Rivera, Chita

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    The Broadway Best of Charles Strouse

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    The composer’s musicals, including “Annie” and “Bye Bye Birdie,” captured essential elements of American culture. Here are five of his most memorable songs.“Bye Bye Birdie” and “Annie,” the composer Charles Strouse’s most popular musicals, were not just big hits that are regularly revived on professional and amateur stages. They captured essential elements of American culture, including a yearning for escape from an older generation’s shackles and a can-do spirit to overcome adversity.Strouse, who died Thursday at 96, wrote jingles, pop songs and movie scores, but he remains famous for his Broadway shows. In addition to those two blockbusters, three others help make up his career peaks.Here are five numbers that illustrate Strouse’s suppleness as a composer and his knack for instantly hummable melodies.1960‘Bye Bye Birdie’Few musicals showcase as many great numbers as this hit about the Elvis Presley-like star Conrad Birdie, who, as a publicity stunt, visits a Midwest family before shipping off to the Army. The movie version, from 1963, is one of Hollywood’s best musicals of that decade, even though it made big changes to the show. The most egregious was casting Janet Leigh in the role of Rose Alvarez, played by Chita Rivera on Broadway. But it is hard to nitpick with the focus being shifted to Kim, a teenager discovering her sultry side, because she was played by Ann-Margret in an explosive performance that made her a star — she was particularly electric in the number “A Lot of Livin’ to Do.”Bonus video: In 2024, Vanessa Williams performed that song at the annual Miscast event, keeping the pronouns originally sung by Conrad Birdie intact.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chita Rivera’s Life and Career Are Honored at the Tonys

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      Chita Rivera, who dazzled Broadway audiences for nearly seven decades, died in January at the age of 91. She “was a Broadway star as long as anyone — and maybe longer,” our chief theater critic, Jesse Green, wrote in an appraisal. Rivera, whose father was born in Puerto Rico, was best known for starring as Anita in “West Side Story” and Velma Kelly in “Chicago,” but had a long list of credits to her name. (She detailed her life in career in “Chita: A Memoir,” written with Patrick Pacheco, in 2023.)The New York Times has extensively covered Rivera’s life and career. Here is a look at some of our recent work remembering her. More

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      Remembering Chita Rivera’s Unique Voice

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      Chita Rivera died on Jan. 30, at age 91. Over her seven decades performing onstage and onscreen, Rivera established herself as one of the 20th century’s great dancers. “But to think of her only as a dancer,” says our chief theater critic, Jesse Green, “is to miss a really important part of what made her one of the most compelling stage performers of the last 70 years. And that is her voice.” Listen in as he presents some of Rivera’s great vocal performances.On today’s episodeJesse Green, chief theater critic for The Times.Photo illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Ted Streshinsky/Corbis, via Getty ImagesFurther reading Read Jesse’s appraisal of Chita Rivera’s gifts as a singerThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More

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      Chita Rivera Tributes Pour in From Rita Moreno, the Cast of ‘Chicago’ and More

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      Onstage and off, she was celebrated as a pathbreaking triple-threat who left a huge legacy in musical theater and dance.Chita Rivera created several memorable Broadway characters that are now considered part of the canon, including the role of Velma Kelly in the original production of “Chicago.” So when the cast of the long-running Broadway revival took to the stage of the Ambassador Theater in New York on Tuesday night just a few hours after her death was announced, it was only natural that they would pay tribute to her.After the performance the cast assembled onstage as Amra-Faye Wright, who plays Kelly now, recalled Rivera as a “Broadway giant,” who championed other dancers.“I feel still an impostor in the role because it belonged to Chita Rivera,” Wright said, as cast members dabbed their eyes. “She created it. She starred in the original production of ‘Chicago’ and she lives on constantly in our hearts, on this stage, in every performance. We love you, Chita.”Rivera’s death on Tuesday at the age of 91 inspired an outpouring of testimonials from fans and colleagues, elected officials and stars of stage and screen, who recalled her as a pathbreaking triple-threat who left a huge legacy in musical theater and dance.The audience at “Chicago” listened as Rivera was recalled as a “Broadway giant.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn Instagram, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer, writer and actor, described Rivera as “The trailblazer for 🇵🇷 on Broadway,” using an emoji of the Puerto Rican flag, and called her “an absolute original.”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 Lived to Entertain. Here Are 9 Memorable Performances.

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      A quadruple threat, Rivera could make a lasting impression in minutes, whether onstage or onscreen. These videos illustrate why.Chita Rivera, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91, was known for her extraordinary artistry. Yet, it is hard to comprehend the full scope of her talent because, like so many Broadway performers of her generation, much of her best work was not captured on-screen. Her Anita in the landmark 1957 Broadway production of “West Side Story”? Rita Moreno took it on in the Hollywood adaptation. Rose in the hit “Bye Bye Birdie,” from 1960? That role went to Janet Leigh in the movie. Only in 1969 did Rivera make her feature-film debut, in “Sweet Charity,” almost two decades after her Broadway debut. Thankfully, we have variety shows, TV specials and unofficial fan videos to help us patch together a compelling video portrait. Her life force bursts through in every second.Here’s a look back at some of those indelible moments.1962‘This Could Be the Start of Something’Although this song is closely associated with its writer, Steve Allen, Rivera made it her own in this appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1962. The dancers welcome her by singing “Hey, Chita! Like, wow!” and that pretty much sums it all up. Rivera did not need a whole show to make an impact: She could deliver a knockout punch in just a few minutes. Not only did the era’s variety shows provide perfect settings for those self-contained gems, but they also introduced her to a national audience.1964‘I Believe in You’Rivera easily held her own against the best, including Judy Garland. The two women performed a duet of this song from “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” on Garland’s variety show in January 1964. On that same episode, Rivera also blew the roof off the studio with “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’,” a number from “Porgy and Bess” reimagined as a va-va-voom dance extravaganza choreographed by Peter Gennaro.1965‘Blue Is a Color’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: A Life in Photos

