Where has this been hiding? John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, a modest stage hit in the early 1990s, is allegedly adapted from Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel of the same name, but most musical fans thought first of the 1985 film version for which William Hurt won his only Oscar.
The used grounds are now dumped back in the filter and the boiling water flushed through to make the weakest brew yet.
This is a serious topic. During the later years of the Argentinian dictatorship, one Luis Molina (the enthusiastic Tonatiuh), a window-dresser who identifies as female, is imprisoned for “public indecency”, with a dour political prisoner named Valentin (Diego Luna) as unhappy cellmate. (It says something about how attitudes have changed that, in the book and earlier film, the sympathetic Molina was convicted for “corruption of a minor”.)
In truth, the journeys travelled were never sketched with much subtlety. Molina, from a reasonably comfortable background, is too busy having fun to care about the downtrodden. Valentin, raised in less plentiful circumstances, is too committed to the cause to appreciate sensual pleasures. “What are you reading?” the former asks. “A biography of Lenin!” his roomy scowls back.
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To an initially unreceptive audience, Molina attempts to lighten the mood by talking the joyless Marxist through a favourite movie. It is an absurdly extravagant society musical called, yes, Kiss of the Spider Woman. Who better to play Ingrid Luna, its beautiful star in fantasy sequences, than the always welcome Jennifer Lopez?
As Valentin lets down his emotional guard, Molina wakes up to political realities. All very neat. All a little too neat. Still, musical theatre often profits – no, not always – from such broadly drawn dynamics. J-Lo makes the best of glamorous society scenes and later dark fantasies involving the titular semi-arachnid temptress.
Sadly, the rest of the production feels underpowered and poorly thought through. The supposedly wretched cell has the look of a mildly grubby student flat from the 1980s. The musical sequences, staged narrowly, have more the feel of dinner theatre than of translated Broadway grandeur.
And the songs? Nobody will confuse any of them with the best from the same team’s Cabaret and Chicago. The film exists to give Lopez an opportunity to bring the house down. She does that, but it’s not quite enough.
In cinemas from Friday, April 17th
