Chita Knocks ‘em Dead
There were two original cast members of West Side Story in the Shaw Theatre on Saturday night, one on the stage, one in the stalls. Chita Rivera, to put it mildly, was on the stage.
Watching in amazement and delight, along with the rest of us, was Riggs O’Hara, who first came to London with West Side fifty years ago as the baby in the company and stayed here to work as a dancer, actor and, most importantly, partner and amanuensis to the late John Dexter, director of the Wesker trilogy, and the first, definitive productions of The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus.
Riggs looked pretty amazing and tells me he’s moved to Hastings. To say Chita looked pretty amazing, too, would be an understatement. To say she looked good for 75 would be insulting. To say she burned up the stage and gave a performance of consummate grace, unquenchable fire and technical perfection would just about serve as a summary.
I have to admit I wasn’t expecting anything so special. There’s a whole lot of camp old showbiz bromide going off around so-called legendary cabaret performers like Barbara Cook and Michael Feinstein when in fact they’re either over the hill or just overrated.
But Chita’s the real deal. I’ve seen her twice on stage, first in The Rink on Broadway, secondly in The Kiss of the Spider Woman at the Shaftesbury. She was pretty good in both. On Saturday, making a tour d’horizon of her career from Bye Bye Birdie through Sweet Charity, Chicago and her latest Kander and Ebb show, The Visit, she was simply sensational.
I’d have to go back over thirty years to the Palladium appearances of Ethel Merman and Shirley MacLaine to recall anything quite as remarkable as this show in terms of sheer star quality, nostalgic resonance and irresistible power.
I arrived home just in time to watch Match of the Day, usually the highlight of my weekend, but not this weekend. I’ll be getting over Chita for a few days yet. The drive home was complicated by the fire in Camden Lock and a big diversion, although we didn’t get close enough to see that there was a fire; just another closed Tube station or multiple knife fight, we thought.
So I immediately rang my actor friend Bill Hoyland and his partner Carole de Jongh (no relation to Nicholas) to make sure they were OK, as they live right by that part of the Lock, across the road near the Hawley pub.
“Oh yes,” said Carole. “We went out to the movies, came home, had dinner and a couple of drinks and slumped in front of the television to watch the news. When they mentioned the fire in Camden, I though, ooh-er, what’s all that then; and then I looked out the window and saw these giant flames in the sky!”
Her namesake Nicholas has been attracting media interest in his play about John Gielgud’s cottaging court case in 1953, Plague Over England, which opens at the Finborough at the end of the month.
I look forward to this inordinately, and not necessarily to give it a bad review. Nick says that he started writing out the dialogue of the courtroom and suddenly found he was writing a play, which sounds as though he wrote it because he had something to say, and not because he was a critic trying to show how it’s done.
Another critic, Lloyd Evans of The Spectator, is also braving the boards once again as a playwright, this time unencumbered with Toby Young as his partner in crime. Lloyd’s play is part of a new season shortly to be announced by Stephanie Crawford at the King’s Head, where the uncomfortable seating has been removed and replaced with red banquettes seating 140 people.
What, no discomfort at the King’s Head? Can we bear to go there any more? And no more ghastly dinners? This is intolerable.
I’m afraid that Stephanie has quite forgotten that part of the King’s Head’s charm comes from its squalor and brutal seating arrangements. She may find herself faced with a mutinous audience requiring low standards to be maintained on the stage, at least. Which is, I suppose, where Lloyd Evans comes in.
