A half-century hoofer

DURING her 55-year career in Broadway musicals, song and dance gypsy Chita Rivera became a star in such challenging parts as Anita in the original cast of “West Side Story,” Velma in the first (Bob Fosse) version of “Chicago” and the title character in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” But her current project is giving her, literally, the role of a lifetime.

In “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” she plays herself -- or what she calls “the nicer side of me” -- performing a compendium of her greatest hits while working alongside dancers half a century younger, including her daughter, Lisa Mordente. “It’s really just a woman telling stories and reliving her life,” Rivera says. “I’m just me there, and then, when I go into the musical numbers, I’m pulling the characters I remember out of the years when I did it. Like Aurora in ‘Spider Woman.’ I remember that feeling, how dark she was.”

Boasting new songs by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and a script by Terrence McNally, plus choreography and direction by Graciela Daniele, this musical autobiography plays the Orange County Performing Arts Center from Tuesday to next Sunday. (A subsequent run at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills was canceled last week.) For Southern California, it’s a kind of homecoming, since the show premiered at the Old Globe in San Diego two years ago.

At age 74, anyone might be forgiven for feeling dismay at the prospect of eight singing/dancing performances a week (five jammed together on weekends) on a 16-city post-Broadway tour. But Rivera has developed a mind game to get her through the rough spots. “If we have Mondays off and we open Tuesday and then go right into a matinee the next day, I don’t like that,” she declares, sitting in a hotel between performances during her tour’s recent stop at this city’s Paramount Theatre. “It kind of takes the shimmer off the opening night, that you have to get yourself up at 10 o’clock the next day and vocalize and do all those stretching things that at this time in my life I really don’t want to do.

“But psychologically, when you get to Friday, you go, ‘Oh, the weekend, this is great!’ So you get into the matinee and even though something might hurt, you know that it’s OK because the day after tomorrow you have off.”

Looking svelte and even a little tomboyish in a black pantsuit and cap, Rivera says that she wants people to think of her show as an affirmation of life -- and that age has nothing to do with a person’s zest for living or appetite for new experiences. But she also acknowledges that time does take its toll. “I’d really like to walk around this town,” she says in a quasi-conspiratorial undertone, “but not down those hills -- my knees.” In a near-whisper: “I don’t usually get into any of this stuff, but I’m Catholic. I tell it all.”

“All” often includes jokes about herself, such as one involving a woman who came to see her show in New York. “She was really quite old,” Rivera says. “And she looked me in the eye and said, ‘You know, we’re the same age.’ And I wanted to kill myself.” She laughs. “God love her and let her live for however long she wants to live. But this woman was old. So that shocked me, but then I got over it.”

She also got over a 1986 car crash that nearly ended her performing career and left her with 16 screws in one leg. “I don’t make a big deal out of it,” she comments. “There are people walking around with so much more stuff done to their bodies and they’ve lived through it. I’m no goody two-shoes by any means, but it’s working.” She looks down at her famous legs. “Maybe not as well as it used to -- but it’s working.”

“Chita Rivera” (the show) begins by depicting the night in 2002 when she received a Kennedy Center Honor, then flashes back to her youth in Washington, D.C., her ballet studies and her first jobs in Broadway musicals. It includes reminiscences of working relationships with co-stars, composers and choreographers as well as her development into a double-Tony-winning pro.

But lots of stories remain untold, for no life can be summarized in a two-hour cavalcade without plenty of downsizing. Rivera says that she wishes the show had more about her failed marriage to fellow “West Side Story” dancer Tony Mordente (“I feel it every night.”). And in conversation, she’s happy to discuss matters passed over quickly onstage -- such as the roles she lost to movie actresses when her Broadway hits were filmed.

What about Rita Moreno in “West Side Story” (1961)?

“I thought she was great, absolutely right for the role,” Rivera says. “When I saw her, the first thing that hit me was -- it’s going to sound so stupid -- ‘She’s got my dress on -- that dress was designed for me. She’s got my earrings too.’ But I thought she was terrific.”

Catherine Zeta-Jones in “Chicago” (2002)?

