Our second program celebrating the career of Chita Rivera is this week’s feature on The Dress Circle (2/18 7:00 p.m.) as we begin our 41st year on WWFM.
Last week, we sampled songs from the earlier part of Rivera’s career, and this week, we’re looking at her Tony Award winning work as Anna in “The Rink” and the title character in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” both musicals by Kander and Ebb.
We’ve also got her Tony nominated performance in the 2003 revival of Maury Yeston’s “Nine” as the very French Lilliane La Fleur and Rupert Holmes’ “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” where she was delightful as Princess Puffer. We’ll round out our playlist with several songs from her final stage performance as Claire in another Kander and Ebb musical “The Visit” for which she was nominated for another Tony.
Sadly, we aren’t able to bring you any performances from her outings in “Merlin,” “Jerry’s Girls,” or her one-woman show “Chita Rivera: A Dancer’s Life,” but we don’t have original cast recordings of these shows.
We were fortunate enough to see her in several of the shows we’ve included over these past two programs, and we hope we’ve been able to give you some idea of her incredible talents.