Cabaret & Concert NewsChita Rivera Packs March Slate With 54 Below Run, Plus Appearances With Tommy Tune and Seth RudetskyThe Broadway legend has lined up appearances across the country, starting with a 10-performance New York City concert engagement.
By
Adam Hetrick
February 20, 2018
Two-time Tony Award-winning Broadway legend Chita Rivera will kick off a busy March with a 10-performance nightclub engagement at Feinstein’s/54 Below, running March 6–22.
Rivera will take audiences through her groundbreaking stage career, highlighting such shows as West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Visit, and more. She’ll be joined by long-time music director Michael Croiter with Gary Adler (piano) and Jim Donica (bass). Click here for tickets.
On March 24 at 8 PM, Rivera will link up with fellow Broadway legend Tommy Tune for Chita & Tune: Just in Time at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, New Jersey. The concert is the final engagement in the duo’s cross-country tour that launched earlier this year. Click here for tickets.
Rivera will close out the month on the West Coast, joining SiriusXM radio host and Playbill columnist Seth Rudetsky at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts March 29 for two special performances as part of the Broadway @ the Wallis series. Show times are 7:30 PM and 9:30 PM. Click here for tickets.
Rivera won Tony Awards for her performances in The Rink and Kiss of the Spider Woman. She originated the role of Anita in the 1957 premiere of West Side Story and has appeared in the Broadway productions of Chicago, Bye Bye Birdie, Jerry's Girls, Merlin, Bajour, Can-Can and Nine, as well as her autobiographical show, The Dancer's Life. Rivera originated the role of Claire Zachanassian in the Kander-Ebb-McNally musical The Visit, which premiered on Broadway in 2015. She was awarded The Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2009.
Rivera has been a special guest performer on Playbill’s Broadway on the High Seas cruises. Tickets are now on sale for the Broadway on the High Seas 10: Odyssey Through the Greek Isles cruise June 24–July 1, 2019, with a lineup of Broadway stars to be announced. Call Judy Perl Worldwide for tickets at (844) 561-3625. Visit PlaybillTravel.com for booking and information.
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Check Out These Rare Classic Drawings From Famed Artist Al Hirschfeld
Check Out These Rare Classic Drawings From Famed Artist Al Hirschfeld
In celebration of The New-York Historical Society's special exhibition "The Hirschfeld Century: The Art of Al Hirschfeld" and the new book "The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age," Playbill presents a look back at some classic Al Hirschfeld drawings.
18 PHOTOS
Ruth Dwyer, 1921
Not content with simply drawing his subject for this Selznick melodrama, Hirschfeld experimented with this portrait to make it more engaging for the viewer. Even at this early stage of his career, he pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved in line.
Buster West and Noble Sissle at the Ambassadeurs nightclub, 1928
Hirschfeld was a serious hot jazz fan and claimed to help Django Reinhardt get his first recording date. He also loved eccentric dancers, like Buster West, who found humor in the same places Hirschfeld did: in movement, expression, and well-defined character.
Strike Up the Band Bobby Clark, Paul McCullough, Doris Carson, Gordon Smith, Robert Bentley, Dudley Clements, Blanche Ring, and George Gershwin, 1930
Strike Up the Band had premiered in 1927 and was a rare miss for the Gershwins and George Kaufman. They added Morrie Ryskind to write a believable love interest and retooled the satire to soften its sting. This new production proved to be a hit and introduced
Opening Night of the Bucks County Playhouse, 1939 Florence McGee, Burgess Meredith, St. John Terrell, Don Walker, Kenyon Nicholson, Jack Kirkland, Moss Hart, Roger Davis, Beatrice Kaufman, George S. Kaufman, and Richard Bennett
Hirschfeld understood that great theater does not only happen in New York. In the summers of 1938, 1939, and 1940, he often visited the Straw Hat Trail to draw scenes of the rural playhouses. This drawing of Beatrice Kaufman almost got him fired from The New York Times. He returned regularly to the playhouse during the next three decades, recording rehearsals and productions for stand-alone drawings in the Times.
Supporting Players Whose Numbers Stop Their Musical Shows, 1949
Left to right: Lisa Kirk, singing “Always True to You (in My Fashion),” and Lorenzo Fuller, Eddie Sledge, and Fred Davis doing “Too Darn Hot” in Kiss Me, Kate; Juanita Hall, Betta St. John, and William Tabbert in “Happy Talk” from South Pacific; Kathryn Lee and Bill Callahan dancing to “Lucky in the Rain” in As the Girls Go; and Carol Channing in “The Gladiola Girl” in Lend an Ear. Channing felt that this drawing helped make her a star.
Bloomer Girl
Richard Huey, David Brooks, Celeste Holm, and Joan McCracken, 1944
Hirschfeld never stopped experimenting and collaged a doily as Celeste Holm’s dress in this drawing. He emphasized the dress as it played an important role in Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s musical comedy about a hoopskirt manufacturer on the eve of the Civil War, his daughter, and her aunt, who invents bloomers. The authors too were experimenting as they dealt with serious subjects, such as the emancipation of both women and slaves, in music and lyrics in the hit show.
