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Chita Rivera, the fire-and-ice dancer, singer and actress who rose to stardom in the original Broadway production of “West Side Story” and dazzled audiences for nearly seven decades as a Puerto Rican lodestar of American musical theater, died Tuesday. . She was 91 years old.
The death was announced in a statement by his daughter, Lisa Mordente. She gave no other details.
For generations of music fans, Ms. Rivera was a spinning, jumping, high-kicking elemental dance force; a seductive singer of smoky ballads and sizzling jazz; and a power-propelling vaudeville actress. She appeared in dozens of theater productions in New York and London, traveled 100,000 miles on cabaret tours, and performed in dozens of films and television shows.
On Broadway, she created a series of memorably tough women: Anita in “West Side Story” (1957), Rosie in “Bye Bye Birdie” (1960), the murderous vixen Velma Kelly in “Chicago” (1975) and the title role in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993). She sang enduring songs in those roles: “America” in “West Side Story,” “One Boy” and “Spanish Rose” in “Bye Bye Birdie” and “All That Jazz” in “Chicago.”
Critics looked for synonyms for hyperbole to rave about its pyrotechnics. In 2005, Newsweek I called “Only the greatest musical theater dancer of all time.” Reviewing her performance in “Bye Bye Birdie” in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called her “a flammable singer and a gyroscopic dancer.” Of her Tony Award-winning performance as Anna in “The Rink” (1984), Richard Corliss in Time magazine wrote: “Bringing together 30 years of Broadway knowledge into the framework of a vivacious teenager, the 51-year-old entertainer could already sell “a song for the deaf.”
Ms. Rivera was a hard-working perfectionist who rarely missed a beat, let alone a performance. Trained in classical ballet before joining the musical stage, she was beloved on Broadway, where she began performing in the early 1950s. With her spectacular voice and eloquent body language, she radiated a charisma rooted in solid singing and dancing techniques and the pleasures she derived from them.
As a singer and actress, Rivera was largely self-taught, although she received practical education from some of the most prominent pedagogues in the pantheon: choreographers Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, the composer team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and playwright Terrence McNally.
In 1986, Rivera had to put her dancing life on hold when a taxi collided with her car in Manhattan, breaking her left leg in a dozen places. She underwent two surgeries, in which screws and plates were used to reconnect her bones, followed by months of rehabilitation. For many dancers, the injuries could have ended her career, but almost a year after the accident she began dancing again, and her road back was easing her comeback with cabaret acts that sustained her. during years.
She never fully recovered. “You’ll never see me in ballet slippers again because I don’t have an Achilles tendon,” she told The Times in 1993, when she returned to Broadway after a seven-year absence to star in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” .” And she added: “I can’t do the full stretch. But I don’t have any pain anymore. The only problem is that my leg sets off metal detectors at airports.”
In “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” an autobiographical retrospective presented on Broadway in 2005, she performed a tango about the men of her past, a dance sequence for Bob Fosse, Mr. Robbins and other choreographers, and a medley of her musical. highlights, including “A Boy Like That” from “West Side Story” and “All That Jazz” from “Chicago.”
“At 72, he still has the voice, the attitude and, oh yes, the legs to turn heads,” Ben Brantley wrote in a review for The Times. “She is a professional in a world of exacting judgments and mythical standards. She feels good that ‘The Dancer’s Life’ presents her as the ultimate gypsy, the talented troupe that she had the right moments.”
A decade later, Rivera was still a billboard star, starring in a 2015 musical adaptation of “The Visit,” the Kander-Ebb-McNally musical based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s satirical play about greed and revenge. In it she played a wealthy widow who returns to her depressed hometown with an offer of money for the murder of an old love who betrayed her long ago.
The production ran on Broadway for 11 weeks, including previews, grossed $2 million and received five Tony nominations. The Times reported that “the opening night audience was on its feet, her applause so boisterous and sustained that Ms. Rivera had to signal to her to silence him with a masterful wave of her hand.”
Ms. Rivera received a shower of honors during her long career. She won two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical, for “The Rink” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman”; she was nominated by eight others; and in 2018 she received a special Tony for her lifetime achievement. In 2002, she became the first Hispanic American woman to receive the Kennedy Center Honors, the capital’s version of the Oscars, in a group that included Elizabeth Taylor, James Earl Jones and Paul Simon.
In 2009, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House.
It was the culmination of an odyssey that began a few miles away, in Washington, on January 23, 1933, with the birth of Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero, the third of five children of Pedro Julio and Katherine (Anderson) del Rivero. .
