Thinking About Bob Fosse's 'Bye, Bye Life' From "All That Jazz"

My favorite movie musical of all time is Bob Fosse's "All That Jazz". There is much food for thought packed into this little musical.

For example, at 5:22 in this video, the dancers assume the neo-classical Ascending Arabesque stance from George Balanchine's 1928 "Apollo", representing the Rays of the Sun. But there's just 2 arabesques here; not the original 3. The question in my mind is: Why?

Is it just a looser, jazzier formulation? Is it a shout-out to Balanchine, perhaps? New York, after all, is a pretty small town, dance-wise. Fosse and Balanchine no doubt knew each other, or at least of each other. Balanchine was still alive when this movie came out, and could be expected to see it at the cinema, so it could be an acknowledgment. Is it Bob Fosse just being an ass, comparing himself to Apollo in sunset just as Balanchine was rebuked by critics in the 30's for comparing himself to Apollo in sunrise?

I'm not sure which dancers represent which muse, but my opinion is Ben Vereen, facing Roy Scheider with his pointing, accusatory finger, is the third, missing arabesque, the muse of mime, Polyhymnia, symbolized by The Mask. (And masks open the number, and are featured throughout). Balanchine spent most of his career slowly stripping mime out of ballet, so maybe Fosse just finishes the task.

One would think the Bob Fosse's muse would be Terpsichore, the muse of dance and song (and wouldn't Ann Reinking, on the right, be sublimely-perfect in that role?), or even Calliope, the muse of poetry. But in Fosse's judgement of his own life, The Mask leads the dance (as, indeed, Ben Vereen does, in "Bye, Bye Life").

And that's just several seconds of this most-wonderful movie!