As Barnard factors out in his 2015 piece, Rivera did all this towards a backdrop that was not all the time welcoming. “Fifties Broadway was not what you’ll name progressive,” he writes. “Interracial relationships in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific and The King & I brought on uproars and, in some elements of the nation, boycotts and demonstrations. The racial rigidity and violence portrayed in West Aspect Story was taking part in out in actual life simply blocks uptown. Rivera’s rise, as a non-white main girl charged with carrying a present and filling seats, was unbelievable to say the least.”

However the sheer drive of her expertise overwhelmed any challenges that may be derived from a one-dimensional studying of her biography. In her memoir, printed final yr, Rivera acknowledges that whereas ethnic stereotypes definitely created some obstacles in her profession, she refused to be outlined by them: “I needed to be thought-about for a variety of roles and for essentially the most half I succeeded,” she wrote.

That tenacity proved important in 1986, when she was concerned in a automobile accident that left her leg damaged in nearly 20 locations. “She was starring within the Jerry Herman musical Jerry’s Women on the time, and was changed by at least seven totally different dancers,” Barnard writes, “one for every of the numbers—seven 20-somethings to fill in for one 53-year-old.” However, by 1988 Rivera was touring the nation in Can-Can, and by 1993 she’d made her grand return to Broadway in Kander and Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Lady, a efficiency that gained her a second Tony for greatest actress in a musical. (She’d gained her first nearly a decade prior, for Kander and Ebb’s The Rink.) “It’s fantastic to be standing right here, again on Broadway once more, on two good legs,” she stated on stage, wielding that hard-won prize. Within the many years that adopted, she would additionally star in 9, a revue titled Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, The Thriller of Edwin Drood, and McNally’s The Go to.