As multi-talented Broadway stars go,
Chita Rivera has always been a dancer first, then an actress and singer, which may help explain why her recorded output in a career dating back to the 1950s consists largely of appearances on original Broadway cast albums. She did make one solo album, And Now I Sing, for a tiny record label in the 1960s, so this second effort, called
And Now I Swing, is something of a long-awaited sequel. The 76-year-old, who continues to tread the boards, often in a one-woman show performed in theaters and nightclubs, contends in a sleeve note that the album "reveals another side of my personality," and is her version of the sort of album
Rosemary Clooney or
Mel Tormé used to make. Along with the album title, one thus might expect a vocal jazz recording, but that isn't quite the case.
Rivera has commissioned new arrangements of the songs, some of them done by Michael Croiter, the co-founder of the startup record company called Yellow Sound Label, and those charts, played by a small band, certainly are intended more for the cabaret than the stage. But there's still a lot of show music here, much of it written by the songwriting team of
John Kander and Fred Ebb, in whose shows Chicago, The Rink, and Kiss of the Spider Woman
Rivera has appeared on Broadway, not to mention "Where Am I Going," a song from Sweet Charity, in which she toured.
Rivera is an expressive singer with a limited range who shows her age here and there, but she puts across the songs well, especially those that have more rhythm. She is really at home when the rhythm turns Latin, as it does in the second part of the medley "Sweet Happy Life/Mas Que Nada" and the gentle samba "More Than You Know."
Kander and Ebb's "Love and Love Alone" is a largely unheard and highly characteristic ballad for them from The Visit, one of the shows they were working on when Ebb died and which
Rivera has worked on since. It allows her to look forward as well as backward on an album that requires her to stand still and sing for once.