TV Reviews : Bob Fosse Profile in ‘Dance in America’

“Bob Fosse: Steam Heat” has absolutely everything it needs to be definitive--except time.

This PBS “Dance in America” profile airs tonight at 9 on Channels 15 and 24, Saturday at 9 p.m. on Channel 28 and Sunday at 10 p.m. on Channel 50.

At one hour, the program is half the length of Fosse’s partly fictionalized 1979 film autobiography, “All That Jazz.” Thus, in summarizing anew the life and career of this spectacularly talented, alarmingly bedeviled Broadway and Hollywood dancer/choreographer/director, it is doomed to superficiality before it starts.

Fosse died in 1987 at age 60, but extensive archival interview footage makes it possible for him to tell his own story here--with insights also supplied by Gwen Verdon (Fosse’s third wife and his star in five shows), their daughter Nicole, plus a few select friends and colleagues speaking at a public tribute. These sources alone might have filled the hour.

Understandably, however, producer/director Judy Kinberg wants us to sample Fosse’s achievements and also to trace the evolution of his dance style--all in the same 60 minutes.

Researcher Daniel Anker has assembled a fabulous collection of kinescopes, TV commercials and feature-film clips (including excerpts from “All That Jazz”). Inevitably, many of them are cut to incoherent snippets: dancing used as mere montage fodder.

Consequently much of “Bob Fosse: Steam Heat” looks like a TV teaser (exciting shots stitched together to promote an upcoming show). If this effect causes mild frustration in the sequences drawn from feature films (most of them, after all, are available on home video), it grows infuriating when we’re watching vintage performances from the TV vaults. When will that chance come again?

Suggestion: Unless you’ve been weaned on MTV editing, don’t look at the program until after you’ve videotaped it. Then you can at least stop and re-run some of its tantalizing fragments before the pileup makes you dizzy.

Those who risk the cold-turkey, off-the-air approach will probably be happiest with the glimpses of Fosse as a superbly lithe and buoyant young film dancer: in “My Sister Eileen” opposite Tommy Rall, or with Verdon in their great mambo duet from “Damn Yankees.”