Chita Rivera: A Dancer's Life
Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life
Written by Terrence McNally, with original songs by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty
The Colonial Theater, Boston, MA
May 1 - May 6, 2007
She’s 74 years old, for god’s sake. Seventy-four. And when her name is Chita Rivera, she can fill up a theater on the recognition of her name alone. Standing at five feet four inches on great gams, she’s one of the rare legends who knows how to trade on her fame without losing her dignity. Her feet don’t move like Latin lightning any more but she has stage presence, enormous poise, a surprisingly rich alto singing voice, and a terrific storyteller’s sense of timing.
Photo: http://www.thedancerslife.com/downloads.php#
All of which she puts together in this national tour
show, “Chita Rivera: the Dancer’s Life” - the story of her life, a history that practically defines musical theater in the last half of the twentieth century. She’s had her feet bandaged by George Balanchine, been taught to sing by Leonard Bernstein, and danced with the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century - Jack Cole, Jerome Robbins, and Bob Fosse. You don’t have to be a dance junkie to have heard of musicals like West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman. Rivera starred in twenty-five musicals in over fifty years.
The 2002 “Kennedy Honors” award to Rivera is the springboard writer Terence McNally used to propel the show and allow Rivera to look back on her career. Her stage arc may be in eclipse but her spark, well, that’s another matter. Sitting on a chair stage center, Rivera opens the show reminiscing about being raised in Washington, D.C. as a first generation Puerto Rican American. It’s not long before she’s dancing on a table on the set behind her (her mother sent Rivera to ballet school not long after she broke the family table while dancing on it).
Rivera and her company of eight top tier dancers stunningly executed two dozen song and dance routines that reprised her roles on Broadway. Rivera has lived musical theater from the TV Ed Sullivan Show to the post AIDS world.
Photo from http://www.chitarivera.com/productions/dancerslife.htm
The secret is that Chita has learned to do more with less. A sideways glance, a lowering of the voice, a well timed swivel of the hips, an sporadic burst of fancy footwork, and an occasional high kick to the rafters, remind us she’s still on fire. What keeps the show balanced is Rivera’s willingness to complement, not compete with, the extraordinary dancers in her troupe. They clearly adore her.
“Looking back doesn’t have to be painful,” she says at the top of the show. Rivera certainly had her share of pain - shattered leg in an auto accident, denied movie roles for dance roles she created on Broadway - but she always soldiered on in a Darwinian environment in which talent, luck, and grit were her constant dance partners.
Here, she’s content to remind us of her greatness not to prove it. She never forgot the advice given to her by her first dance instructor before her first big audition, “Conchita, stay in your lane,” dance language for ‘Don’t worry about the dancers around you, just be who you are.’ Rivera is still stoked with stamina, talent, and attitude but, simply put, she hasn’t forgotten that she’s seventy-four.
Great singers and dancers like Rivera instinctively embrace their audience. One isn’t surprised to hear her say softly near the end of her show, ”When you drag yourself to the theater on a rainy afternoon and the matinée is less than half full, you are there for that one person whose life might be changed by what you do.” When she looked into the audience, I felt she was looking right at me and I’ll bet someone thirty rows away felt the same thing.
“Passing The Torch”, the last section on the program, features Rivera and her dancers in an exuberant, full throttle rendition of “All That Jazz” (Chicago). Under the combustion, one feels Father Time tapping his feet to the music, a poignant reminder that all shows, Rivera’s and ours, have a finale.
Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero knows what she’s got left in the tank and drives accordingly. What an instructive lesson to those of us not too far behind her in the parade.

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