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      Chita Rivera, Electrifying Broadway Star, Is Dead at 91

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      Appearing in scores of stage productions, she dazzled audiences for nearly six decades, most memorably starring as Anita in “West Side Story” and Velma Kelly in “Chicago.”Chita Rivera, the fire-and-ice dancer, singer and actress who leapt to stardom in the original Broadway production of “West Side Story” and dazzled audiences for nearly seven decades as a Puerto Rican lodestar of the American musical theater, died on Tuesday in New York. She was 91.The death was announced in a statement by her daughter, Lisa Mordente. It gave no other details.To generations of musical aficionados, Ms. Rivera was a whirling, bounding, high-kicking elemental force of the dance; a seductive singer of smoky ballads and sizzling jazz; and a propulsive actress of vaudevillian energy. She appeared in scores of stage productions in New York and London, logged 100,000 miles on cabaret tours and performed in dozens of films and television programs.On Broadway, she created a string of memorably hard-edged women — Anita in “West Side Story” (1957), Rosie in “Bye Bye Birdie” (1960), the murderous floozy Velma Kelly in “Chicago” (1975) and the title role in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993). She sang enduring numbers in those roles: “America” in “West Side Story,” “One Boy” and “Spanish Rose” in “Bye Bye Birdie,” and “All That Jazz” in “Chicago.”Ms. Rivera, foreground, led dancers in a rehearsal for “West Side Story,” which opened on Broadway in 1957, the same year she married a dancer in the production. Leo FriedmanCritics thumbed thesauruses for hyperboles to rhapsodize about her pyrotechnics. In 2005, Newsweek called her “only the greatest musical-theater dancer ever.” Reviewing her performance in “Bye Bye Birdie” in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called her “a flammable singer and gyroscopic dancer.” Of her Tony Award-winning romp as Anna in “The Rink” (1984), Richard Corliss in Time magazine wrote: “Packing 30 years of Broadway savvy into the frame of a vivacious teenager, the 51-year-old entertainer could by now sell a song to 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 showstopping voice and eloquent body language, she radiated a charisma rooted in solid song and dance techniques and in the pleasures she derived from them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Chita Rivera Found Her Emotional Voice for Shows Like ‘West Side Story’

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      Her dancing sometimes overshadowed her thrillingly dramatic way with a song: husky yet clarion, unaffected but full of comment and character.Yes, the legs. Yes, the line. Yes, the look.But also, less commented on, the voice.Chita Rivera, who died on Tuesday at 91, was a Broadway star as long as anyone — and maybe longer. At first, making her way up in the 1950s, from the chorus of “Guys and Dolls” to Anita in “West Side Story,” dancing was her calling card. In the ’60s and ’70s, comedy and satire followed, with “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Chicago.” Later, in works like “The Rink” (1984), “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “The Visit” (2015), her sense of drama prevailed.Yet for me, it’s her voice that remains indelible.It almost didn’t emerge. Back when she started, dancers stayed in their own lane. (There were often separate ensembles for dancers and singers.) Like many people exceptionally intent on mastery, Rivera was single-minded. At her audition for the School of American Ballet at 15, she kept tossing off fouetté turns despite a burst blister that was bleeding through her toe shoe. George Balanchine himself dressed the wound. (She was accepted.)Mastery is not what she felt about her singing. As she relates in “Chita: A Memoir,” written with Patrick Pacheco, she always “hung back” when cast members went out after shows to drink and flirt and belt out show tunes. But while she was on tour with “Call Me Madam” in the early 1950s, a piano player at a theatrical hangout in Chicago overheard her and offered lessons. “Chita, you can sing,” he said.“I could sing? Really? That was news to me.”There are singers who make sure it’s news — they’re great. And then there are those who just sing naturally, with little break from their speaking voices. Rivera, perhaps because she at first felt less confident in song than in movement, never got fussy about the border between dialogue and lyrics. She plowed right past it, sounding exactly alike in both: slightly reedy, husky yet clarion, unaffected but full of comment and character.You can hear all of that in her Anita, whose furious lyrics for “A Boy Like That” (by Stephen Sondheim) are essentially prose dialogue anyway. (“A boy like that, who’d kill your brother!”) And indeed, anger was always a good key for Rivera. Even in a comic role — even in a comic song — she worked the edge of the notes and emotions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Passport’ Review: A Master of Comedy in a Migrant Camp

