as to be breathtaking" (Douglas

Watt, the Daily News ). "Every other

musical should have its faults" (Martin Gottfried, Women's Wear Daily ). Let it be entered into the record that the

original production also won every award going, including eight Tony awards.

Set in a crumbling old Broadway theater that's to be torn

down, Follies is about a number of

ex-Follies girls in middle age and beyond who gather for a final reunion. They

reminisce about their lost youth as the ghosts of showgirls haunt the empty

theater and their younger selves appear. From all I've read and sense about the

original production, whether it was a failure or not, it was astonishingly

ambitious. Far from being an extravagant last hurrah and elegy to the past that

announced the death of the American musical, it dared to go out on a limb to

invent a new beginning.

The early 1970's were still a post-Aquarius age of

experimentation. Follies ,

flipped-out, wayward and impressionistic, is revolutionary at heart. It uses

the dissolves and fluidity of film technique with a nod to Fellini to create a

danced stage dream or nightmare. It attempts the impossible, living in past and

present simultaneously-which in turn is mirrored by the brilliance of the

Sondheim score. When the characters are in the present, we have pure

Sondheim-the aching, disenchanted "Too Many Mornings," the national anthem to

survival "I'm Still Here," the bitterly regretful "The Road You Didn't Take."

When the Follies alumnae re-live the

past, Mr. Sondheim effortlessly pastiches every conceivable musical style (and

lyric) from Friml and Romberg to Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Gershwin or Berlin.

The shock of the new

Roundabout Theatre production is its mistaken reinvention in minimalist Stygian

gloom. You cannot recreate glamour when there ain't no glamour left. But the

production as a whole is cold and remote, lackluster, threadbare. There's no

emotional connection. (And how we long for one.) The spectacular original

production was a folly in terms of its size and big budget. Jazz bands glided

in and out of the action on moving platforms. There were 26 musicians (there

are 14 here). The cast was a lunatic 56 strong. The current production still

has a cast of 40, yet there are times when the big Belasco stage looks

alarmingly empty. All we get, basically, is a dodgy-looking iron staircase on

which the old Follies girls make their perilous descent. The key Dreamland

sequence in Act II is famous for its surreal daring on the edge of a deliberate

nervous breakdown, but alas, it looks and sounds miserably like a tatty

bus-and-truck company's version in search of the real magical thing.

A low budget never stopped an imaginative solution. But the

British director, Matthew Warchus, hasn't begun to capture an imaginatively

staged faded grandeur, or even the right musical pulse. For long bewildering

stretches, the piece seems dance-starved, as if the gifted choreographer

Kathleen Marshall has been shackled. The director is known here for his

meticulous productions of Art and True West -both one-set, intimate plays.

The iconic Follies, which drove its

original creators to near distraction, is his first musical.

Forgive me, but one can't help thinking this is no time to

mess around. Mr. Warchus' gamble of going for the dramatic subtext of a

scaled-down Follies at the expense of

the original elaborate musical is the one move he shouldn't have made. The new

reading of Nicholas Hytner's version of Carousel,

for instance, touched all hearts because the sentimentalized interior tragedy

of the piece was there to be made real. When Peter Brook scaled down Bizet's Carmen to 90minutes like filleting a fat

fish to its barest bones, it worked so memorably because the spine of Prosper

Mérimée's original story was there to be rediscovered. But the biggest weakness

of Follies has always been its

dawdling, simple-minded book by James Goldman. There's no there there.

Mr. Sondheim has defended

the much-criticized, dominating story about the disenchanted married life of

two warring couples, but he hasn't always been the best judge of his own

librettists. Michael Bennett loudly disliked the Goldman book and its pro forma

picture of optimistic youth and mid-life crisis, but Bennett was out-voted by

Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Prince. This quartet in middle-aged sourness-Ben (Gregory

Harrison), Phyllis (Blythe Danner), Buddy (Treat Williams) and Sally (Judith

Ivey)-could fit perfectly into Mr. Sondheim's musical tribute to jaded

marriage, Company . But if you isolate

them from everything else, what are we left with? A spineless self-hater, an

icy sophisticate, a two-timing lug and a dope.

