Lopez was born in the Bronx, New York

Lopez graduated from Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts, where she majored in drama; her experience as a drama student are played out in the musical A Chorus Line. Had Tiffany's survived, it would have marked her debut on the Great White Way, but the production was plagued with so many problems that its creative team deemed it impossible to fix. From there she moved on to Henry, Sweet Henry, which lasted only two months at the end of 1967, when she was 19 years old. Her luck was no better the following year, when Her First Roman lasted a mere two weeks. Lopez also appeared on Broadway in the critically-acclaimed play Anna in the Tropics in 2003.

Lopez finally achieved critical and popular success as a replacement in two shows, Stephen Sondheim's Company (1970), followed by Pippin in 1972. Two years later, she was invited by director and choreographer Michael Bennett to participate in a series of tape-recorded group therapy-style sessions in which chorus boys and girls - AKA "Gypsies" - bared their souls and discussed their lives, dreams, and frustrations. From this emerged A Chorus Line (1975), and Lopez was invited to join the cast portraying Diana Morales, a character patterned very much after herself, and in which she introduced the hit song "What I Did for Love".[3]

In her next production, A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine (1980), Lopez stepped out of the ensemble and into the spotlight, utilizing both her comedic and vocal skills. The show had two acts, the first a mini-musical by Dick Vosburgh and Frank Lazarus with additional material by Jerry Herman about the early days of movie making, the second a send-up of the slapstick Marx Brothers movies, with Lopez in the role of Harpo. Both she and the show received rave reviews, and it ran nearly a year-and-a-half. And for this, she earned a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress. In 1982, Tommy Tune, with whom she had worked in Hollywood/Ukraine, hired her as his assistant on Nine, the musical version of the Federico Fellini film 8½. Midway through the run, she joined the cast as a performer. Currently she can be seen as Camilla in the Broadway production of "In the Heights" .

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