The Broadway icon who was the first Anita
Chita Rivera 1933–2024
Chita Rivera was a legend and a trouper. One of Broadway’s first true triple threats—who sang, danced, and acted with equally showstopping talent—she earned an unsurpassed 10 Tony Award nominations, winning twice in her seven-decade career. She originated the role of Anita in West Side Story, received top billing in Bye Bye Birdie, slunk and strutted to Bob Fosse’s meticulous choreography alongside Gwen Verdon in Chicago, and clocked about 100,000 miles in cabaret tours. Even a 1986 car crash that broke her leg in 12 places didn’t stop her. “I don’t have my Achilles’ tendon,” she said in 1993, the year of her Tony-winning comeback in Kiss of the Spider Woman, “but I don’t have any pain anymore. The only problem is that my leg sets off metal detectors at airports.”
Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero was born in Washington, D.C., where her Puerto Rican father played in the Navy Band. When he died in 1940, her mother took a clerk job and sent her to ballet classes “to curb her habit of breaking furniture as she leaped around the house,” said The Washington Post. At 14, Rivera received a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet; five years later, she “accompanied a classmate to an audition to lend moral support” and was cast in a touring production of Call Me Madam. She quickly became a Broadway regular, said Variety, and “her steadily growing profile skyrocketed” in 1957 when she gave knockout renditions of “America” and “A Boy Like That” in West
Side Story. Despite director Jerome Robbins’ insistence that those playing the American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks avoid socializing, she secretly dated and eventually married Jet dancer Tony Mordente. They divorced in 1966.
Rivera’s Broadway career “rarely slackened,” said The New York Times. “Showered with honors,” she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and became the first Latina recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. Her final Broadway appearance came in 2015, as a vengeful widow in The Visit, but she kept performing in cabaret up through last year. “Death will look at me and say with some exasperation, ‘Actors! Dancers! They always think God will make an exception in their case,’” she wrote in 2023’s Chita: A Memoir. “Then with a wink, he’ll say, ‘Just kidding! Go. You got another show to do.’”