Chita Rivera, who featured in over 20 Broadway musicals over six decades, has passed away, according to her daughter, Lisa Mordente. The three-time Tony Award-winning Broadway great produced unforgettable parts, including Anita in West Side Story, Rose in Bye Bye Birdie, Velma Kelly in Chicago, and Aurora in Kiss of the Spiderwoman. She was 91.
Rivera “was everything Broadway was meant to be,” according to Laurence Maslon, co-producer of the 2004 PBS series Broadway: The American Musical. “She was spontaneous, captivating, and unbelievably skilled for decades on Broadway. You could never forget her once you saw her.
You would believe Chita Rivera was a Broadway baby from infancy, but she wasn’t. Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero, born in Washington, D.C., told an audience during a Screen Actors Guild Foundation interview that she was a tomboy who drove her mother nuts. “She said, ‘I’m putting you in ballet class so we can channel some of that energy.’” So I am quite appreciative.
Rivera embraced ballet so wholeheartedly that she received a full scholarship to the School of American Ballet in New York. Rivera, however, won the position after attending an audition for the tour of the Broadway production Call Me Madam with a friend. Goodbye, ballet; welcome, Broadway. She had her breakthrough in 1957 as Anita in West Side Story, which included a soundtrack by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.
“Hearing ‘America’ was just mind-boggling, with that rhythm,” Rivera told NPR in 2007, commemorating the musical’s 50th anniversary. “I could not wait to do it. It was quite a struggle. And, being Latin, you know, that was a comforting sound.”
West Side Story gave Rivera the opportunity to showcase not just her physical dance abilities, but also her acting and singing skills. She remembers Leonard Bernstein teaching her the score himself: “I remember sitting next to Lenny and him starting with ‘A Boy Like That,’ teaching it to me and me saying, ‘I’ll never do this, I can’t hit those notes, I don’t know how to hit those notes.’”
But she did hit them, and Maslon believes that her ability to sing, act, and dance made her a prized Broadway asset. “She was the first major triple threat. Broadway directors such as Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse recognized the necessity for actors who could do all three things really well.
From 1960 until 2013, she fronted several enormous successes and some significant disappointments. In 1986, Rivera was involved in a terrible taxi accident. Her left leg was fractured, and doctors told she’d never dance again, yet she did—just differently.
“We all have to be realistic,” she said National Public Radio in 2005. “I do not perform flying splits anymore. I no longer do back flips or other stunts. Do you want to know something? “I do not want to.”
But her celebrity never faded. And praises flowed: She received many Tony Awards, including one for lifetime achievement, a Kennedy Center distinction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. According to Maslon, Rivera didn’t do much television or movies since she was entirely focused on the theater.
“That’s why they’re called Broadway legends,” he said. “Hopefully you get to see them live because you’ll never get to see them in another form in quite the same way.”
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