It’s All About Rita

Berkeley resident Rita Moreno is a bona-fide show business legend, one of the first people to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony award. She’ll be 80 in December, but boy, you wouldn’t know it from her performance in her autobiographical show at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup. The play was postponed from June to give Moreno time to recover from knee-replacement surgery, which has slowed down her dancing somewhat, but her energy and stage presence.

Rita Moreno with Salvatore Vassallo and Ray Garcia in Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup. Photo by kevinberne.com.

Moreno doesn’t mention her awards at all in her two and a half hours on the stage. That’s a pity, because her acceptance speeches, viewable on YouTube, are actually pretty great, particularly her giddy speechlessness at the Oscars.

The show follows her life and career ever since she came over from Puerto Rico to New York at the age of five, but Moreno skips over plenty of stuff along the way, including (or rather excluding) anything after the 1970s. For someone who’s been in show business more than 60 years, that’s more than understandable.

Because the rest of the show is roughly chronological, for a while it seems like she’s skipping her Oscar-winning turn in West Side Story too, and the omission is distracting, but it turns out she’s just saving it for near the end. It’s a curious choice from a narrative standpoint, but it gives an opportunity for a climactic song and dance number “America” before the schmaltzier closer “This Is All I Ask.”

Based on hours of conversations with Moreno about her life, the show was written by artistic director Tony Taccone, who’s making his playwriting debut in a one-two punch between this and Ghost Light, a play about California Shakespeare Theater artistic director Jonathan Moscone’s memories of his father, the late San Francisco mayor George Moscone, that recently debuted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and comes to Berkeley Rep in January. Although a veteran director and neophyte playwright, Taccone cedes directing duty to David Galligan, an old hand at solo cabaret shows.

This is Moreno’s third time playing Berkeley Rep, after excellent star turns in Master Class in 2004 and The Glass Menagerie in 2006, but this is obviously a very different, much more personal piece. While it feels like a solo show, it isn’t quite one. Two young hunky guys (Ray Garcia and Salvatore Vassallo) hardly ever speak but help out considerably on the dance numbers and occasionally sing backup. Although there’s certainly more story than song and this isn’t a cabaret act, it’s peppered with musical numbers from various points in her career, including a Spanish dance she learned as a kid from Rita Hayworth’s uncle; “Broadway Rhythm,” Gene Kelly’s big dance fantasia from Singin’ in the Rain (a movie she was in, but not in that scene); and a very campy, heavily accented version of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” the big number from her 1975 Tony Award-winning turn as rubbish cabaret performer Googie Gomez in Terrence McNally’s play The Ritz. There’s an adorable section in which Moreno plays her recurring little-girl character Pandora the Brat from the ’70s children’s series The Electric Company, singing a song about how much she loves to hate things.

There are also occasional snippets of films she was in and other videos such as a very funny Electric Company musical sketch between her and Morgan Freeman and a surprisingly dirty Sesame Street outtake (at least I hope it’s an outtake) with Oscar the Grouch propositioning her. (Lighting and video design is by Alexander V. Nichols.) Aside from their own entertainment value, these help cover some of Moreno’s many costume changes, in elegant getups designed by Annie Smart. Generally speaking, the show is heavily supplemented with projections: the ship she came in on, the New York tenements of her youth, an early Hollywood screen test.

She describes all the cooking smells from around the world in her building as a kid (and plays all her neighbors in a variety of voices), and talks about her mother’s multiple marriages and schemes for getting out of the barrio, the hilarious advice of Marilyn Monroe’s former acting coach, dating Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley at the same time (though much more about the former than the latter), and the constant frustrations of only being offered stereotyped roles.

At times the show feels patchy, more a collection of anecdotes than an arc per se. The transitions between musical numbers and the narrative are especially tenuous, as if the songs are included only because if you’re going to do a show about Rita Moreno starring Rita Moreno they ought to be there somehow. But the whole package is sold beautifully due to Moreno’s magnetic charisma and sharp comic delivery. Even the occasional flubbed line is handled with grace.  When it comes right down to it, it’s a pleasure to hear her story any old way she wants to tell it.

Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup
Through November 13
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
2015 Addison St.
Berkeley, CA
www.berkeleyrep.org

Show #83 of 2011, attended September 7.