The Lyric Stage Company production, led by the enormously talented young director/choreographer Rachel Bertone, turns what is often presented as a Broadway showstopper into an intimate, emotional ride. But Molina, despite his insistence that he is a coward, makes the ultimate sacrifice to protect Valentin - and, in so doing, at last writes his own inspiring story. When the prison warden fails to break Valentin, despite increasingly violent means, he tries to use Molina to draw information on the young revolutionary. The showbiz goddess haunts the proceedings - she performs lavish production numbers that drown out the screams of torture. But Molina wins Valentin over, helping him escape the torments of confinement by reenacting movies starring his most beloved star, Aurora. He draws a real chalk line across the center of the cell, ordering the gay man to stay on his side. Valentin is the definition of macho and, at first, he rejects Molina out of hand. His cellmate is Molina (Eddy Cavazos), a gay window-dresser serving an eight-year sentence on a trumped-up morals charge. Valentin (Taavon Gamble) is a political prisoner, an important prize for an authoritarian regime wishing to crush a growing resistance movement. The plot revolves around two prisoners in an Argentine jail. But while Cabaret condemns the decadents of Weimar Germany to their fate through inaction, Spider Woman dramatizes, through its sensitive gay protagonist, heroism in the face of fascism. Both plays make the audience complicit because we are participating in that escapism on another level. The play, with its theme of the imagination serving as a relief from suffering, echoes Cabaret: art, beauty, and yes, love, are sometimes the only escape from imprisonment, torture, and political persecution. As with Cabaret, Spider Woman exploits this format to multilayered effect.

Kiss of the Spider Woman, the 1993 musical based on the Manuel Puig novel (book by Terence McNally) is no exception, and the effort led to the duo’s third Tony award.Īs this reviewer noted in The Arts Fuse about last year’s production of The Scottsboro Boys, Kander and Ebb’s greatest talent was for presenting raw and brutal topics while using highly theatrical conventions to create relief and distance for the audience. John Kander and Fred Ebb, the great songwriting team behind such immortal hits as Cabaret and Chicago, have never shied from exploring the darker realms of human experience in the American musical format. Eddy Cavazos and Taavon Gamble in the Lyric Stage Company of Boston production of “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Photo: Mark S.

Kiss of a spider woman book