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      The new show by Alexis Michalik, a star of commercial theater, wades into political battles in France, where immigration restrictions have been at the forefront of the government’s agenda.Badly injured from a fight, a man wakes up in the Calais Jungle, a ramshackle camp for migrants in northern France. His memory is gone, and all he has on him is an Eritrean passport with the name “Issa.”That’s the premise of Alexis Michalik’s brisk, effective new play “Passport,” which was greeted with a standing ovation last weekend in Paris. Until it was demolished in 2016, the overcrowded Jungle encampment stood as a symbol of Europe’s refugee crisis, which hasn’t entirely subsided. While the site itself is gone, migrants still regularly attempt to cross the English Channel from the Calais area and reach Britain.Many in the French theater world publicly supported the people living in the Jungle, and a handful of small-scale productions in France took the camp as inspiration. Still, the first major play about it came from Britain, in 2017: Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s immersive “The Jungle” was inspired by the directors’ time in Calais, where they set up a theater with migrants. It went on to become a trans-Atlantic hit, and was revived last year at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.In some ways, Michalik was an unlikely name to follow suit. A star of the commercial theater sector in France, he has built his reputation on accessible, fast-paced comedy dramas like “Edmond,” a “Shakespeare in Love”-style spin on the life of the French playwright Edmond Rostand. His last stage endeavor was a French-language adaptation of the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.”Yet Michalik has tiptoed into heavier subject matters in recent years — first with “Intra Muros,” a play set in a maximum-security prison, then with “A Love Story,” which centered on a lesbian couple’s I.V.F. journey.“Passport,” which is playing at the Théâtre de la Renaissance through June 30, wades even more openly into current political battles in France, where immigration restrictions have been at the forefront of President Emmanuel Macron’s agenda. In response, Michalik, who wrote and directed the play, invokes the audience’s empathy. “Imagine if a war started here, in your country,” one actor tells us near the beginning. “Your life is threatened, so logically, you decide to leave.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Review: Romance on the Rocks

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      Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are superb as a midcentury-modern couple free-falling into addiction in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s musical.Seldom have a pair of alcoholics looked as glamorous as they do in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s bruised romance of a Broadway musical, “Days of Wine and Roses,” starring Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James as midcentury-modern Manhattan lovers free-falling all the way to hell, drinks in hand.What’s astonishing about this show, though — aside from the central performances, which are superb, and Guettel’s anxious, spiky, sumptuous score, which grabs hold of us and doesn’t let go — is the way its devastating chic snuggles right up to catastrophic self-destruction.For all the glossy come-hither of Michael Greif’s tone-perfect production, which opened on Sunday night at Studio 54, not for an instant does it glamorize the boozing itself. And yet we can sense the allure: how alcohol might become the one true thing that matters, smoldering wreckage be damned.Adapted from JP Miller’s recovery-evangelizing 1958 teleplay and 1962 film of the same name, this “Days of Wine and Roses” is like a jazz opera melded seamlessly with a play. Deeper, wiser and warmer than it was in its premiere at Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company last year, it is no longer so wary of melodrama that it’s afraid of feeling, too. Gone is the emotional aridity that kept the story at a strange remove.Granted, the opening scene is still perplexing, too sparely written and staged to situate the audience properly, or let us grasp the skin-crawling 1950s creepiness of what James’s Joe Clay is up to on a yacht in the East River. A public relations guy, Joe has arranged a corporate party onboard, and procured female guests for the pleasure of the male executives.So there is a certain rancidness to his mistaking O’Hara’s Kirsten Arnesen — the impeccable secretary to the boss at the firm where they both work — for one of the women in his Rolodex. Not exactly a meet-cute, even if she does set him straight, puncturing his condescension with a tight, nice-girl smile pasted to her face.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Obie Awards, Sans Ceremony, Honor ‘Dark Disabled Stories’

