Word: rivera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kiss is the first new musical success for director Hal Prince since The Phantom of the Opera, which he staged in London in 1986. It is the first new musical success for composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb since The Rink in 1984. For star Chita Rivera, a seven-time Tony nominee still dancing at 60, Kiss is her first Broadway show since Jerry's Girls in 1986. During that run, she broke her leg in a car accident and was told she might never again walk, let alone skitter, strut and tango eight times a week...
...start of the turnabout may fairly be dated to the night Rivera saw the original version as a guest of Kander and Ebb. Like the critics, she wasn't enchanted: "The stage was so big that the tension just went bye-bye, there was so much space between the two men in that cell." Tactfully, her hosts did not tell her she had been considered, and passed over, for the title role as the fantasy creature of the decorator's reveries. Having cast an actress a generation younger, they belatedly realized they needed, as Rivera laughingly phrases it, "a diva...
...signed for the debut of a revised Kiss in Toronto last summer and for the London run in the fall but would not commit to Broadway until she was given more to do, notably a film-fantasy scene set during the Bolshevik Revolution. Before that was written, Rivera found her role a sort of < decorative overlay, a symbol without a persona. It demanded a lot of her as a singer but not as a dancer or an actress. "I wanted to be a part of the story," she says. "Even now, I can't remember a show where I spent...
...Maria Rivera, a parent whose two children have participated in the early childhood program, said it provided her with support and resources...
...program gave me skills and resources I would not have found on my own," Rivera said...