I didn't get to this last week, but the
NYT published six pieces in two days:
Obituary (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/theater/chita-rivera-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TU0.eotw.uITFcnWNfJcv&bgrp=g&smid=url-share)A Life in Photos (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/theater/chita-rivera-photos-life.html)An Appraisal (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/theater/chita-rivera-broadway-west-side-story.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TU0.4mca.JjS0zaEVUtW9&bgrp=g&smid=url-share)9 Memorable Performances (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/theater/chita-rivera-key-moments-career.html)Her Ballet Roots (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/arts/chita-rivera-ballet-dance.html)Reactions and Tributes (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/theater/chita-rivera-tributes.html)Chita.jpg image.jpg
Dance Magazine: Remembering Chita Rivera (https://www.dancemagazine.com/remembering-chita-rivera/)
I believe the only theatre work of Ms. Rivera's that I ever saw live was The Visit, in its (and her) final Broadway performance, on June 14, 2015. While the show itself may not have been quite first-rank Kander & Ebb, I thought she carried it quite capably -- commandingly, even -- despite a slight cold which, she confessed in her curtain speech afterward, was making her voice even huskier than usual. There's a full slime tutorial of that production on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su7phIRHznc).
Ed.: My bad: a quick scan of IBDB (https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/chita-rivera-57887) reminds me that I had also seen Ms. Rivera two years prior in the Roundabout's Mystery of Edwin Drood (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYIgs0Po2dc) revival at Studio 54.
Both honorable performances in respectable material, there are far worse ways to make a graceful B'way exit. Her cabaret act (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_LpRjmLTXc) at 54 Below, which I saw a few years later, in October 2019, was obviously more pure-Chita, but I came away feeling that her many-peaked career had (sadly but, at 86, hardly surprisingly) passed its final peak. Ms. Rivera's 2021 cameo (https://youtu.be/Xjv8vNCfdUA?si=6PXZrl4GarYno88s&t=89) as one of the "Legends" in tick, tick... BOOM!'s Sunday-brunch scene made a moving, albeit vanishingly brief, final screen appearance.
Among the roles she created, the only one I could have seen (but didn't) prior to The Visit was her Aurora in Kiss of the Spider Woman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl37PvcT88E), whose entire two-year run I missed while flailing my way through graduate school (and walking past the Broadhurst, four blocks from my apartment at the time, probably half a dozen times a week en route to and from the Times Sq subway). On the basis of its OCR -- admittedly only a handful of hearings over many years -- Spider Woman's score has never quite grabbed me. But a movie adaptation (https://variety.com/2023/film/news/jennifer-lopez-kiss-of-the-spider-woman-musical-bill-condon-1235825197/), written and directed by Bill Condon, is slated to begin filming this spring with J.Lo in the title role.