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      There was no formal celebration for the newest honorees. Instead, the American Theater Wing presented cash grants to sustain their work.The Obie Awards, a scrappy but venerable annual competition honoring the best theater staged Off and Off Off Broadway, has chosen “Dark Disabled Stories,” Ryan J. Haddad’s autobiographical work inspired by his experiences navigating the city with cerebral palsy, as the best new American play.The prize was announced on Saturday night, both by news release and on Spectrum News NY1, as the American Theater Wing, which presents the Obies, decided to forgo a costly ceremony — in most nonpandemic years, the Obies have been handed out at a boozy and often boisterous party — and instead to give grants of $1,000 to $5,000 directly to the winning artists and arts institutions.“These are unprecedented times, and it’s extremely challenging for theater right now, so we absolutely want to celebrate the achievements of Off and Off Off Broadway, but in doing so we want to have the most impact by putting money directly in the pockets of the artists and the companies making the work,” said Heather A. Hitchens, the Wing’s president and chief executive. “Everybody likes a party, and maybe some day it will make sense to do that again, but we’re not made of money — we’re a nonprofit, so how can we use our resources to be the greatest force for good right now?”The Obies, created by The Village Voice in the mid 1950s, have been in flux for years as The Voice foundered and the pandemic battered the theater industry. The Wing, with a board led by artists, has kept the Obies afloat with a combination of in-person and streaming ceremonies.The Obies proudly have no defined categories or set number of winners — a panel of judges, this year led by the director David Mendizábal and the critic Melissa Rose Bernardo, determines how to structure the honors each season. The awards announced this weekend were for shows that opened Off or Off Off Broadway between Sept. 1, 2022, and Aug. 31, 2023.The judges gave two awards for playwriting. One went to Hansol Jung for “Wolf Play,” about a twice-abandoned adopted boy who reacts to his trauma by behaving like a wolf and is depicted by a puppet; the play was staged first at Soho Rep and then at MCC Theater, in collaboration with Ma-Yi Theater Company. The other playwriting award went to Bruce Norris for “Downstate,” about a group home for men who are registered sex offenders; that play was staged at Playwrights Horizons in a production developed by Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and the National Theater in London.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      How Frankie Grande Spends His Sundays

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      The actor, singer and reality TV personality fills his day with video games, comfort food with friends and a teary trip to the movies.Frankie Grande likes to stay busy — even on Sundays.“From the moment I wake up, it’s go, go, go,” said Mr. Grande, a 41-year-old actor, singer and reality TV personality. This month, he returned to playing Victor Garber in “Titanique,” an Off Broadway parody musical of the movie “Titanic.” He first played the character in a fully staged production in 2022, and is now back for a limited run through Feb. 18.Mr. Grande, who is the half brother of the pop superstar Ariana Grande, was born in New York, grew up in Englewood, N.J., and Boca Raton, Fla., and graduated from Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. Now he splits his time between a two-bedroom penthouse apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and a home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He lives with his husband of almost two years, the actor and model Hale Grande, 31, and their red toy poodle puppy, Appa.While Mr. Grande was a relative unknown when he moved back to New York City in 2005 — he said he often wandered through Times Square wearing a pair of earbuds, soaking in the scene — he’s now a YouTube, Instagram and TikTok personality with more than 3.5 million followers across all three accounts.“I definitely can’t wander now without being recognized every four feet,” he said. “But I love talking with fans.”Mr. Grande can spend hours playing video games, like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, with his husband, Hale Grande.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesHERE COMES THE SUN I don’t usually get up before 10 a.m. — my husband is in Los Angeles for work, and we’d been up all night playing the new Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora game — but I surprise myself and wake up at 8:45 a.m. I have a Philips alarm clock that mimics a natural 30-minute sunrise, and at the end it has birds chirping. It wakes me up like I’m on a farm with animal noises. It’s a really peaceful way to start the day.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Review: Water Party, Union Theatre

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      Rating

      Good

      A staged reading means we only have the writing to really focus on. But Water Party is certainly well enough written that it’s enough to make for a fascinating evening.

      Our reviewing guidelines for Everything Theatre state that we should cover as many aspects of a production as possible; writing, acting, lighting, sound, staging and anything else that makes the show come together in front of us. 

      Of course, we all have our own styles, I tend to lean too heavily on the writing and its themes, making Water Party ideal for reviewing, because this is a staged reading; performed scripts in hand, with minimal other aspects. The idea being it allows for new plays to be road-tested in a minimalistic and inexpensive way. And as a truly selfish aside, it means I don’t feel so guilty when I fail to shout out the praises of the lighting tech!

