A Musical Hit For London

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN

AUTHOR: MUSIC BY JOHN KANDER; LYRICS BY FRED EBB; BOOK BY TERRENCE McNALLY

WHERE: LONDON'S WEST END

THE BOTTOM LINE: Bedfellows make strange politics in a hypnotic anthem to revolution, sexual freedom and old movies.

American culture vultures generally gush over the vigor and variety of the London stage and lament that their own vidiotic society offers nothing comparable. But for the past couple of years, although London's sheer theatrical volume has vastly exceeded Broadway's, the quality of new work has been conspicuously higher in the U.S., and London's saving grace has been imports, with recent best-play awards going to works from Ireland, Chile and New York City. The dependence is even deeper when it comes to musicals. When three opened in one week last month, the only homegrown entry was Radio Times, recycling half-century-old songs by the author of Me and My Girl. Another, Which Witch, came from Norway, although its spellbinding score and story were hexed by witless local direction.

The one real success of that group -- in fact, the most rousing and moving musical to reach the West End since Miss Saigon -- is Kiss of the Spider Woman, which retells the story of Manuel Puig's novel and the noted film. The new version comes from a North American cast and creators, headed by composer John Kander, lyricist Fred Ebb and director Harold Prince -- the makers of Cabaret, which Kiss often recalls in its silvery visual shimmer, sexual ambiguity, bursts of surreality and blend of grim politics and show-biz glitter. But unlike Cabaret, which used a Berlin nightclub for satiric comment on the rise of the Nazis, Kiss looks to shadowy passages from old movies for sentimental uplift. They suggest that art, more than life, teaches decency and heroism.

The raw -- very raw -- material is unlikely for song and dance. The setting is a Latin American prison cell shared by a man in for political insurrection (Anthony Crivello) and one in for the social insurrection of homosexuality (Brent Carver). This musical must be among the first to feature torture, mutilation and threats of anal rape and is surely the first to portray one character washing another after a bout of diarrhea. Book writer Terrence McNally and nonpareil lyricist Ebb make the points, not always beloved of the Marxist left represented by the revolutionary, that there is no political freedom without sexual freedom and that love outdoes ideology at breeding bravery.

But the show is far from didactic. This is as much as anything a musical about the magic of musicals, and its title character -- sultrily sung and danced with eyebrow-high kicks by Chita Rivera at 60, an age when she qualifies for a senior citizen's London bus pass -- is pure fantasy, a bygone film goddess whose camp theatrics provide the personal mythology of the gay prisoner brilliantly played by Carver. When life becomes awful, he escapes into reveries of scenes from her films. And when life becomes truly unsustainable, he joins her forever in a brightly lit world of soft shoe and smiles. The real star, as so often, is Prince, whose staging tricks are as spectacular as in his Phantom of the Opera. This time they serve a far better show.