Chita Rivera, Still Going Strong, Reviews a Long Life of Song & Dance for Songbook Season Finale

March 8, 2010 · Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Buzz, People, Q on Stage

Chita Rivera - photo by Laura Marie Duncan

Source: www.qonstage.com
By Bruce-Michael Gelbert

The climax of the Lincoln Center American Songbook season, on March 6 at the Allen Room, was an evening with Chita Rivera, a love fest, really, between audience and theater legend. Music Director, percussionist and guitarist Michael Croiter, Associate Music Director and pianist Michael Patrick Walker, Dan Willis on reed instruments, trumpeter Jeremy Miloszewicz, violinist Antoine Silverman, and bassist Jim Donica assisted and sometimes provided backup vocals.

After an overture drawn from “The Dance at the Gym”-”Mambo!”-from Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s “West Side Story,” in which Rivera created the role of Anita, the lady herself entered, in bright red dress and red high heels, for a pairing of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “I Wont Dance (don’t ask me)” and Irving Berlin’s “Let Me Sing (and I’m happy),” as her energetic opening.

Not shy about her years of accomplishment and experience, Rivera offered, “This is the 52nd anniversary of ‘West Side Story’-how did that happen?;” quipped, “New York has been really good to me for a hundred years;” and confided and advised, “I’ve been living the life of a 35-year-old woman-don’t count ‘em, just live ‘em!” Continuing, “I’d like to sing a couple of songs that [Bernstein] taught me from ‘West Side Story’,” she rolled back the years with a biting “A Boy Like That” and, trading lines with Walker, a rollicking “American” in which all the punch lines were, of course, hers. In a hot “Sweet and Happy Life,” by Luiz Bonfa, Antonio Maria, and Norman Gimbel, she danced as much as she sang, got everyone clapping, and encored part of the song.

Musicals by John Kander and the late Fred Ebb-”two of my best friends, without whom I wouldn’t be here tonight”-have played a major part in Rivera’s career and did so on this occasion as well. “I Don’t Remember You (that was another time, that was another place),” she sang to someone from a lifetime ago, in a selection from the duo’s “The Happy Time.” The title number from “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” after Manuel Puig’s novel, was the haunting highlight of a medley of songs from that musical. Rivera remembered Ebb by asserting that what stood out, from a long, long life, was “Love and Love Alone,” in an especially Kurt Weill-esque excerpt from “The Visit,” after Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s disturbing tragi-comic play.
Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse figured prominently into Rivera’s affectionate reminiscences of colleagues and influences, and she recalled their invitation to her to play the title part in Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields’ “Sweet C
harity,” on tour with the original cast, as she queried, in song, “Where Am I Going (and what will I find)?” Insisting that Charity “is not a hooker-she’s a dance hall hostess,” Rivera told us about one of two shows in which she did actually play one of “the ladies of the boulevard,” Fifi, in Victor Young and Stella Unger’s “Seventh Heaven,” because one should have diverse experience, at least on stage, she said, and shared her solo version of the trio “Camille, Collette, Fifi.” Continuing in French mode, she mused, “(It was) Not Exactly Paris (it was not exactly spring),” by Michael Leonard and Russell George, about a very special someone from long ago (”of all the men in my life, I remember one”), with Miloszewicz’s trumpet helping to create a mood indigo. Calling “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” her first “dark musical,” of many to come, Rivera effectively evoked the dizzying “(crazy) Carousel” and carnival of that popular Brel song. Turning to Vincent Youmans, Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu’s standard, Rivera paid tribute to the special men in her life with an unusually up-tempo “More Than You Know.”

Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty wrote “A Woman the World Has Never Seen,” for the star to perform in “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” examining the unknown woman behind the familiar roles, and including extracts from a couple of Kander and Ebb shows. The familiar intro to “All That Jazz,” from “Chicago,” introduced, rather, wry lament “Class,” from the same show-”Fooled you,” said Rivera-and, in “Chief Cook and Bottle Washer,” from “The Rink,” Rivera aired the hardship of being a wife and mother and extolled the virtues of becoming an entrepreneur instead.

Kander and Ebb’s “Chicago” furnished the final songs on the program, as Rivera donned a top hat, wielded a cane, and saluted the late Gwen Verdon with some iconic dance steps, in the ironic celebration of life “Nowadays.” The familiar opening notes of “Chicago” sounded once more, and Rivera commented, “Everybody loves that vamp-John Kander writes the best vamps-and he wrote that vamp for me!” as she launched into “All That Jazz” and made the thrice-familiar number seem fresh again, as only she could. “This is a song for my circle of friends,” Rivera sang, in her Carol Hall encore, embracing people, present and past, in her life.
What an exhilarating Songbook series season finale!

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