A Funny Thing Happened on the Fosse Tour

Back in 2003, I was playing drums for the National tour of “Fosse”. The show is a collection of numbers that Bob Fosse choreographed through this career. It included pieces from “Damn Yankees”, “Sweet Charity,” “Chicago” “Pippin” and “ Cabaret” to name a few.

One of the numbers was called “ Rich Mans Frug” and it was to sort of poke fun of how the super wealthy behaved at parties. All the dancers have to dance with cigarettes as a prop that are lit. They extinguish them in their pocket during the second part of the song.

One night dancer C was dancing his heart out ( Full out as they say in the Broadway lingo)

He extinguished cigarette ( or so he thought) but little did he know the lining in his pocket that was designed to do the Job started to disintegrate…. Dancer P looks over at C and realizes that smoke is starting to emerge from C’s jacket!!! He realized he must do something! He yells at him “C! C! You’re on fire!!!”

C responds “ thank you!” Thinking he was given a compliment.

P says “No No. you’re actually on fire!”

We had great stage management that was standing by with fire extinguishers and no one was hurt. ( except for the jacket pocket).

I think of this because everyone says this is fire that is fire. But this literally was Fire!!!