The remarkable film, Broadway and choreography career of native Chicagoan Bob Fosse will be presented Saturday at Berwyn Public Library beginning at 2 pm. Admission is free, but those interested in attending are encouraged to register in advance through the Berwyn Library website to reserve their seat.
"Bob Fosse: 'Oh Wow' Choreography" is the latest of 14 multimedia film history presentations assembled since 2017 by American history enthusiast John LeGear, a lifelong communications specialist for national not-for-profit organizations. Berwyn Library will be hosting the first-ever public showing of this new Fosse presentation on June 21. It is the seventh of LeGear's "movie music" shows hosted by Berwyn Library since 2022.
Dancer-choreographer Bob Fosse forever changed the way audiences around the world viewed dance on the stage and in the film industry from the 1950s to the 1980s. Born in 1927 and raised on the north side of Chicago, Fosse was the fifth of six children and learned early on that he’d need to do special things to garner any attention from his family.
Visionary, intense, and passionately driven, Fosse was an artist whose work was always provocative, entertaining, and quite unlike anything ever before seen. He graduated from Amundsen High School on the north side of Chicago in 1945 and served two years in the US Navy before heading to Broadway in 1947 with plans to become the next Fred Astaire.
Through his early films Fosse revolutionized the presentation of dance on screen and paved the way for a whole generation of film and video directors that followed.
LeGear will introduce each of 20 Fosse-related film compilations in this 85-minute presentation, which is divided evenly between Fosse's on-screen work of the 1950s through his choreography that extended well into the 1980s.