CHITA PROVES HER METTLE.

Byline: Phil Rosenthal 

The only indication you might have that Chita Rivera once was told she might never walk again, let alone dance, is if you were with her in an airport.

The 18 tiny screws surgeons used to heal her badly broken left leg a decade ago sometimes set off metal detectors.

"I laugh about it," Rivera said in an interview Wednesday. "Besides, it makes for a much better story. You've got to welcome whatever happens in your life."

To see her dance, kick, strut and stride, reprising her 1993 Tony-winning role in the musical "Kiss of the Spider Woman" through April 21 at the Ahmanson Theatre downtown - at age 63 no less - you would never realize how seriously she was injured in that Manhattan car accident.

But Rivera is a resilient trick of nature. A wonder. An amazement. A spectacle. In the title role, she is the chief attraction of "Spider Woman" and a surer bet than the musical itself.

One normally would not peg "Kiss of the Spider Woman," first a 1976 novel by Manuel Puig and then a 1985 Hector Babenco movie starring Raul Julia, William Hurt and Sonia Braga, as natural source material for a full-out musical. Persecution, torture and the ugly degradations of Latin American prison life are not the sort of stuff that typically signals a Broadway hit.

It is Rivera who rescues the show - and the audience - with her beguiling songs and dance, much like her movie-star diva character, Aurora, provides salvation for the gay inmate, Molina (Juan Chioran), through vivid recollections.

What's interesting about the impact she has on the show is that she is not actually on stage for much of it. She can't remember a role in which she has spent so much time backstage, and hers is a career that got its first star turn almost 40 years ago with the role of Anita in the original production of "West Side Story."

"It's perfectly spaced for me," Rivera said. "I can get some tea to soothe my throat, wrap my knee if it hurts. This is a much nicer schedule. It's like 'Phantom of the Opera.' You think the Phantom is out there all the time, but he isn't."

Her considerable contributions to "Spider Woman," however, are not limited to her performance. Six years ago, when the musical was bombing in a suburban New York workshop, she attended a performance and told director Harold Prince and songwriters Fred Ebb and John Kander they needed to give Aurora more to do.

The result is her big production number right after intermission.

Rivera is so effective as Aurora that you wouldn't take her age into account, unless, of course, you saw Dick Van Dyke, her still spry but now grandfatherly co-star of 36 years ago in Broadway's "Bye Bye Birdie," also watching in awe on opening night at the Ahmanson.

"You don't want people more amazed by your age than your skill," she said with resignation.

The show, eight times a week, is its own workout regimen for Rivera, who always has been careful about what she eats and does. She looked out her window at her hotel's health spa - "I really should go there," she said - and noted, "You are a seriously boring person when you do a show."

There remain a few more stops on the road for "Spider Woman." Then Rivera plans her first real breather in four years. She might do a new play by "Kiss" librettist Terrence McNally after that.

Her work, she said, is just that: work. But it is exhilarating just the same, and she should know.

"It's simply being alive and not giving in to anything that would pull you down," she said.