Mr. Goldman's attempt to be "serious" in a musical doesn't

make his book great art. It's bad art, a sappy squabbling melodrama, which

spills over into the score. The libretto is fuzzy several times over.

Why-should you care to know-didn't Ben marry his childhood crush, ex-showgirl

Sally, in the first place? Why, when each couple has been torn apart by the

folly of their rotten marriage, do they reunite in the end? That's show biz,

folks.

Small wonder the four

principal performers look ill at ease. The director has gone for legit

actors in his book-driven approach. But who-or what-are they acting? And the

best actors in the world can't always sing and dance well. There are, as there

always were, several delightful "turns" from veteran stars including Polly

Bergen, Donald Saddler, Marge Champion, Betty Garrett and Joan Roberts, the

original Laurey in Oklahoma!- and all,

we're glad to say, very much still here.

But it's true, of course. You can't go home again. Home, the

original Follies, is a dream. Yet

it's why, in spite of everything-the doubts, the resentments, the hazy things

that might have been different-I could end up missing a musical I've never

seen.

He was, after all, Broadway's dominant choreographer-director of the late 60's and 70's, though some would give the crown to Michael Bennett. (Jerome Robbins remains on his own mountain peak, along with God.) Fosse invented his own signature style-chic sleaze crossed with show-biz glitz, a stylized syncopation, silky, mostly heterosexual pelvic thrusts, pigeon toes, the lowlife fuck-you attitude of hookers and strippers (in perfect white gloves and black bowlers). As the famously cynical number from Fosse's Chicago goes:

Give 'em the old razzle-dazzle,

Razzle-dazzle 'em

Give 'em an act with lots of flash in it,

And the reaction will be pas- sionate.

Give 'em the old hocus-pocus,

Bead and feather 'em.

How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

He razzle-dazzled 'em all right, inventing the unmistakable Fosse Style, which gave birth to a thousand not-so-talented impersonators from Las Vegas to Michael Jackson videos. If nothing else, the important and reverential tribute to his entire oeuvre , Fosse , at the Broadhurst Theater, reminds us of his significant contribution-particularly his choreography for Sweet Charity , Pippin , Chicago and his own 1978 celebration of dance, Dancin' , as well as his films, Cabaret and the somewhat narcissistic 1979 movie autobiography, All That Jazz .

The riches on expert display in Fosse -some 26 routines performed by 32 dancers-were eagerly anticipated by me. To see anyone dancing on Broadway nowadays is a treat; to experience a Fosse troupe as good as this one promised an exceptional evening. The show has also been co-directed and co-choreographed by Ann Reinking (Mr. Fosse's lover and muse during the 1970's, who reconceived the choreography in the current Chicago ); another key member of the production team, Chet Walker, was the dance captain on the 1986 revival of Sweet Charity ; and the artistic adviser is Gwen Verdon, keeper of the Fosse flame, his wife and star of the original Fosse productions of Sweet Charity , Damn Yankees and Chicago .

With credentials as distinguished as theirs, how could Fosse go wrong? Yet the show as a whole doesn't really ignite. It ultimately reveals the limitations of Fosse's brand of automated genius. He created stars-Ms. Verdon, Ms. Reinking, Ben Vereen of Pippin -but a Fosse dancer is essentially a machine. His dances were unique, but they depersonalized dancers.

He was a cool choreographer-not, however, the cold one revealed in Fosse . He was also sexually hot, and blatantly so-in a pre-lap-dancing era. He wasn't remote or merely retro, or looking a bit quaint by now, as, alas, he appears to be in Fosse . He has dated, not always badly or fatally. (The successful revival of Chicago shows that his raunchy choreography can still work.) But the near-clinical Fosse is too close to a scholarly guided tour of the past.

They have museum-ified the choreographer who was proud to say he was first inspired by strip joints. The lengthy show is-of all unexpected things-tiring. There is no book, no unifying narrative and three acts. Unless you happen to know the number being performed-say, "Big Spender" from Sweet Charity or "Steam Heat" from Pajama Game -the likelihood is that you won't have a clue what's happening, or why. Nothing has a context (except nostalgia). Everything is taken out of context, as if the original show doesn't count. Only the deification of the choreography counts.

