Near the beginning of her cabaret act, modestly titled "The Secret of Life," Chita Rivera vows not to dance. Don't believe it for an instant.
In 80 fully caffeinated minutes at the Rrazz Room, the 75-year-old star with more than half a century's worth of A-list Broadway credits taps and kicks, shimmies and jolts, struts and strikes one showstopper pose after another. Hips, shoulders, outstretched arms, rump, neck - it all gets flung into the act with the same kind of heedless abandon she brings to her singing.
Her songs, medleys and song fragments delivered in a husky, heavily miked voice, tend to go straight for the wrenching or comic jugular. Her expressions are writ large. Even her bright red flapper-style dress and pixie-mop black hairdo defy you to regard her as anything but a brassy, sassy, go-for-the-gusto type who's lived life to the fullest and can't be kept down. She high-fives her piano player and pops two fingers in her mouth to produce a loud whistle.
"I've done it all," she sings right out of the chute, then ticks off a few of her leading men. When it comes to Antonio Banderas, with whom she appeared in "Nine," she offers this sultry affirmation: "Oh yes. And I had him." The temperature in the room shoots up.
Rivera may be delighted to find herself in an intimate setting, as she says, but her irrepressible instincts and impulses are all about the big gesture, the big impact and the theatrical equivalent of a knockout punch. With music and dance, patter and pure energy, she's a one-woman highlight reel. There's a whole lot of Broadway crammed into this ostensibly small box of a show.
The not-so-secret formula of Rivera's "Secret of Life" is to keep bolting along through her astonishing career, from an uptempo tour of "Bye, Bye Birdie" to a fully dramatized account of "Chief Cook and Bottle Washer" from "The Rink" to signature numbers from "Sweet Charity," "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and "Chicago." The very well known gets tumbled together with the obscure (a song from the 1955 flop "Seventh Heaven"). She dons a top hat to pay tribute to Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse. She dresses up her "West Side Story" selections with memories of auditioning for Leonard Bernstein.
All that drive can be a little exhausting, especially before the audience gets up to full speed. Rivera had to silence a talker in the house Wednesday who was slowing her down and throwing off her rhythm. Once you've accepted that subtlety isn't an especially important element, you submit and go along for the full-throttle ride. A hurtling "Carousel," from "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris," could be the evening's theme song, a showpiece of Rivera's determination to make sheer nerve carry the moment.
Just when you think she can't possibly amp up the stakes anymore, after her baby-doll bump-and-grind turn in "Big Spender," from "Sweet Charity," and a French cartoon number ("Camille, Colette, Fifi"), Rivera dials things down a bit. She takes to a stool for the first time and demonstrates that she can act with her voice as well as her body. The number is Michael Leonard and Russell George's wistful "Not Exactly Paris," and it's touchingly rendered. "Of all the men in my life," one perfectly poised line goes, "I remember one." Rivera makes him step back into the foreground before he fades into memory's mist once more.
Even such lightly shadowed moments are fleeting. Joy and exultation are the default modes. Rivera makes only the briefest allusion to the pins and screws in her legs, the result of a 1986 automobile accident she doesn't mention. She'd rather sing the praises of Verdon, her "Rink" co-star Liza Minnelli, Jerome Robbins (whom she called "Big Daddy") and men in general. She even works in a teaser plug for a revival of the 2001 Kander and Ebb show "The Visit," which may come to San Francisco next year.
Somehow it seems fitting that Rivera's voice gets better as the show progresses. After announcing what is already abundantly clear - "I bond with every woman that I play"- she offers up a sly reading of "Class" (from "Chicago") and a soaring sample of "Spider Woman."
She toasts all her new friends in the audience with "Here's to Us," then rewards them with a 151-proof shot of "All That Jazz." Then, as if to soothe the overstimulated crowd with an affectionate lullaby, she sails off with Carol Hall's "My Circle of Friends."