"So people tend to have this one-sided picture of Bob," adds Reinking. 'They see his conflict, his rage, his confusion. But they don't see his tenderness, his good, kindly true self, his broken heart."
What people also saw, of course, was Fosse's theatrical genius and Reinking had a front-row seat, particularly during the creation of "Chicago" when, as she puts it, three brilliant men--Fosse, Kander and Ebb--sat down around the dining room table and started sketching out a musical that would emerge as one of the blackest jewels in musical theater history.
"Chicago made you itch," says Reinking. "It made you itch because everybody's so bad, and yet there is such tremendous truth and morality in it. We do glamorize bad people, and there is irresponsible press and rampant consumerism. But Bob was at a stage in his life when he was very mad. His life had been threatened [by a serious heart attack] and he had long been this maverick fighting for what he believed in. He pushed people's buttons and he didn't care whether they liked him or not. So it was an uncomfortable experience for a lot of people because you couldn't like these characters. And yet it was so entertaining that you had to laugh and have a good time. And that made you itch, too."
In 1977, Reinking, then Fosse's girlfriend, replaced Verdon, still Fosse's wife, in "Chicago," thereby creating one of the more intriguing branches on the Broadway family tree. It is a measure of Reinking's complicated personality and protean talent that just prior, she had played Joan of Arc in the 1975 musical flop, "Goodtime Charley" opposite Joel Grey, and Cassie in "A Chorus Line"--the humanistic musical, which opened the same season. The Michael Bennett show, with its generous spirit made "Chicago" seem even more bitter by comparison, robbing it, too, of all the honors that year.
"I went from saint to mortal saint to sinner and I had a ball," says Reinking, noting that Roxie was the toughest role she'd ever played because it was important not to veer too far afield with the character's nastiness. "If you go too dark, then she's just cynical and it gets in the way of people getting the satire of the piece, that these people have sacrificed way too much for way too little. You have to keep in touch with Roxie's innocence. It's a bizarre, perverse, misguided innocence, but it's genuine."
At about the time of "Dancin'," Reinking says her relationship with Fosse reached a "stalemate." She wanted marriage and a family, he remained tortured and noncommittal about the relationship. They split toward the end of the run of "Dancin', " and Reinking went on to make films ('Annie," "Mickey and Maude"), choreograph for various ballet companies and productions, and marry, first investment banker Herbert Allen and then a Florida businessman, the father of her child, who was born in 1990.
In 1986, Reinking re-teamed with Fosse for a revival of "Sweet Charity," co-starring Bebe Neuwirth. It would be Fosse's last work; he died while the show was on pre-Broadway tryout. Reinking did not return to the work of her late mentor until 1992, when director Rob Marshall invited her to choreograph a revival of "Chicago," starring Bebe Neuwirth and Juliet Prowse, for the now-defunct Long Beach Civic Light Opera. Reinking says that the limited engagement there was "a warm, good time," a reunion of sorts because so much of the cast had worked with Fosse. But no one seemed to think that the time was necessarily ripe for a full-blown Broadway revival. Indeed, afterward, life went on for Reinking in much the same manner as it had before: performing, choreographing and devoting as much time as possible to her son.
Four years later, however, at the request of her manager Lee Gross, Reinking met with Bobbie, who was then mounting a concert production for "Encores!" Eager to concentrate just on choreographing, she says that she initially turned down his request to play Roxie opposite Neuwirth, but eventually caved in when he persisted. Little did she know that what she thought of as a three-week gig would dramatically and fundamentally change her life.
What she is struggling to do now, she says, is to keep from becoming "a jerk" by remaining aware of Fosse's warning that success can be even more insidious than failure. "Glamour does kill," she says. "It's sometimes hard to maintain your equilibrium, particularly if you're creative and you're constantly fearful that the gift will be taken away. The two most powerful pulls in my life have always been to be an artist and to be a mother. Keeping that in balance is the most important thing in my life right now."