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      The dancer Chita Rivera, who “dazzled audiences for nearly seven decades as a Puerto Rican lodestar of the American musical theater,” has died at 91. Her influence can be seen in many Broadway productions over the years, including “West Side Story” (1957), “Bye Bye Birdie” (1960), “Chicago” (1975) and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993).As Anita in “West Side Story,” she took “a part equivalent to the nurse in the Shakespeare play,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in his review for The New York Times.She worked with the choreographers Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins, the composer Leonard Bernstein, the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the playwright Terrence McNally, among others.Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23, 1933, she was a quick study. After auditioning, she won a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in Manhattan, and lived with family in the Bronx. She wrote in her autobiography, “Chita: A Memoir,” that she dealt with the overwhelmingly white spaces she found herself in by becoming a class clown. Her feelings of being an outsider lessened on Broadway but persisted.Her ballet training stayed with her. “Her finesse comes in the gracious way she shows every angle of her body, the attention to épaulement — the carriage of the arms and shoulders — all the while talking up space,” Gia Kourlas writes. “Dancing big and with intention.”Here are a selection of images from her remarkable life onstage.Rivera and company in “Chita & All That Jazz,” a musical celebration of her life in theater, in Philadelphia in 1988.Joan MarcusRivera, left, and Gwen Verdon during a rehearsal of the musical “Chicago” in Philadelphia in 1975.Associated PressRivera, third from left, in a scene from the Broadway musical “West Side Story,” with Carmen Gutierrez and Lynn Ross. John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesRivera accepts a special Tony award for lifetime achievement in the theater in 2018 at Radio City Music Hall.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLiza Minnelli, left, and Rivera attend the 38th Annual Tony Awards in 1984 at the Gershwin Theater in Manhattan.Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesRivera gets a standing ovation at the 10th Anniversary celebration of the musical “Chicago” at the Ambassador Theater in Manhattan in 2006. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical revue “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” was created by Mark Hummel, written by Terrence McNally, with direction and choreography by Graciela Daniele.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreographer Jerome Robbins, second from left, goes through rehearsals for “West Side Story” in 1957. Rivera, center, played the role of Anita.Associated PressRivera at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Manhattan in 2023.Philip Montgomery for The New York Times More

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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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      Can’t Make It to Broadway? Book and Movie Ideas for Theater Lovers.

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      There are plenty of novels, memoirs, documentaries and livestreaming options sure to satiate fans of theater.A trip to the theater isn’t always possible, especially during the busy — and pricey — holiday season. When a craving for stage drama hits, fear not, there are options. In the world of literature, long-awaited memoirs by Barbra Streisand and Chita Rivera arrived this year, as did the first major biography of the playwright August Wilson. Whether you prefer a live capture of a popular Broadway show like “Waitress,” or a film adaptation of, say, “Dicks: The Musical,” an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch, there is an abundance of musical theater films. (And if all else fails, you can listen to our critics discuss two recent musical-theater highlights or hear the story of the success of “Wicked” from our theater reporter.) Here is a small selection of notable works of theater-related memoir, fiction and film.To ReadViking PressHarperOne‘My Name Is Barbra’Barbra Streisand’s memoir spans 970 pages of print and 48 hours via audiobook. But for an icon of her stature, whose personal life — her Brooklyn upbringing, her celeb lovers, her underdog charm, that famous nose — is almost as mythic as her career, a page count exceeding that of “Ulysses” could be considered restraint. While it’s filled with chatty, personable retellings of stories that may be familiar to Streisand fans, there are plenty of fresh anecdotes too. Alexandra Jacobs called it “a banquet of a book” in her review in The New York Times and advised that “you might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.” Read the review.‘CHITA: A Memoir’The Broadway legend Chita Rivera wants to share the spotlight with her successors, and so, though her book is a memoir, Rivera kept the next generation in mind while writing it with the arts journalist Patrick Pacheco. In a conversation with Juan A. Ramírez in The Times, she said, “It’s not as much of a memoir as it is an opportunity for kids to realize that if they want this, they can have it — but they have to work hard.” That endless striving earned her three Tony Awards and led to her collaborations with the likes of John Kander and Fred Ebb, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse. Her drive shines in this book along with glimpses of snark from her “fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores.”‘August Wilson: A Life’If the seminal American playwright August Wilson were to read his own life story, written by the former Boston Globe theater critic Patti Hartigan, he would most likely do so in the back of a seedy diner, drinking coffee and chain smoking, as he often did. In the first major biography of the playwright, Hartigan chronicles Wilson’s prolific career — including his Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” — and his immeasurable influence on capturing the experiences of Black Americans in the 20th century.‘The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race’In the scholar Farah Karim-Cooper’s book about Shakespeare and racism, she posits that “love demands that we reconcile ourselves with flaws and limitations.” Karim-Cooper, a director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and a professor at King’s College London, applies this philosophy to the great playwright, scrutinizing his relationship with race and interrogating how his works shaped harmful Renaissance ideals — while still professing admiration. Pick it up for an expert perspective on a thorny theater subject, or to share a reading list with the prominent Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson, who reviewed the book for The Times.Tom LakeWe 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