Broadway show girls call it a layback: balancing on one foot, the other leg shoots up through 180 degrees while you bend your spine concavely and snap your head in line with your torso, extending your arms their full length. You do this at high speed, creating what looks like, from a distance, a perfect capital letter “H”. You hold it for a few seconds then go back into your dance and repeat the manoeuvre several times in the same razzle-dazzle number.
Nobody did this better than Ann Reinking, muse and partner of the great choreographer Bob Fosse. Movement ran through her limbs like no other’s: she could strut her stuff in a cakewalk, flip her hands in athletic contempt, tip her bowler, brazen out in a spangled waistcoat and elongate her legs so they reached her shoulders. Reinking, who has died aged 71, was Fosse incarnate.
Most famously, she recycled Fosse’s first production of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Chicago – in which she had replaced Fosse’s wife, the musical star Gwen Verdon, in the role of Roxie Hart – as a smash hit 20 years later. On its first run, in 1977, the show had been overshadowed on Broadway, ironically, by A Chorus Line, which celebrated the kind of Broadway babe and hoofer that Reinking typified.
In 1996, initially in a concert staging of four performances only – as part of an Encores! series in the City Center – she reprised her role as Roxie, with Bebe Neuwirth as Velma Kelly and Joel Grey as Amos (“Mr Cellophane”) Hart. When the show went to Broadway, she won a Tony award for best choreography “in the style of Bob Fosse”.
In London in 1997, Walter Bobbie’s production, first starring Ute Lemper and Ruthie Henshall, was a smash hit, running for almost 15 years (at the Adelphi for nine years, then the Cambridge and the Garrick). It hit a zeitgeist metaphorical moment of celebrity linked to criminality and, in Reinking’s reimagining, exposed Fosse’s stark, often brutal, choreography as a vibrant language of contemporary theatre, similar to the existential riffs of Pina Bausch on classical dance, and just as sexy. Everyone wore black, most of it lingerie.
Reinking herself was the chorus girl who, like Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street, went on as an understudy and came back a star. She made a Broadway debut aged 19 in Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret – given the Fosse look in the 1972 movie starring Liza Minnelli – and first crossed his radar when she auditioned for Pippin (1972) on Broadway.
She was cast, became Fosse’s protegee and partner – he was married to, but separated from Verdon – until 1978, when she was one of a cast of 16 in Fosse’s ground-breaking dance revue, Dancin’ – to music of George M Cohan, Cat Stevens and Bach, among others. One of the producers, Bernie Jacobs of the Shubert organisation, wanted to tone that show down. He referred to a Reinking fantasy item as “the cunnilingus number.” There was a bust-up in previews, but the number stayed in. Fosse always won.
Reinking was the classiest ever Broadway takeover replacement, succeeding Donna McKechnie in A Chorus Line (1976) in Michael Bennett’s virtuosic choreography of The Music and the Mirror; Verdon – who doubled as professional ally and romantic rival – in the first version of Chicago; and, 10 years later, Debbie Allen in Fosse’s revival of Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon’s Sweet Charity.
She grew up in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, one of six children of Frances (née Harrison) and Walter Reinking. (One of her brothers, Bob, later ran PJ’s Grill and Bar in Covent Garden, a favourite haunt of actors and producers.) She took ballet lessons as a child with two former members of the Ballets Russes and made a professional debut, aged 12, in Giselle with the English Royal Ballet on tour.
Reinking won a Ford Foundation scholarship to study with the San Francisco Ballet while still at Bellevue high school and took summer classes with the Joffrey Ballet at the Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Sensing bright lights and stardom, Robert Joffrey advised her to try Broadway.
So, in 1968, aged 18, Reinking moved to New York and joined the corps de ballet (not the Rockettes) at the Radio City Music Hall. After her debut in Cabaret, she danced in the chorus of Coco (1969) by Alan J Lerner and André Previn, starring Katharine Hepburn as Coco Chanel; and in a famous flop, Wild and Wonderful (“wet, windy, tame, terrible and wretched” were some of the kinder critical epithets) where she met the actor Larry Small, whom she married in 1972.
After Pippin, she appeared in Over Here! (1974) with the two surviving Andrews Sisters, and jitter-bugged her way into critical lexicography before managing a full war dance as an armour-clad Joan of Arc in Goodtime Charley (1975) with Grey as the Dauphin. Dancin’ was followed by the full-on Fosse autobiographical movie All That Jazz (1979) in which she played herself as Katie Jagger.
The disintegrating, drug-addicted Fosse was played brilliantly in All That Jazz by Roy Scheider, and Reinking played her part to the full and beyond in her performance of unbridled eroticism. Her only other movie roles of note were in John Huston’s Annie (1982) in which she was a prim, but delightful, buttoned-up secretary to Albert Finney’s philanthropic Warbucks, and in Blake Edwards’ Micki and Maude (1984), in which she shared her bigamist TV reporter husband (Dudley Moore) with Amy Irving’s “younger model” musician.
The civilised relationship she sustained with Fosse and Verdon was tactfully implied in the television documentary film Fosse/Verdon (2019) in which Margaret Qualley played Reinking, Sam Rockwell Fosse, and Michelle Williams (brilliantly) Verdon.
Reinking was by then retired, living in Phoenix, Arizona.
Her marriage to Small ended in divorce, as did two further marriages. Her fourth husband, Peter Talbert, whom she married in 1994, survives her, along with a son, Christopher, from her third marriage, to James Stuart.
Christopher has the genetic disorder Marfan syndrome. Reinking made a moving documentary on this topic, In My Hands, in 2009.
• Ann Reinking, dancer and choreographer, born 10 November 1949; died 12 December 2020