His father, who was born in Puerto Rico, played clarinet and saxophone with the US Navy Band and the Harry James Orchestra. He died when Conchita was 7 years old. Her mother, who was of Scottish, Irish, and Puerto Rican descent and also had African-American ancestors, which she discovered late in her life, became a Pentagon employee and enrolled Conchita in singing, dancing, and piano lessons. . Dancing became her passion. Following the advice of her teacher, she auditioned for George Balanchine and won a scholarship to his School of American Ballet in New York City.
Living with an uncle’s family in the Bronx, he graduated from William Howard Taft High School in 1951. In an open call for dancers, he won a role with a national touring company of Irving Berlin’s “Call Me Madam.” After 10 months on tour, he replaced Onna White as the lead dancer in “Guys and Dolls” in New York. Over the next few years, he danced in “Seventh Heaven,” “Shoestring Revue,” and “Mr. Wonderful.” Her career advanced. She shortened her name to a catchy Chita Rivera.
In 1953, she got a job on Broadway as a chorus dancer in “Can-Can,” the Cole Porter-Abe Burrows musical starring Gwen Verdon, who encouraged Rivera to photograph the marquee. She won a role in “Mr. Wonderful” and had a romantic fling with her star, Sammy Davis Jr.
Rivera rose to stardom in 1957 as Anita in “West Side Story,” the Romeo and Juliet story set in postwar Manhattan, where star-crossed lovers Maria and Tony become caught in a deadly street gang war. As Anita, she sang a moving duet with Carol Lawrence as Maria, “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love” and a magical “Tonight,” as well as leading a rousing ensemble on “America.”
With music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, choreography by Robbins, and a book by Arthur Laurents, the musical earned rave reviews and ran for 732 performances before going on tour, with an even longer run in London.
In 1957, Rivera married Anthony Mordente, a “West Side Story” dancer. They divorced in 1966. In addition to her daughter Lisa, Ms. Rivera is survived by three siblings, Julio, Armando and Lola del Rivero.
Other triumphs followed, beginning with the original production of “Bye Bye Birdie” in 1960, a musical comedy centered around a hip-thrusting character based on Elvis Presley. This parodied a fading era of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, celebrity culture, the power of television in small-town America, and showbiz in general. It featured Ms. Rivera as the secretary of a songwriter who turns the loss of her agency’s meal ticket, rock star Conrad Birdie, who is being drafted into the military, into a coup by organizing a national kissing contest. farewell for fainted fans. Ms. Rivera, nominated for her first Tony, was hailed in The Guardian: “Her personality is so magnetic that we tend to forget the plot and just wait for Ms. Rivera to take center stage.”
She earned another Tony nomination in 1976 for the original Broadway production of “Chicago,” the wryly cynical musical about vice in the 1920s. Ms. Rivera played Velma Kelly to Ms. Verdon’s Roxie Hart: Rival Assassins at the Cook County Jail competing for lurid publicity and the services of never-lost attorney Billy Flynn, played by Jerry. Orbach. It had 936 performances.
Ms. Rivera’s Broadway career rarely flagged, and when she found time, she filled it with international cabaret work and appeared in films, television dramas and comedies, and variety shows by Ed Sullivan, Dinah Shore, Garry Moore, Sid Caesar and Carol. Burnett.
His films included a half-dozen documentaries about Broadway and its stars. She also made a cameo in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2021 film, “Tick, Tick… Boom!” a biographical musical drama based on the stage musical of the same name by Jonathan Larson.
In 2017, the Astaire Awards, named after Fred and Adele Astaire, who appeared in 10 Broadway musicals between 1917 and 1931, were renamed the Chita Rivera Awards for Dance and Choreography.
In 2015, Broadway marveled when Rivera, 82, opened “The Visit.”
Hadn’t you considered retiring?
“God, no,” she told BroadwayDirect.com. “That depends on God. But in the meantime, life is fabulous and I am lucky to have lived a long time surrounded by the most creative people. “I still have a lot of dancing and singing to do, and too many people to entertain.”
His long-awaited autobiography, “Chita: A Memoir,” written with journalist Patrick Pacheco, was published in spring 2023. It charted his life “with the clarity and carefreeness of a veteran” and revealed two distinct sides of his life. Mrs. Rivera. personality, wrote Juan A. Ramírez in The Times.
While Chita is the sweet one “who tries to put everything together, solve problems and likes to laugh,” Ms. Rivera wrote, her “inner renegade,” named Dolores, “doesn’t hold back and gets her jobs. “She was the one who protected me.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.