So the scenes and dance numbers dutifully listed in the Playbill read like a graduate thesis on the Art of Bob Fosse. How about this: "'From This Moment On' (from the motion picture Kiss Me, Kate , 1953). Music and lyrics by Cole Porter (the first 45 seconds of film choreography by Bob Fosse). Originally danced by Bob Fosse and Carol Haney …"

Having fun? The sense of the weighty is imposed, of course, to create a bigger atmosphere of historic significance-bigger than the actual material can take. Do we need a Fosse excerpt from The Bob Hope Special , 1968? Or, for that matter, from The Colgate Comedy Hour , 1951? Well, perhaps we do, if we're touring an important museum.

Not all Fosse dances are created equal. Yet here the minor is treated as reverentially as the major. Dances are lovingly re-created-the retro 1960's "Rich Man's Frug" from Sweet Charity -but the high energy is overprogrammed. We greet the well-known numbers like old friends, but something is invariably missing. Perhaps we miss star power, or the living spirit of Fosse himself that's been lost in all the technical virtuosity on polished display. "Mein Herr" from his film version of Cabaret is flat on stage, crying out for the voyeuristic camera (and Liza Minnelli raising the roof). Then again, the classic 1950's "Steam Heat" is brilliantly performed, yet it no longer-45 years on!-truly excites. That's inevitable, perhaps. But rarely has a Fosse show proved less sexy.

Bob Fosse belonged to the golden era of Broadway choreographers that included Agnes de Mille, Gower Champion, Michael Bennett and Jerome Robbins. (Robbins, like Bennett, was influenced by the film choreography of Jack Cole.) You can recognize Fosse's style-and his alone-in a fog. The other geniuses integrated their dances more into narrative and character. Who could impersonate a Michael Bennett sequence from A Chorus Line ? But anyone can do a Fosse, making a passable imitation. And Fosse was never subtle.

The link with his thrilling generation of choreographers has long since snapped, leaving Broadway dance in its lowest state. The highly regarded Susan Strohman and Graciela Daniele aren't innovators; Ms. Strohman's strength is nostalgic pastiche. Tommy Tune soldiers on in high, old-fashioned show-biz glitz. Why has the great dance tradition been lost? Well, perhaps it was an exceptional golden era, never to be repeated. AIDS has also taken a terrible toll on the dance community. The era of the all-powerful director-choreographer has passed.

Musicals today aren't dance-driven. ( Bring in da Noise … was a notable exception that grew out of a black tradition and heritage.) Who remembers the dance numbers in The Lion King and Rent ? Or Les Misérables ? The Andrew Lloyd Webber blockbusters-now approaching a merciful end after an entire generation of colonial dominance-were pseudo-operas, not dance musicals. Cats is danced, the rest are "sung-through"; there isn't time to dance, or the inclination.

Where's the new school of American musicals to revive the lost link with the Fosse generation? Let's not drift into depression yet awhile. But look at the four musicals coming up this season: a revival of the 1946 Annie Get Your Gun ; a revival of the 1948 Kiss Me, Kate ; Easter Parade , a stage version of the 1948 movie, directed and choreographed by Tommy Tune; and a revival of the 1967 musical, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown .

Now to that, Fosse would say: "Live and laugh at it all" (from "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries," music and lyrics by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson). On the other hand, Fosse , the tribute, is part of the problem. It's another exercise in nostalgia.

It's also a mistaken attempt to elevate Fosse to the level of Jerome Robbins' tremendous valedictory to himself a few seasons ago, Jerome Robbins' Broadway . But Fosse himself felt inadequate compared to Robbins, and didn't possess his creative staying power; Fosse never completed a ballet. And Robbins choreographed superior musicals, among them West Side Story .

Fosse's talent was the knotted, uptight, horny choreography of the urban neurotic. He was earthbound, never lyrical. His dance tribute about an old hoofer, "Mr. Bojangles," is sentimental. He shied away from authentic emotion in his work. When he died of a heart attack in 1987, age 60, he was already afraid that he'd become dated. Fosse was a remarkable choreographer who made one big statement; Fosse is too much of a good thing.