“Gorgeous. I kept telling [director] Rob Marshall, ‘Don’t give her all of my steps now, save some of those steps for me.’ I thought she was wonderful and breathtaking to look at, which was perfect for the part because it’s two gorgeous women who fool the world.”

Janet Leigh in “Bye Bye Birdie” (1963)?

“Wrong. She was a lovely human being, a beautiful woman and a fine actress. But she couldn’t dance. They darkened her hair and put an earring on her because a big loop earring means that you’re Hispanic. I mean, come on.... “

“I’m a good sport, I really am, but when they came to me and asked to film my performance [as reference footage], I really got angry. How dare they? I knew darn well they couldn’t make any money off me -- they needed a movie star for the part. I totally understood it. But you can only go so far. I thought it was pretty awful, disrespectful, and I clearly said, ‘Nooooo.’ I wasn’t at all delicate about it.”

The ones who made her moves

RIVERA says she gets great pleasure and inspiration from interacting with the young dancers in the company -- a feeling especially evident early in Act 2 when everyone assembles for an extended tribute to such master dance-makers as Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Jack Cole and Peter Gennaro (Onstage and off, Rivera makes sure that Gennaro is credited for his contribution to “West Side Story,” underappreciated in most accounts of the work.)

These choreographers and a number of others shaped the dancing image of Rivera that she re-creates nightly in her show. Some were hard to work with, some not -- and at least one, she says, was impossible.

You won’t hear her tell it onstage, but Rivera still regrets what happened when she turned over the staging of her nightclub act to choreographer Ron Lewis.

“I’d seen his work in Vegas with Liza [Minnelli] and I loved it,” she recalls. “His numbers have so many steps in them that you can take one number and make four numbers out of it.”

But once Lewis, Rivera and her male dancers began working together, expectations turned to alarm.

“It was really hard,” Rivera recalls. “I thought that I was losing my memory. There does come a time when you’re not as fast as you used to be picking up the steps. But this was many years ago, I was probably in my 30s. And every day it just got worse. We were so frightened -- we just weren’t getting it.

“I myself will try anything. And I don’t like saying I can’t, but I decided, ‘I can’t put the boys through this.’ And it’s sad because he was a brilliant choreographer and I couldn’t make it work.”

When it comes to dancing, Rivera doesn’t like overkill -- the dizzying pileup of moves that can be more intimidating than pleasurable. “When I see dance, I want to see it all,” she insists. “I don’t want to miss something.” So a lot of fast and furious dance shows have disappointed her, including Twyla Tharp’s “Movin’ Out.” But she admits that she doesn’t go to the theater a lot: “I’m a great audience in that I respond and I’m moved, but I have to be working in order to go to the theater because otherwise I want to be up there if it’s something I really, really love.”

After the tour ends in June, she’ll be up there again in a new edition of the Kander and Ebb musical “The Visit.” And after that, who knows? She remembers seeing actress Zoe Caldwell as opera star Maria Callas in McNally’s play “Master Class” and feeling she would “explode,” she wanted to do it so much. But it didn’t happen.

“I was asked to do it,” she says, “but I had just come off of ‘Spider Woman’ and I was totally empty, just exhausted, and I really didn’t think my brain could take that at that moment. So I didn’t do it and I still would like to.”

Her eyes glow at the prospect, and the woman who’s been playing herself for eight performances a week, on Broadway and on tour, over the last two years, tells you that she usually doesn’t think about herself all that much. “I’m such a strange creature I don’t know how I ended up in this business anyhow, really,” she says with a smile.

“One day someone said, ‘Chita, is there something about you that people don’t know?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that I’m nowhere near as nice as I appear to be.’ And that’s the truth. You just keep working all the time to battle all these crazy things that keep coming at you.

“I’m so glad that I can communicate. I turn the news on all the time and it kills me. I feel like, ‘Show business, I’m in show business when there’s a huge world out there that’s suffering.’ So I feel very tiny.”

lewis.segal@latimes.com

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Segal is The Times’ dance critic.

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‘Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life’

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday, and 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday

Price: $15 to $65

Contact: (714) 556-2787 or www.ocpac.org