The Current Cinema - A film of the musical of KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN (Bill Condon, USA, 2025)

 

Aurora (Jennifer Lopez), Kiss of the Spiderwoman

 Someday we’ll be free

I promise you we’ll be free

If not tomorrow

Then the Day After That

 

One of the most electric moments ever in a theatre, at least for me, was the moment in the Kander and Ebb Broadway musical Kiss of the Spiderwoman, when the political prisoner Valentin unleashes an anthem to revolutionary struggle. You can listen to the performance by Anthony Crivello and the chorus which I heard back in 1993 (the year the Toronto Blue Jays last won the World Series with a Joe Carter walk off three run homer), the other equal greatest memorable moment on my only visit to New York.

Kiss of the Spiderwoman started out back in 1976 as a novel by Manuel Puig.  Valentin is in in the same cell as Molina, a gay window dresser jailed for indecency offences. Molina entertains Valentin by recounting the plots of classic movies. In the novel it’s fairly clear that among the films being drawn upon by Molina are such noir classics as Cat People  and  I Walked with a Zombie. Wikipedia adds in a couple more titles – The Enchanted Cottage  and Paris Underground. 

Since the novel was published it has undergone almost as many iterations as The Talented Mr Ripley.  (In fact though Ripley hasn’t been turned into a musical, about the last thing left for it.)

Aurora (Jennifer Lopez), Molina (Tonatiuh)  

Spiderwoman was turned into a play by Puig himself and then into a very good film by Héctor Babenco. William Hurt won an Oscar for his performance as Valentin but the surprise standout was Sônia Braga as the spiderwoman. Braga had already had a long career in her native Brazil but this was the first time most of us had seen her. The film reduced the content of Molina’s film fantasy down to a single title being told throughout.

This was the basic element picked up by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Terence McNally for their musical show which premiered in Toronto in 1992 before going out on Broadway in 1993 directed by Hal Prince and choreographed by Susan Stroman. The only Sydney production I’ve ever been aware of was at the now Hayes Theatre in Potts Point where an amateur cast struggled throughout. Some years ago the Melbourne Theatre Company did it, not very well, but with a full professional cast and elaborate staging reminiscent of Prince’s Broadway show.

Now there is a movie of it which opened last week and, after a desultory week, will be either off or down to single morning sessions wherever it’s on. It didn’t get reviewed by either The Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian, at least not on their websites. 

The movie is in the hands of Bill Condon who gets the “Written and Directed by” credit. (The end credits note that McNally, Ebb and Chita Rivera who starred in the Broadway production have all died.) It has its moments. Jennifer Lopez, mostly as a blonde, stars in the very elaborate musical sequences.  In one sense Condon opens up the film references to full on re-creations and goes back to the multiple movie sources that featured in Puig's novel.There are reminders of the ballets in things like Les Girls, a colorful port sequence that brings back the The Pirate, nods to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes  and Cyd Charisse in The Bandwagon gangster ballet. The colours here are those of Metro in the 40s and 50s, the choreography OK - better in some sequences than overs – and one interpolation, when the love match is resolved near the end, looks rather like a splendid homage to Douglas Sirk melodrama with colour, bright lighting, costume  and subsequent back projection something akin to those in Written on the Wind. But...but....that might just be a bit too esoteric and certainly not something that will sell tickets

Armando (Diego Luna), Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez)

The spiderwoman’s signature song is done in a setting so elaborate when I was expecting noir murkiness. Instead there’s this whole set with greenery and ground fog.

Condon leaves out the line "There are no girls, mama" when Molina, perhaps for the first time tells his mother he's gay. He also made the decision to leave out quite a few songs. Odd lines from them are scattered into the script. I do wonder why you would leave out the aforementioned showstopper “The Day After That”, the best sung song in the show by far. I mused to myself whether any one of the couple of dozen people who get a credit as some sort of ‘producer’ said “Hey Bill, you sure about that?” Reminds me of the decision of the idiot producer of the film adaptation of Kurt Weill & Ogden Nash's One Touch of Venus who decided to drop most of Weill's music and replace it with compositions by his wife. The omissions included one of the greatest songs ever written for the Broadway stage "I'm a Stranger Here Myself".

