Below is an excerpt from her obituary in "The New York Times"
"Ann Reinking, a dancer, actor and Tony Award-winning choreographer who performed on Broadway for nearly three decades, where she was also known for her long association with Bob Fosse and his work, died on Saturday. She was 71.
Ms. Reinking died in her sleep in a hotel room in the Seattle area, where she was visiting her older brother, said Dahrla King, her sister-in-law. The cause was not yet known, she said.
She was perhaps best known as a performer for playing Roxie Hart in the musical 'Chicago.' It was the role that she stepped into in 1977 at 26, and which helped make her a star. And it is the role that she returned to triumphantly nearly two decades later in the hugely successful 1996 Broadway revival — which she also choreographed.
Her success onstage also fascinated audiences because of a romantic subplot playing out offstage. When Ms. Reinking, an ingénue, took on that role, she was romantically involved with Fosse, the director and choreographer. And the star she was replacing was Gwen Verdon, who had been married to Fosse, and who had separated from him several years earlier. ('Annie taking over had extraordinary symmetry,' Ms. Verdon later recalled. 'Pieces simply fell into place.')
By the time Ms. Reinking returned to the role two decades later, she had developed into a formidable choreographer herself. She won the Tony Award for best choreography for the 1996 “Chicago” revival, which she imagined as an updated tribute to Fosse’s earlier choreography. Both her performance and her choreography were praised by Ben Brantley in The New York Times.
'Ms. Reinking, a former dancer for Fosse (and, for a time, his companion), has brought her own light-handed sparkle in evoking the Fosse spirit, and the corps de ballet couldn’t be better,'
he wrote in his review, 'physically capturing the wry, knowing pastiche of some of Kander and Ebb’s best songs.'
She continued to keep the flame of Fosse, who had died of a heart attack in 1987, burning brightly in 1999 by going on to co-direct and co-choreograph the Broadway musical 'Fosse,' a
revue of his work which won the Tony for best musical.
'He lived to wake people up, to make them really live,'’ she had said of Fosse in 1996. 'He taught me how hard you have to work to do that.'”
From the ensembles of “Cabaret” and “Pippin,” she stepped into the role of Roxie Hart in “Chicago,” and the rest is Tony-winning history.
www.nytimes.com
