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Chita Rivera, the most revered Latina broadway star to date. So of course, one of the 12 Broadway musicals has to be about her life (I mean she did star in two others…). Chita Rivera: A Dancer’s Life is “a singing [and dancing] scrapbook’ (Brantley, NYT) of her life, from her overactive childhood to her receiving the Kennedy Center Honor (the first Latina to receive it mind you…). “There is a ghost of a skeletal framework to the show” (Barnes, NY Post), but we hear her tell the story of how she started dancing ballet and how it led to her becoming a gypsy dancer on Broadway, “depicting herself as a cog in the machinery rather than the engine that drives it” (Rooney, Variety). She continues by going through her lengthy resume, speaking on co-stars she admired and role models she learned from, “skip[ping] superficially from one episode to the next, offering single-line summations rather than delving for personal revelations” (Rooney, Variety). The act ends with the moment we have all been waiting for, West Side Story. She does a “self-effacing account… taking multiple botched stabs at Anita’s song, “A Boy Like That,” [recounting her] audition for the intimidating Leonard Bernstein, mak[ing] it all the more thrilling when she nails the high-drama number” (Rooney, Variety). 

The second act reads more like a tribute than a continuation of her story. An original tango creatively tells the story of her lovers, adding the latin flavor that a choreographer once craved from her at an audition by saying “You’re not Latin enough.” She then does a detailed dance revue of the choreographers that changed and shaped her, Robbins, Gennaro, Cole, and Fosse. The show ends with a touching original song where Rivera describes her relationships with every role she’s played and how they’ve changed her. “While this undercooked show doesn’t do her justice, when she struts her way through “All That Jazz” at the final curtain — every move mirrored by Liana Ortiz as her younger self, her adoring eyes never leaving the star — Rivera eloquently cements her place in the musical theater pantheon” (Rooney, Variety). The show itself is not the most structurally sound, and doesn’t have much of an emotional flow either. “Ms. Rivera may keep the blinds drawn on her innermost self. But she continues to wear her heart in her performing style. "The Dancer's Life" is not, sad to say, an electric show. But it cannot disguise the electricity of the woman at its center” (Brantley, NYT).