Kiss of the Spider Woman–The Musical
Brooks wasn’t seriously disparaging Cabaret, of course; but there are those who do, arguing that subjects like fascism, anti-Semitism, and abortion “just don’t work” in musicals. Not that these folks don’t like musicals–Guys and Dolls and La Cage aux Folles are great shows. They just think it should remain an escapist genre.
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The men who defied conventional wisdom in Cabaret turned their talents in the early 90s to a more recent example of fascist evil: 1970s Argentina, whose leaders waged a “dirty war” that claimed the lives of between 14,000 and 30,000 civilians (depending on whose tallies you believe, the government’s or those of international human-rights groups). Prince, Kander, and Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman–The Musical is a natural successor to Cabaret that tops the earlier show for harsh realism and flamboyant spectacle. Like Cabaret, which was inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s memoirs of 1930s Berlin, Kiss of the Spider Woman uses material from a novel, a play, and a movie; unlike the original Cabaret, it heightens rather than disguises the homosexual sensibility of its source. Song for song, Cabaret is a better score; but Kiss of the Spider Woman is no slouch in the music department, ranging as it does from pulsing Latin jazz and pounding industrial techno-pop to lilting, longing love songs and a brassy title tune that could have been penned for a 1960s James Bond flick. The lyrics, meanwhile, carry as much narrative and symbolic information as the best opera librettos. Prince’s multimedia staging achieves an astonishing sense of multiple planes of existence, with the help of Jerome Sirlin’s brilliantly integrated set and slide projections, creating the effect of three-dimensional cinema.
Weird, as my neighbor said? You bet. Grim depictions of torture and execution alternate with extravagant conga lines (including one with Aurora plumed as a jungle bird), and the soaring steel bars of the prison dissolve into colorful jungles, starry skies, and intricate spiderwebs into which Aurora, as an angel of death, draws the dead victims of the Argentine despots. (The chief of the Buenos Aires provincial police was reported to have said in the days of the war, “First, we will kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then…their sympathizers, then…those who remain indifferent, and finally we will kill the timid”–a statement that perfectly sums up Puig’s plot.) Molina’s campy fantasies are juxtaposed with Valentin’s impassioned dreams of freedom (proclaimed by a chorus of “disappeared” peasants in the stirring anthem “The Day After That”). These represent the visions, the heroic myths, that each man nurtured: Marxist rhetoric for Valentin, movies for Molina.