At the Hayes Theatre in Kings Cross - A terrific production of HOLIDAY INN (Irving Berlin, Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge)

The leads - Nigel Huckle,  Emma Feliciano, Mary McCorry (I'm presuming), 

Should I be just a bit ashamed to admit I’ve never seen Holiday Inn. It was made at Paramount  in 1942 by Mark Sandrich but the auteur was Irving Berlin who wrote the words and music.

Now I’ve just come at the film after seeing a wildly enthusiastic show on the tiny performing space of the Hayes Theatre up in Kings Cross where a five piece band sat around the back of the stage and ten young actors, singers and dancers knocked out their own version directed, for the first time, by choreographer Sally Dashwood. The new libretto is by Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge, with the same music and lyrics by Irving Berlin from this movie and others. The musical opened on Broadway in 2016 and I am assuming this is the first time it has been performed out here, in Sydney at least. 

It was fabulous and the talent on display quite remarkable. Most striking though were two features – the rapid fire costume changes of all ten cast members and the precision of the production. Entrances and exits were timed like a perfect version of Feydeau. The choreography, a huge amount of it involving large swathes of the cast working in some tiny spaces, was not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely brilliant.

It runs at the Hayes Theatre till December 22. Treat yourself to a great night out then find a copy of the movie somewhere, probably OK.ru if you are desperate, and watch Bing Crosby fighting off Fred Astaire for attention. That’s worth a look too even if just to note how smart Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge have been in getting this old show back front and centre.

Ronin Films offers copies for sale of JUDITH ANDERSON - AUSTRALIAN STAR, FIRST LADY OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE by Desley Deacon

“The two headline films of the Canberra International Film Festival, Rebecca (1940) and Pursued (1947) are electrified by the presence on screen by the presence of one of Australia’s most formidable actresses of the period, Dame Judith Anderson. … Desley Deacon’s biography of Anderson skilfully explores the actor’s personal and professional life. … a nuanced description of Anderson … makes compelling reading.” - Shane Breynard, The Canberra Times, August 2022.

 

Everyone knows Mrs Danvers as a byword for menace in Hitchcock’s Rebecca  and as an iconic figure for lesbians in the movies.  But only dedicated fans know her brilliant creator.

 

The book tells Judith Anderson’s life story for the first time.  It recovers her career as one of the great stars of stage and television and an important character actress in the cinema.

 

Born In Adelaide, Australia, in 1897, brought up by a determined single mother, she parlayed her rich, velvety voice and ability to give reality to strong emotional roles into stardom on Broadway in the 1920s.

 

Not a conventional beauty, she was alluring, with her beautiful body, perfect dress sense, and striking, volatile personality.  

 

After playing glamorous roles, she was recognised as a Leading Lady of the American stage under the direction of Guthrie McClintic in Hamlet and co-starring with Laurence Olivier and Maurice Evans in Macbeth.  Her reputation as a great actress was confirmed by her landmark performance in 1947 in the ancient Greek Medea, adapted for her by her friend, poet Robinson Jeffers.

 

In 1955, she played Medea again for an Australian tour supported by the newly formed Elizabethan Theatre Trust.  And in 1982, at the age of 83, she appeared in Medea again, playing the Nurse to fellow Australian Zoe Caldwell’s Medea.

 

Ambitious and driven, Anderson toured extensively, made numerous highly praised appearances on television, and, after her unforgettable role as Mrs Danvers, was a sought-after character actress in film, playing her last role as the Vulcan High Priestess in Star Trek III at the age of 87.  

 

She won many awards and was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1960 and Companion of the Order of Australia just before her death in 1992.  

 

She had a stormy private life and two short marriages, which, she remarked, were “much too long”.

 

The author, Desley Deacon, is Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University after a stellar career as an academic cultural historian, researcher and writer in Australia and USA.  At ANU, she was professor of gender history, and served as head of the Department of History for two terms, overseeing the foundation of both the Australian Centre for Indigenous Studies and the National Centre of Biography.  Her biography of Judith Anderson was shortlisted for a distinguished literary award in the USA in 2019.

Paperback, 461 pages plus detailed list of stage and screen performances, bibliography and index.  Kerr Publishing, Melbourne, 2019.

 

To purchase a copy or make enquiries from Ronin Films:  JUST CLICK HERE