The biggest irony of a patched-up sexagenarian turning in the year’s sexiest performance is that Rivera thinks she’s not that unusual. “Part of Chita will always be the gypsy, trying to prove herself. I don’t think she ever thinks of herself as a star,” says “Spider Woman” lyricist Fred Ebb and a close friend since they worked on “Zorba” in 1969. The character she plays in “Spider Woman”-a Dietrich-like movie icon conjured up by an Argentine prisoner as a source of escape and inspirationdoesn’t demand the same breakneck performance as, say, her star-making “America” number in “West Side Story” (1957). But Rivera never soft-pedals, even when she’s dressed from head to tush in yellow feathers belting “Gimme Love,” a wild dream number where she tangos, struts, cha-chas and kicks the pants off four well-muscled dancers half her age. “It feels great. There isn’t any pain, ever,” says the indestructible dancing diva. Since she first did the show a year ago on the road, she has never missed a performance, never even exercised beyond a 15-minute preshow stretch. Her only concession to age and errant taxis is that she tries to avoid lifts: “If you lift me up too many times, they’ll say, ‘My God, she’s got to be lifted! She can’t do it on the ground herself’.”
Rivera spent 11 months exercising her “bionic” leg-the screws set off airport metal detectors-first with daily therapy and ballet classes. Then she sought safety at sea, performing her cabaret act on cruises to Bali and Brazil, where audiences judge the entertainment on the Kathie Lee Gifford standard. But she already knew about working in pain. When 15-year-old Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero of Washington, D.C., auditioned for a School of American Ballet scholarship, she popped a blister, soaked her shoe with blood-and kept on dancing. Balanchine was so impressed he dressed her wound himself. She trained with him for three years, then chucked her tutu and her name after a friend begged her to audition for “Call Me Madam” in 1950. Since then she has been nominated for seven Tonys. She’s the favorite to win her second next month, but it’s not the end of the world if she doesn’t. With Chita Rivera, there’s always a next year.
