http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/arts/music/chita-rivera-kicks-up-her-heels-at-birdland.html 2014-10-11 01:02:28 Chita Rivera Kicks Up Her Heels at Birdland In “Chita’s Back!,” her show at Birdland, the Broadway giant Chita Rivera brings her drive and power to the old songs from shows like “Bye Bye Birdie,” “West Side Story” and “All That Jazz.” === “The one thing I won’t give up is my rhythm,” Chita Rivera declared on Thursday evening at Birdland. Watching this Broadway giant, whom I’ve seen onstage many times (and I always come away walking on air), I marveled once again as that rhythm seized her body and zigzagged through her like lightning. A signature posture is a haughty, self-assertive strut in which she throws back her head, then jerks forward in a kind of whiplash. Ms. Rivera is 81, and though the width of her stride may have diminished, her essential drive is as powerful and determined as ever. The sight of The show, titled “Chita’s Back!” — in which she was accompanied by a quartet led by the guitarist and percussionist Michael Croiter, with Michael Patrick Walker on piano, Jim Donica on bass and Dan Willis on saxophone — was not all that different from others she has performed in recent years. Most of her signature songs, from shows including “West Side Story” through “All That Jazz,” were included, along with stories about Leonard Bernstein, Bob Fosse, Gwen Verdon and many others. Ms. Rivera’s rhythm is virtually synonymous with the sly, infectious Kander and Ebb vamp, that teasing, tickling intro to many of their songs. A variation of it drives “Love and Love Alone,” a blunt, cosmically sweeping number from “The Visit.” The lyrics for a song that has the sweet-and-sour feel of Brecht-Weill offer a blunt, cosmic perspective on love, life and death. They imply that tough love, which anticipates its own destruction, is the truest love.