Broadway Dancer Gwen Verdon Dies
Gwen Verdon, Broadway's premier female dancer who was the seductive Lola in Damn Yankees and the saucy, love-struck Charity in Sweet Charity, died today of natural causes. She was 75.
Verdon did her best work with director and choreographer Bob Fosse, to whom she was married for 15 years.
She worked with Fosse not only in Damn Yankees (1955) and Sweet Charity (1965) but in New Girl in Town (1957), Redhead (1960) and Chicago (1975). She won four Tony Awards, beginning with Can-Can, the 1953 Cole Porter musical.
A lithe, red-haired dancer, she was first cheered by Broadway audiences in the Porter musical which starred the French chanteuse Lilo. Yet it was the unknown Verdon who stopped the show with her sexy Garden of Eden ballet. Two years later, she was elevated to stardom as the devil's amorous assistant in Damn Yankees, a musical about a baseball fan who sells his soul so he can play for his favorite team, the Washington Senators.
The show's first poster featured Verdon in a baseball uniform but when ticket sales lagged the advertising was changed. Verdon was put in sexy black lingerie. Box-office receipts soared. The show ran over 1,000 performances.
Fosse, whom she married in 1960 and divorced 15 years later, created the dances for Damn Yankees, as well as for Verdon's four remaining Broadway musicals. In New Girl in Town, based on Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, she played a former prostitute who returns to her New England roots.
In 1959, Fosse tailor-made Redhead, a murder-mystery musical set in Victorian England, for her. He did the same with Sweet Charity, based on the Federico Fellini film Nights of Cabiria. In it, Verdon played Charity Hope Valentine, a taxi dancer who wore her heart on her sleeve.
Chicago, which opened in 1975, featured Verdon as the Windy City murderer Roxie Hart. The Kander and Ebb musical is currently enjoying a long-running revival on Broadway.
On screen, she re-created the role of Lola in Damn Yankees, and also appeared in Cocoon.
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