Long Odds Can’t Derail Hit Musical

How could “Kiss of the Spider Woman” have possibly become a hit Broadway musical?

The odds certainly seemed stacked against it:

It’s set in a Latin American prison.

One of the main characters is a Che-like revolutionary.

The other is a homosexual window dresser.

The Spider Woman of the title is a B-movie film actress of the ‘40s who exists only in the window dresser’s imagination.

It’s based on the 1985 non-musical movie, most memorable for William Hurt wearing feathers and kissing Raul Julia.

Well, we won’t find out for certain how this all came together into a hit until the national touring production arrives at the Spokane Opera House for performances Wednesday and next Thursday. However, we can get a hint of how it worked on Broadway in 1993 from the fact that it won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

And get a load of some of these admiring reviews:

“The last musical of the season is far and away the most thrilling,” wrote David Richards in the New York Times in May 1993.

“On the most fundamental level, the musical is celebrating the theatrical impulse and its ability to remake the world. The evening’s creators are practicing precisely what they preach. ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ doesn’t just assert their collective belief in the transforming and redemptive properties of theater. It embodies that belief.”

Meanwhile, Frank Rich, his colleague at the New York Times, said this, “For those who dote on Broadway musicals, (director) Hal Prince’s new work would be worth seeing just for the Fellini-esque finale… . You cannot help feeling a shiver of pure theater.”

These theatrical qualities catapulted it into an unlikely popular hit, featuring a spectacular star turn by Chita Rivera as the Spider Woman. In this touring production, that part is played by Argentinian film star Sandra Guida.

This production will, of course, feature the book by Terrence McNally (“Master Class”) and score by John Kander and Fred Ebb (“Cabaret”). It will also be based on Prince’s original direction, with the original sets and costumes. Apparently, the physical production is quite spectacular.

“Mr. Prince’s staging is almost always commanding,” wrote Rich. “He ceaselessly manipulates the major elements of Jerome Sirlin’s elegant set, front and back drops suggesting an infinity of prison bars and spider webs, to create an ominous mood and to expand or confine the stage space to match either the freedom or oppression of his character’s spirits.”

As Rich points out, the story remains essentially “about what happens when a gay window dresser and a straight Marxist guerrilla are thrown together in a Latin American jail.” Where, then, does the musical part of it come in?

It comes in flashbacks, in the mind of Molina, the window dresser. To make his long imprisonment endurable, he re-runs movies in his head, the ‘40s musicals he loved as a boy, the ones starring an actress named Aurora.

” ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ brings them to life in a series of brilliant musical numbers that transform bare-chested convicts into chorus boys, steel bars into canes, and the prison itself into a low-rent Copacabana,” wrote Richards. “There, right in the center, dressed in canary-yellow feathers or satin tails and a rakish fedora, is Ms. Rivera.”

The finale has already become nearly legendary in musical theater. As Molina nears death at the hands of the prison guards, Aurora arrives on the scene as the Spider Woman, and Molina imagines himself on screen, dancing a tango.

Rich said this scene “consummates the showmanship of a director who wrote the book on how to spread a web of white heat through a Broadway house.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “Kiss of the Spider Woman” will be staged Wednesday and next Thursday, May 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Spokane Opera House. Tickets are $39 and $36, available at G&B Select-a-Seat outlets or call (800) 325-SEAT.