Reviewed
by David Spencer
A living Broadway musical theatre
legend almost certainly deserves a retrospective celebration about his or her
career if s/he wants one -- and there aren't many in the performer category
more compellingly worthy than Chita Rivera, the Latin spitfire who created Anita in West
Side Story,
Rosie in Bye
Bye Birdie
and the title
fantasy figure in Kiss of the Spider Woman, among others -- who, at over 70,
is still almost mind-bogglingly agile and sexy and charismatic. Her singing
voice has lost some wideness of range and, as happens, lowered; nor does she
still have the power to really sustain money notes on pitch or attractively --
but like the veteran pro she is, she embraces the limitation and adjusts her
vocal delivery accordingly. You're not discomfited by the sound because she's
not: as with her
dancing, she's aware and pragmatic...even as she also remains passionate about
dance, dancers, choreography, choreographers and the Broadway musical in
general. And that enthusiasm is terribly infectious.
Yet, Chita
Rivera: The Dancer's Life isn't all it ought to be. As structured by scripter Terrence
McNally, it's a
little too self-congratulatory (its point of departure is the night Ms. Rivera
received her Kennedy Center honor), a little too Vegas style sum-up. It's also
structured haphazardly: the first act traces her training and seemingly the
entirety of her career (the curtain comes down and, but for the absence of a
finale, you're amazed the evening isn't over), then Act Two presents too much
that overlaps where we've been, as Ms, Rivera touches upon her love life (in a
manner that is strangely unrevealing and TMI at the same time), and her survey
of the great choreographers with whom she's worked -- and their styles. (This
survey, more than any other segment in the evening, makes the show cook at its
hottest level, because here the insider view is unencumbered by special
material interpretation).
With few
exceptions, one cited above, the audience misses a sufficient sense of personal
intimacy, of being brought up close and inside. Oh, to be sure, there are fun
anecdotes, but not that many, and they yield little cumulative impact.
And then
there are the "autobiographical" songs by Ahrens & Flaherty. They're mild at best. On the
one hand, they represent a thankless task: the musicalization of a living
person's perspective, to be performed by that person. No matter how smartly rendered,
the subject's POV is still being paraphrased, artificially shaped and formed
through a third-party filter, then handed back for performance. This defeats
the illusion of spontaneous confession, and makes the viewer only more
conscious of a Life Reduced to Special Material. On the other hand...the best
such special material (like what Kander and Ebb wrote for Liza) at least has a
certain brazenness. The Ahrens-Flaherty Chita numbers, however, reflect a more
conservative imprimatur. They're the product of gifted, A-List writers,
literate and well-made and detailed and attractive and yet somehow, with no
loss of respect for Ms. Rivera implied, unintentionally diminishing. They seem
righter for Chita as a supporting character in a musical than Chita the
real-life force of nature presented within a musical context. And they pale
beside the songs Ms. Rivera sings from the classic musicals in which she
infused that force into characters other than herself. A curious paradox!
Then
there's the ensemble of dancers who interact with Ms. Rivera and back her up.
They too are gifted and graceful and clearly love her, as she palpably loves
them...but they're an oddly motley crew, without any particular definition as an ensemble. Their selection,
and the use to which they're put, reflects the same lack of optimal focus of
the overall structure. If they are to be a ragtag collective, somehow that should be made a
unifying point, e.g.
even something as rudimentary as dancers come in all shapes and sizes, and
anyone with the calling and the gift can be a trouper.
Withal,
though, I don't mean to say that Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life is bereft of exhilaration, nor
that it isn't touching -- nor that it isn't worthwhile, if the time and the
ticket price are available to you. Sure it is. It would have to be. And I felt privileged to
be in the great lady's presence no matter how under-conceived the vessel that
holds her.
But --
as a director once said to me when cajoling me to write a better song than the
perfectly nice one that existed: "It should do more than touch you. It
should kill
you." And if a show where Chita gets to be Chita doesn't kill you...there's a problem...