      It does also mean that the writing has to be strong enough to stand on its own two feet. Thankfully Mimi Collins’ script is just that, taking us into a dystopian future where birth control is put in the water supply to control a population too large to sustain. Couples must apply to have a baby, and if approved, receive a year’s supply of safe water. It’s then tradition to throw a party to celebrate. 

      Celeste and Daniel (Eva-Marie Kung and Jay Faisca) are the happy couple throwing such a party, having finally been approved. Invited are Becky and Ray (Madeleine Herd and Jake Solari), who have previously been approved and are now proud parents, along with Layla and Charlie (Analiese Emerson and Rui Maria Pego), who have just received their third and final rejection, meaning that they will never be able to have their own child. It’s a set-up made for tension, made worse when Celeste lets slip a secret that leads to suggestions that perhaps the selection process isn’t quite as foolproof as all the talk of algorithms may initially suggest. 

      Dystopian futures work best when they feel as if they could really happen. Water Party is certainly that. Climate crisis and over population are very hot topics. But it’s perhaps the ongoing Roe Vs Wade debate occurring in America right now and a woman’s right to abortion that lurks menacingly in the background for much of the play. When it finally comes out from hiding, the play reaches its zenith as Layla delivers her speech on how the water’s birth control is man’s way to take back control over woman. It certainly makes for the most interesting talking points, aided by Celeste’s refusal to believe it, dismissing such talk as a fanciful conspiracy theory. 

      If, and hopefully she will, Collins decides to develop Water Party into a full production then it’s this concept that could prove the most fruitful to build around further, offering as it does a different way to debate such a divisive subject. The ending though is less successful and should undergo a rethink. Whilst it delivers an unexpected plot twist it still feels a little cheap and a convenient way to bring things to an end.

      The fact actors hold scripts in hand and the only real staging is walking from one side of the stage to the other hardly seemed to matter, the powerful and thought-provoking script is more than enough (for now) to make this fascinating. It certainly whetted my appetite to want to see this again as a full production. Oh, and just a final shout out to the unnamed lighting tech, some wonderful switching from one light to another to make us aware we were moving from one room to another! It added that little extra to proceedings. 

      Written and directed by: Mimi CollinsProduced by: Bespoke Plays

      Water Party played for one performance only at The Union Theatre.

      Further information about Bespoke Plays can be found here. More

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      ‘Zoomers’ Review: Just Don’t Kill the Vibes

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      Gen Z’s reputation for conflict avoidance, and the way digital media abets it, is a recurring theme in the latest by the “Dimes Square” playwright Matthew Gasda.“Zoomers,” the new play written and directed by Matthew Gasda, explores the specific milieu of artsy 20-something transplants, largely the same population that frequents the Greenpoint loft of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, where the show is currently running.It’s immediately clear that the 30-something Gasda, whose 2022 play “Dimes Square” captured the crowd of artists, writers and scenesters in New York City’s downtown, has spent significant time observing his younger subjects. With the exception of a few awkward phrases, his naturalistic play captures the way Gen Z talks.“Zoomers” opens with three roommates ambling around their Brooklyn apartment in Bushwick, a land where shaggy hair is a personality trait and hard kombucha might as well be on tap. Michael (Jonah O’Hara-David), Jacob (Henry Lynch), and Jada (Reneé-Nicole Powell) are recovering from a night of respective drinking, smoking weed and existential dread. The cure for their ills? Intense rounds of Super Smash Bros.The video game is their other vice. For the emotionally stunted Jacob in particular, it’s a pleasurable escape whenever conversations get too heated. Any time characters dare to reveal their anguish — Michael’s commute is interrupted when a man jumps in front of the L train; Jada dreams of metastasizing tumors in her eyes — their traumas are swept aside by a call to play Smash or a damning accusation of killing the “vibes.” It is not until the penultimate scene of the play, when a new roommate named Ella (Sophia Englesberg) presses her much older architect boyfriend (George Olesky) about his emotional detachment, that we see any of the characters scale the hump of adversity and land somewhere close to catharsis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More