Chita Rivera Drops In For Signature's 'Visit'

Kander and Ebb Musical to Open in 2007

Chita Rivera will star at Signature Theatre next year in the John Kander/Fred Ebb musical "The Visit," based on Friedrich Durrenmatt's play about a rich woman returning to her home town.

"The Visit," set to open the 2007-08 season, will reunite the core from the show's 2001 premiere at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, all of them Tony Award winners: Rivera, director Frank Galati ("Ragtime" and "The Grapes of Wrath") and choreographer Ann Reinking.

Signature artistic director Eric Schaeffer said yesterday from Paris: "I saw that production, and fell in love with it."

The show, though, never got out of Chicago, perhaps in part because it opened shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"The Visit" was one of the last musicals in the great Kander and Ebb partnership (which includes "Cabaret" and "Chicago") before lyricist Ebb died in 2004. The team is having a good year: Their final collaboration, "Curtains," is a hit in Los Angeles and seems likely to land on Broadway this season.

"The Visit" was scheduled for New York's Public Theater two years ago, with Frank Langella to star opposite Rivera, but the production was scrapped when major investors pulled out.

When Schaeffer recently learned from Kander that producers still weren't showing much interest in the musical, he offered the composer an opportunity to direct it in Signature's new, bigger theater in Arlington. (The venue, opening later this season, has a capacity of 349, more than doubling the seating in its longtime space, a converted auto garage.)

Kander suggested bringing in Galati and Reinking, and Schaeffer says he might have put the show in this year's schedule were it not for Galati's current obligations in Chicago, where he is directing Broadway-bound "The Pirate Queen" by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg ("Les Miserables").

Rivera's long alliance with Kander and Ebb includes a Tony nomination as the original Velma Kelly in "Chicago," and wins for "The Rink" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman." Last season, Rivera, 73, appeared on Broadway in the autobiographical "Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life," garnering her ninth Tony nomination.

Signature's Kander-and-Ebb shows include productions of "Cabaret" and "The Rink," as well as the world premiere of "Over and Over," based on Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth."

That 1999 musical was originally to star Bebe Neuwirth, but Neuwirth left early under a cloud of creative differences and was replaced by Sherie René Scott.

The book for "The Visit" is by playwright-librettist Terrence McNally (who also penned the books for "Ragtime" and "The Dancer's Life"), and Schaeffer says any lyrical revisions will be handled by Kander "because he's so inside Fred's head."

He adds that only minor changes are planned: "The show's in fantastic shape."

Single tickets for the show's planned five-week run won't go on sale until next August.

"I'm sure those tickets will be eaten up in no time," Schaeffer said. "For people to see Chita in a space like ours -- it's few and far between that that's ever going to happen."