Identified for her dynamic character and prodigious bodily vitality, Chita Rivera, who has died aged 91, created the function of Anita in West Aspect Story in 1957. Because the heroine Maria’s good friend in arguably one of the best musical of the twentieth century, Rivera tore up the stage within the ensemble dance quantity America, a surprising musical expression of minority group aspiration, and sang memorable concord traces in Tonight and I Have a Love.
Beginning out as a principal dancer in New York revue, Rivera first made waves doing a calypso can-can in 1955 (alongside Gloria DeHaven and Bea Arthur) and later co-starred with Sammy Davis Jr, Dick Van Dyke, Gwen Verdon, Donald O’Connor and Liza Minnelli. She was as beloved in London as she was in New York, first showing within the capital within the West Finish premiere of West Aspect Story (1958), returning to Her Majesty’s in 1961 in Charles Strouse, Lee Adams and Michael Stewart’s Bye Bye Birdie (Marty Wilde took the function of an Elvis-style pop star drafted into the armed forces) and, sensationally, because the dream-spinning Aurora, display idol and image of dying, in John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Girl on the Shaftesbury in 1992.
When she introduced her solo present to the Shaw theatre in London 2008, she was no much less swish, fiery or technically good than she had been 40 years earlier. And she or he nonetheless kicked her heels method over her ears.
Vivacious, pugnacious and bright-eyed, at 5ft 3in tall, she gave a rendition of Jacques Brel’s fiendish Carousel that was merely unimaginable and honoured her Broadway roots in a string of show-stoppers together with These days from Kander and Ebb’s Chicago, having created the function of Velma Kelly on Broadway in 1975.
Born in Washington DC, she was one in all 5 kids of Pedro Figueroa del Rivero, a Puerto Rican clarinettist within the US navy band who died when Chita was seven, and his spouse, Katherine (nee Anderson), a authorities official.
Chita received a scholarship to the College of American Ballet in New York, the place she additionally attended William Howard Taft highschool, lodging with household within the Bronx. On graduating in 1951, she toured as a principal dancer in Irving Berlin’s Name Me Madam (with Elaine Stritch within the Ethel Merman function of “the hostess with the mostest”) earlier than making her Broadway debut in 1953 in Guys and Dolls, adopted by an off-Broadway lead function in Ben Bagley’s Shoestring Revue in 1955.
In the identical 12 months she stole the notices within the musical comedy Seventh Heaven and in 1956 joined Davis in Mr Great with music and lyrics by Jerry Bock; one critic described her as “an actual cute chick with rolling eyes and sinuous hips”.
Regardless of the triumph of West Aspect Story, though the Anita function went to Rita Moreno for the 1961 movie model of the musical; Rivera exploited this muddle over Chita and Rita in one in all her cabaret songs. In the identical 12 months Bye Bye Birdie – one of many first musicals in regards to the rock’n’roll period – flopped in London. Rivera then resumed her dedication to touring within the US, with highway revivals of Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon’s Candy Charity in 1967, succeeding her good friend Verdon as Hope Charity, the New York taxi dancer with a coronary heart as massive because the Bronx; and Kander and Ebb’s Zorbá in 1969.
Deliver Again Birdie (1981) with O’Connor was a disastrous sequel to Bye Bye Birdie, and a veil is finest drawn over the illusionist Doug Henning’s Merlin (1983), during which she was unkindly forged as a rancorous outdated witch.
She was unfortunate, too, in her subsequent Kander and Ebb Broadway car, The Rink (1984), on the Martin Beck, during which she performed Minnelli’s mom (The Apple Doesn’t Fall Very Removed from the Tree was one of the best tune) in a sentimental lament for a closing curler rink. Minnelli was enduring one in all her “unpredictable” durations, and I noticed her solely understudy, Lenora Nemetz, although an ageless Rivera was on devastating kind.
They are saying “break a leg” for good luck on Broadway, however Rivera’s luck ran out when she was concerned in a nasty automobile accident in Manhattan whereas showing in a Jerry Herman tribute present, Jerry’s Women (1985). She broke her leg in 12 locations, however made a tremendous restoration by means of years of ache and physiotherapy.
Kiss of the Spider Girl marked a triumphant comeback, and he or she went on to tango with Antonio Banderas in a 2003 Broadway revival of 9, directed by David Leveaux, and headline her personal present, Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life (2005).
For some years she labored with Kander and Ebb, and playwright Terrence McNally, on a musical model of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Go to. The present was tried out in Chicago in 2001, once more in Washington in 2008 and, when seen in a revamped, truncated kind at Roger Rees’s Williamstown Theatre competition in the summertime of 2014, her efficiency as Claire Zachanassian, the world’s richest girl, was hailed in Selection as “a lioness in winter … magisterial, crafty and completely frozen in her mission” of in search of a life in change for her thousands and thousands.
“I’m unkillable!” she exclaimed. And indestructible, too, for greater than 60 years on the boards. In 2009, in her residence city of Washington, President Barack Obama awarded her the presidential medal of freedom.
Rivera returned to Broadway in The Go to opening on the Lyceum Theatre for a three-month run in March 2015. She was nominated for a Tony award and a Drama Desk award. In 2017, the Astaire Awards had been rebranded The Chita Rivera Awards for Dance and Choreography. The next 12 months, she acquired a particular Tony award for lifetime achievement.
She had a cameo within the 2021 movie musical and tribute to Jonathan Larson, Tick, Tick … Growth!, and her autobiography, Chita: A Memoir, co-written with Patrick Pacheco, was printed in 2023.
In 1957 she married a fellow dancer in West Aspect Story, Tony Mordente; they divorced in 1966.
The London opening of the present was delayed so she may give beginning to their daughter, Lisa, who survives her, alongside along with her siblings Julio, Armando and Lola. Her sister Carmen predeceased her.
