A little theater

Memorial Day weekend: the star of the long weekend was Friday's performance by Chita Rivera, who is appearing at the Signature Theater in a newly staged musical production of Kander and Ebb's The Visit, based on the play by Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt. Rivera plays an old lady returned to the town of her birth where she is feted as the rich old woman who will restore the faded and depressed German burg to its full potential with a massive injection of money. She does offer the money, 10 billion marks, but the quid pro quo is the murder of her teenage lover who spurned her for the daughter of a well-to-do shopkeeper. Rivera, now 75, starred in the original West Side Story in 1957. She dominates The Visit, even though the cast is superb. She actually does dance. It's a good performance, incredibly heavy in its grotesqueness. You hope for a reprieve. There is none.