R.I.P. Chita Rivera 1933-2024

[scenicdesign71]

I didn't get to this last week, but the NYT published six pieces in two days:

Obituary

A Life in Photos

An Appraisal

9 Memorable Performances

Her Ballet Roots

Reactions and Tributes


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Dance Magazine:  Remembering Chita Rivera

[scenicdesign71]

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.

Ed.: My bad: a quick scan of IBDB reminds me that I had also seen Ms. Rivera two years prior in the Roundabout's Mystery of Edwin Drood 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 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 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, 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, written and directed by Bill Condon, is slated to begin filming this spring with J.Lo in the title role.