by She is known for her dynamic personality and her great physical energy, and died at the age of 91 Chita Rivera, who created the role of Anita in West Side Story in 1957. As the friend of the heroine Maria of the best musical of the 20th century, it could be argued that Rivera was into music. staged in the dynamic ensemble dance Number America, a wonderful musical representation of the desire of minority groups, and sang memorable chorus lines in Tonight and I Have a Love.
Starting out as a lead dancer in a New York revue, Rivera first made waves doing a calypso can in 1955 (with 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 loved in London as she was in New York, appearing for the first time in the capital in the premiere of West Side Story (1958), returning to Her Majesty’s in 1961 in Charles Strouse, Lee Adams and Michael Stewart’s Bye Bye Birdie (Marty Wilde took on the role of an Elvis-like pop star drafted into the armed forces) and, spectacularly, as the dreamy Aurora, screen idol and symbol of death, in John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman at the Shaftesbury . in 1992.
When she brought her solo show to the Shaw theater in London in 2008, she was no less graceful, fierce or technically perfect than she had been 40 years earlier. And she still kicked her heels over her ears.
Related: Broadway legend Chita Rivera was a triple threat, a trailblazer – and a hoot
Standing at 5ft 3in tall, she performed in Jacques Brel’s fiendish Carousel which was simply incredible and paid homage to her Broadway roots in a series of show stoppers including today there from Kander and Ebb’s Chicago, after she created the role. Velma Kelly on Broadway in 1975.
Born in Washington DC, she was one of five children of Pedro Figueroa del Rivero, a Puerto Rican harpist in the US naval band who died when Chita was seven, and his wife, Katherine (nee Anderson this), a government official.
Chita earned a scholarship to the School of American Ballet in New York, where she also attended William Howard Taft High School, living with her family in the Bronx. After graduating in 1951, she toured as a principal dancer in Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam (with Elaine Stritch as Ethel Merman as “the hostess with the mostest”) before making her Broadway debut in 1953 in Guys and Dolls, followed by an off-Broadway starring role in Ben Bagley’s Shoestring Revue in 1955.
In the same year she stole the limelight in the musical comedy Seventh Heaven and in 1956 she joined Davis in Mr Wonderful with music and lyrics by Jerry Bock; One reviewer described her as “a real cute chick with rolling eyes and perky hips”.
Despite the success of West Side Story, although the role of Anita went to Rita Moreno for the 1961 film version of the musical; Rivera used this mud over Chita and Rita in one of her cabaret songs. In the same year, Bye Bye Birdie – one of the first concerts of the rock and roll era – came to London. Rivera then resumed her commitment to touring the United States, with a road revival of Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon’s Sweet Charity in 1967, succeeding her friend Verdon as Hope Charity, a New York taxi dancer who a heart as big as the Bronx; and Zorbá Kander and Ebb in 1969.
O’Connor’s Bring Back Birdie (1981) was a disastrous sequel to Bye Bye Birdie, and illusionist Doug Henning’s Merlin (1983), in which she was unkindly cast as a fake old hag, is best overshadowed.
She also had bad luck in her first Kander and Ebb Broadway vehicle, The Rink (1984), at the Martin Beck, in which she played Minnelli’s mother (The Apple Doesn’t Fall Very Far from the Tree was the better) in sentimental longing for a final roller rink. One of his “unpredictable” periods was waiting for Minnelli, and I did not see the only understudy, Lenora Nemetz, although the ageless Rivera was in terrible form.
They say “broken leg” means good luck on Broadway, but Rivera’s luck turned when she was in a bad car accident in Manhattan while appearing in the Jerry Herman tribute show, Jerry’s Girls (1985). She broke her leg in 12 places, but made a remarkable recovery through years of pain and physiotherapy.
Kiss of the Spider Woman made a triumphant return, went on to tango with Antonio Banderas in the 2003 Broadway revival of Nine, directed by David Leveaux, and led her own show, Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life (2005).
For several years she worked with Kander and Ebb, and with playwright Terrence McNally, on a musical version of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit. The show was tried out in Chicago in 2001, again in Washington in 2008 and, when it was seen in a reworked and truncated form at the Roger Rees Williamstown Theater festival in the summer of 2014, her performance as Claire Zachanassian, the richest woman, was praised in the world. in Variety as “a lion in winter … wary, cunning and completely frozen in her mission” seeking life in exchange for the millions she had.
“I’m unkillable!” she exclaimed. And indestructible, too, for more than 60 years on the tables. In 2009, in her hometown of Washington, President Barack Obama presented her with the presidential medal of freedom.
Rivera returned to Broadway in The Visit opening at the Lyceum Theater 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 were rebranded as the Chita Rivera Awards for Dance and Choreography. The following year, she received a special Tony award for lifetime achievement.
She had a cameo in the 2021 musical and Jonathan Larson tribute film, Tick, Tick … Boom!, and her autobiography, Chita: A Memoir, co-written with Patrick Pacheco, was published in 2023.
In 1957 she married another West Side Story dancer, Tony Mordente; they divorced in 1966.
The show’s London opening was delayed so she could give birth to their daughter, Lisa, who survives her, along with her sisters Julio, Armando and Lola. She was predeceased by her sister Carmen.
• Chita Rivera (Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero), actress and dancer, born 23 January 1933; he died 30 January 2024
