Nicole Fosse Is Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse's Daughter—And Fosse/Verdon's Greatest Asset
Juliet Brett steps onto the red carpet at the Fosse/Verdon premiere in New York, all smiles. She's dressed in a flattering blue velvet gown, celebrating her turn as Nicole Fosse, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon's daughter. The off-the-shoulder dress was selected with some advice from-wait for it-Nicole Fosse.
"We text," Brett laughs. The close relationship between subject and actor might seem strange, but it's baked into the structure of Fosse/Verdon. The show, for which Nicole Fosse is an executive producer, offers an unflinching look at both Fosse and Verdon. And in every stage of production, Nicole endeared herself to the cast and crew. "Yeah. I really love her," Brett tells Town & Country. "She’s amazing."
Given that the show aims to tell the story of Fosse and Verdon's partnership, it couldn't have been done any other way. The series is based on Sam Wasson's biography of Fosse (appropriately titled Fosse), but for the choreographer's romantic and creative partner, there's far less source material. When the writers delved into Verdon's life, Nicole Fosse often had to fill in the gaps-from the details of her first marriage to her favorite costume jewelry.
"We couldn’t have done a lot of our work without her," Melissa Toth, the show's costume designer, tells Town & Country. "She was actually quite a private person, and there’s not a lot of photographic evidence of her on the internet the way there is of Bob Fosse. So we really needed that stuff from Nicole."
Nicole didn't seem to mind opening up, or watching a pair of relative strangers play her parents. Sure, she may have had her reservations-"If I didn’t have trouble with some of the moments, either there’s something wrong with me or something wrong with the piece," she told the Washington Post-but she kept them to herself.
"In the end it wasn’t jarring like, 'Oh, my mother never looked like that,'" Toth says. "We never heard that. It was always, 'I remember when my mom wore something so similar to that, and you got it just right.'"
Aya Cash, who portrayed Neil Simon's wife Joan, said that she would have had "three pictures" to go on without Nicole's advice. "She’s the one who said Joan never had the bow out of her hair," Cash told Town & Country. "And to have her on set telling stories and acknowledging when you got something right was really satisfying."
Even for Sam Rockwell, who had a wealth of material to draw on when studying to play Fosse, Nicole was an irreplaceable asset. "Little things," he told Town & Country. "He called her 'Pickle.' Little things like that."
Brett agrees that above all, Nicole's insight into her own relationship with her parents was illuminating. "The strongest thing that resonated with me was how much love she felt for her parents, and how much love this family had, even amidst all of the struggle and amidst all of the drama," she says.
But not everything that Nicole shared will become public knowledge. "There were enough stories to go around," says Paul Reiser, who played Cabaret producer Cy Feuer. Any particularly good ones? "None that I can repeat for you people."
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