Chita Rivera begins her stage cabaret act with the Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields classic “I Won’t Dance”, but despite the song claiming that “My heart won’t let my feet do things they should do”, her legs insist before too long – and she has wins our hearts entirely. At 75, she is still astonishingly lithe and limber, despite a close encounter with a taxi kind in 1986 that nearly ended her career: “Everything stretches a little differently now, when you have sixteen screws in your leg and a new hip!”, she told me when I interviewed her in New York in November, the full version of which you can read in the current (February 7) issue of The Stage.
I saw her on her home turf then at Feinstein’s, as I blogged about here at the time here, but seeing her again at London’s Shaw on Friday evening — on the first of a three-night run that has, alas, now finished – I was struck by something anew: they just don’t make them like her anymore. And nor can they.
Charles Isherwood of the New York Times called her “one of the last living embodiments of the golden age of the musical theatre who continues to perform” last year and it’s true: not only has that golden age now long passed, but also the kind of career like Chita’s, forged and matured in the theatre, is no longer possible.
Nor can the sheer force of personality and utter command of the stage that she has so deliciously honed through it be replicated. As she sings that lovely James Taylor song The Secret O’Life, which became one of Nancy LaMott’s signature songs too, she owns it completely: “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time/ Any fool can do it/ There ain’t nothing to it/ Nobody knows how we got to/ The top of the hill/ But since we’re on our way down/ We might as well enjoy the ride.”
Chita has been at the top of the Broadway anthill for so long now that she is a living, breathing history lesson to it; but she’s far from on the way down. In fact later this year she will re-visit her role in The Visit, one of Kander and Ebb’s final musicals that she originated in Chicago in 2001, and hearing the sneak preview she gave of one its haunting songs, I realised I need to book my ticket now to see it at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, in May. As she told me in New York, “It’s the only thing I really want to do again.”
But to hear her sing ‘All That Jazz’, that she originated as the first Velma Kelly in the original 1975 production of Chicago, is to hear the Broadway sound at its sizzling best. She owns it, too: “I love that vamp”, she says, when it starts to play. “Catherine Zeta-Jones thinks it’s her vamp – but it’s mine. She can keep the Oscar – I’ll keep the vamp!”
I didn’t see her do it originally, of course, but I first saw her on Broadway in Kander and Ebb’s The Rink in 1984, opposite Liza Minnelli. I have followed her avidly ever since, seeing her in London in the original Kiss of the Spiderwoman in 1992 and a return to Chicago, this time as Roxie Hart, in the show’s current revival in 1999 (then at the Adelphi). I have also seen her again on Broadway in the revival of Nine in 2003. Last September she was due to come to London for a two-week West End season at Wyndham’s, but that season was suddenly aborted due to a hole in the then-producer’s financing for it. As Chita declared on her website at the time, “I want all my fans in the UK to know that this was not my choice and beyond my control. I was so looking forward to returning to London, a city I adore, and I certainly hope that another date can be arranged in the near future.” I am delighted that we’ve finally been given the chance to see her.
From one New York institution to another: whenever I am there, my TV station of choice is the 24-hour local news channel, NY1, with its rolling coverage of the minutiae of New York life (and of course weather!) – amongst which it puts theatre high on its agenda. There’s a weekly dedicated half hour theatre show called On Stage, broadcast every Saturday morning at 9.30am (and repeated again at 7.30pm and at the same times on Sundays, as well as twice on Tuesdays, at 12.30am and 9.30pm). NY1’s main on-air theatre critic Roma Torre is now also one of the station’s regular news anchors, and I was very excited seeing the latest New York disaster movie Cloverfield on Saturday evening to discover Roma, of course, doing the breaking news bulletin within the film about what was happening in New York harbour. It gave an extra degree of authenticity to the movie!
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