Shakespeare, Shaw, and O’Neill Manipulate Their Characters
Mural for the Playbill Restaurant at the Hotel Manhattan, 1958
Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady; Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the Taming of the Shrew; Florence Eldridge and Fredric March in Long Day’s Journey into Night. For this mural for the Playbill Restaurant, the designer used actual rope for the string of the marionettes, and she ringed the large work in lightbulbs to simulate a backstage mirror.
First Ladies of the Theater Mural for Playbill Restaurant at the Hotel Manhattan, 1958
Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, Julie Harris in The Member of the Wedding, Lynn Fontanne in The Visit, Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, Katharine Cornell in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing, Judith Anderson as Medea, Ruth Gordon in The Matchmaker, Shirley Booth in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
I Can Get it for you Wholesale
Barbara Streisand, Lillian Roth, and Elliot Gould, 1962
In 1962 Al visited his friend, composer Harold Rome during the auditions for Rome’s I Can Get it For You Wholesale. The creative team was looking for a girl who was “Spinster Incarnate”, when a young Barbra Streisand walked onstage with a stack of music she placed on the upright piano. In what was probably a calculated piece of business, she took one piece and crossed the stage with the music unravelling to great comic effect. She then called for a stage hand to bring her a chair and proceeded to interview her auditioners. They were incredulous, but when she opened her mouth to sing (still seated), they were convinced. Al went to Boston to see the show in tryouts, and although she initially had a small part, Streisand earned a third of the drawing.
Here’s Love rehearsal
Michael Kidd, Norman Jewison, Janis Paige, Craig Stevens, Valerie Lee, Meredith Willson, Laurence Naismith, and Cliff Hall, 1963
Meredith Willson hit it big on Broadway with his first show, The Music Man, in 1957. He followed with another hit, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, in 1960. Willson’s third triumph was this musical adaptation of the classic Miracle on 34th Street (which the show is often called now). Director Norman Jewison was fired from the show two weeks before out of town tryouts when he did not show enough respect for Willson or his wife. He was replaced by Stuart Ostrow.
Ruby Keeler in No, No, Nanette, 1971
One of the biggest hits of the 1970–71 Broadway season was the revival of a forty-six-year-old musical, starring a sixty-year-old dancer last seen on Broadway in 1929. With her enthusiastic tap dancing in the revival of the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette, Ruby Keeler seemed as fresh and agile as she had been four decades earlier when Hirschfeld last drew her in the Ziegfeld production Show Girl. She was then married to one of Broadway’s biggest stars, Al Jolson.
Kabuki sketch
Watercolor, 1975
In 1975, Hirschfeld was invited to Japan to exhibit his work. In return for the warm reception, he created a series of lithographs based on figures from Japan’s legendary Kabuki and Noh theatres. These works the early influence of Japanese prints on his work in the almost casual elegance of its manipulation of line and space. The artist had first encountered the art of the Far East as a youth when his father brought home a book of Hokusai prints. Hirschfeld remarked he was much more influenced by Japanese artists than by the painters of the West.
Bill Irwin, 1982
“Bill Irwin is a marvelous mime, a classic clown,” said Hirschfeld at the time. “I love to draw him as much as I did Zero Mostel. I like that kind of explosive actor.” Hirschfeld joked that he did not believe that Irwin had any bones in his body as he seemed so flexible.
Mikhail Baryshnikov in Metamorphosis, 1989
Baryshnikov, whose acting has always been a part of his greatness as a dancer, made his New York theatre debut triumphantly in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, as a man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. One of ballet’s most famous defectors from the USSR, Baryshnikov had been portrayed by Hirschfeld in classics such as Giselle in 1976, as well as in modern dance roles with his own White Oak Dance Project in 1994.
Kiss of the Spider Woman’s librettist, Terrence McNally, wrote, “No one ‘writes’ more accurately of the performing arts than Al Hirschfeld. He accomplishes on a blank page with his pen and ink in a few strokes what many of us need a lifetime of words to say. He gets to the essence of his subject with an economy that should be the envy of most wordsmiths.”
Sandra Bernhard in I’m Still Here...Damn It!, 1998
Hirschfeld was more interested in character than in simple caricature, but in Sandra Bernhard he found an iconoclastic comedian, singer, actress, and author who encouraged plenty of both. He first drew her during the run of her his Off-Broadway show Without You I’m Nothing in 1988. For her Broadway debut in 1998, Hirschfeld summed her up in a show that the New York Times described as “an angst-driven, foul-mouthed, poison-laced joy ride that banks and careens frenetically through the worlds of fashion, celebrity, rock, and religion.”
David Mamet and Ricky Jay, director and star of On the Stem, 2002
When David Mamet and Ricky Jay came to Al’s studio to pose for a drawing in 2002, it was the night of the opening of On the Stem, a magic show by Jay, directed by Mamet. Their conversation about vaudeville and magic acts, was printed verbatim in the Times with this sublime drawing of the duo. When he returned home, Jay, a man who had seen—and seen through— a lot of wonders, said, “Wasn't that amazing hearing Hirschfeld? A guy like that, you know, he was there, he can remember those stories, a lot of which are really disappearing. It's so important, because he's able to bridge that gap between what Broadway used to be and what it is now.” Al turned 99 five days after the piece was published. He had been drawing Broadway since he was 23.
Self Portrait, 2002
This was Hirschfeld’s last self portrait in November 2002.
