Along Comes the Spider

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Show business loves two kinds of news: the gritty comeback and the sparkling debut. One sentimentalizes the past; the other sentimentalizes the future. Both burnish the legend of individuality in a largely collaborative medium. By this yardstick, Broadway ought to cheer sevenfold the last and best musical of the season, Kiss of the Spider Woman. Its U.S. debut next week will turn the clock back to high noon for four long-absent old hands aged about 60 and herald the dawn of three substantial younger talents.

Kiss is the first new musical success for director Hal Prince since The Phantom of the Opera, which he staged in London in 1986. It is the first new musical success for composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb since The Rink in 1984. For star Chita Rivera, a seven-time Tony nominee still dancing at 60, Kiss is her first Broadway show since Jerry's Girls in 1986. During that run, she broke her leg in a car accident and was told she might never again walk, let alone skitter, strut and tango eight times a week as a combination film- noir diva and emblem of death.

The show also marks the Broadway baptism of Brent Carver, one of Canada's leading actors for a decade. As a fey, movie-obsessed interior decorator imprisoned for homosexuality, Carver far surpasses the cinematic performance of the role that won William Hurt a 1985 Oscar. In the less rewarding part of a revolutionary cell mate, Anthony Crivello acts with bluff intensity and sings with beauty and power. The men's cramped quarters and surrounding tiers of cagelike squalor become a park, a movie palace, a Russian alley, even a vast, symbolic spiderweb through inspired film projections by set designer Jerome Sirlin, making a dazzling Broadway debut after a career in the avant- garde and in opera.

Raw star power does not ensure triumph -- this season's major musical disappointment, The Goodbye Girl, was shaped by comparably gilded names -- but Kiss is a proven commodity. The same production, with the same cast, opened in London six months ago to deserved acclaim. Some reviewers were uncomfortable with the subject matter, which includes torture, threats of anal rape, and a disquieting scene in which one man washes the other after a bout of poison- induced diarrhea. Admits Prince: "We couldn't have gotten this project financed a decade ago."

For most audience members, however, the artistry of the production overcame its harshness. Many particularly enjoyed the ending, which manages to be at once cynical, unhappy, exultant and uplifting -- a bundle of contradictions faithful to the novel by the late Manuel Puig. He consulted on the script and suggested a key plot change from the film: when the mismatched cell mates briefly turn romantic, the bond is not love but a quid pro quo transaction, each using the other to serve a purpose the other has not embraced. Only after the deal goes ruinously wrong do they discover true devotion.

For all its success, Kiss is also -- and here is the hook that intrigues Broadway -- a proven flop. An earlier version received a multimillion-dollar 1990 tryout off-Broadway -- about 25 miles off, at a suburban campus of the State University of New York. The producers implored critics to stay away because the work was in development, but reportorial instincts prevailed. Reviewers came, saw and slaughtered, halting Kiss and killing its sponsor, a fledgling agency set up to nurture musicals. Prince now says, "Irony of ironies, the fiasco may have helped. The show's political consciousness is much better suited to this moment." But to achieve a sparkling debut, Kiss has already had to sustain its own epic comeback.

The start of the turnabout may fairly be dated to the night Rivera saw the original version as a guest of Kander and Ebb. Like the critics, she wasn't enchanted: "The stage was so big that the tension just went bye-bye, there was so much space between the two men in that cell." Tactfully, her hosts did not tell her she had been considered, and passed over, for the title role as the fantasy creature of the decorator's reveries. Having cast an actress a generation younger, they belatedly realized they needed, as Rivera laughingly phrases it, "a diva." Once the show's creators bowed to the axiom that it takes a star to play a star, Rivera, like many an actress before her, wanted her part built up.

She signed for the debut of a revised Kiss in Toronto last summer and for the London run in the fall but would not commit to Broadway until she was given more to do, notably a film-fantasy scene set during the Bolshevik Revolution. Before that was written, Rivera found her role a sort of < decorative overlay, a symbol without a persona. It demanded a lot of her as a singer but not as a dancer or an actress. "I wanted to be a part of the story," she says. "Even now, I can't remember a show where I spent this much time in the dressing room."

Rivera's interests coincide with the show's. Women are the core audience for musicals; without her, Kiss would be virtually all male. Moreover, her presence affords mainstream heterosexuals a comfortable entry into a violent and homoerotic world. Above all, her face, thrusting body and eerily insinuating voice -- a dagger wrapped in velvet -- keep Spider Woman vivid in memory, making it an event rather than just a show. This may not be Rivera's showiest role, but it is one in which she seems irreplaceable.

The other pivotal casting choice was Carver. In contrast to Hurt, who conspicuously struggled to seem effeminate, Carver comes across as a naturally fragile man fighting with every ounce of his being to be dignified, streetwise and tough. He gives the role a true heroism, and his periodic vaults into fantasy seem respites rather than utter retreats.

The divergence from the film in Carver's performance is typical. Hardly anyone involved with the musical admits to having liked the movie or to having studied it during the years of revision. Prince dismisses it as "a glamorous trick." The style he sought, along with Kander, Ebb and librettist Terrence McNally, was the magic realism of Latin American fiction, in which everyday behavior lurches into the weird. If there was a screen influence, Prince says, it was Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, a TV miniseries that hopscotched among layers of reality and expected audiences to get their bearings gradually, by osmosis. Says Prince: "The way the numbers are parsed into Kiss is unique. They are abrupt, fragmented. The scenic design allows you to hallucinate in a fraction of a second. We change venue without lifting, lowering, moving or revealing anything. There is no waiting. It is two realities in one."

Designer Sirlin's biggest challenge was the jail cell, which in the tryout occupied the entire stage. Now it is an authentically crowded 8 ft. by 10 ft., with two beds, a sink and a toilet. Says Sirlin: "A musical about two guys singing to each other in a cell . . . well, it has limitations. Then I realized confinement can be a kind of infinity. There is no end to the enigmatic pieces of jail you see. I wanted many layers of seclusion that you could still see through, to symbolize the lack of privacy and to turn the layers into fantasy." He shot hundreds of photographs, etched paintings onto film and fed the images into four giant projectors. This technique may be the next wave in musicals: Tommy, which opened last week, uses somewhat the same device, if not so spellbindingly.

In the end, what most makes Kiss work is what propelled the novel and film. Given the grim setting, the story rightly celebrates the liberating power of fantasy and popular culture. Yet the two men's true empowerment comes in the everyday world, through bonding to each other, through love. Escapism is what man may need. Connection is what he wants. The conflict between needs and wants is the wellspring of all literature.