Kiss of the Spider Woman has been told for audiences of six consecutive decades now. The source novel by Manuel Puig was published in 1976. The first film adaptation was released in 1985 and won William Hurt the Best Actor Oscar. Legendary Broadway composing team John Kander and Fred Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret) debuted the stage musical in 1993, and it swept the Tonys with wins for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (Terrance McNally), Best Score (Kander & Ebb), Best Actor in a Musical (Brent Carver), Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Anthony Crivello), Best Actress in a Musical (Chita Rivera), and Best Costume Design (Florence Klotz). It was revived off Broadway in 2007 and reimagined into a seven-actor show in 2010. Now, a film adaptation of the stage musical is in theatres, directed by Bill Condon (Chicago).
Never having seen or read any version of the story, I was glad to have the new movie to put a plot to my Original Broadway Cast album. Here it is. In an Argentine prison, political prisoner Valentin (Diego Luna) is given a new cellmate in flamboyant gay windowdresser Molina (Tonatiuh), who has been arrested for obscenity. Molina is being used as a mole by the warden, who wants to extract critical information from Valentin about his revolutionary group. Molina bonds with Valentin by telling him the story of his favorite movie (Kiss of the Spider Woman, which stars Jennifer Lopez as the main character, Aurora, and the title villain) in the serial style of Scheherazade. Molina longs to be Lopez’s character in a literal sense, while Valentin longs for her in a carnal way. This awkward dynamic leads the men’s bonding to become romantic and sexual. (Now you see why 2025 inevitably gave us a film of the famous Broadway version.)
This new iteration relies on the usual Kander & Ebb film adaptation process: the book songs (songs that take place in the story’s prison reality) have been cut, pushing all of the musical numbers into the nondiegetic (fantasy) world of Molina’s retelling of the Technicolor musical he loves. This technique once again creates a better version of the musical than the one performed on Broadway, as it did with the film versions of Cabaret, Chicago, and the non-Kander & Ebb musical Nine.
Does better equal good, however? I personally think the stage version has only one great musical number: Chita Rivera’s iconic take on the title song. That’s what people remember from the show. The movie version has resurrected three songs that were cut before the play hit Broadway, and, with the trimmed-down tracklist, the film manages a decent score. Diego Luna is great. Newcomer Tonatiuh is good. Jennifer Lopez is okay.
And—let’s face it—J.Lo was always going to be the weak link here, even though she is a natural casting choice. Before her musical career, Lopez was a very promising actress (look at Out of Sight…pun!). These days, however, she has made most of the slide into campy irrelevance. True, the movie-within-the-movie is camp. That works in her favor, I guess. And maybe it’s just my hatred of camp that is getting in the way. I am almost 100% certain, however, that no one in my readership would find the film worthwhile, unless they just want to see any version of the show (like I did) in order to stitch the narrative of the soundtrack together.
My biggest problem was the lavishly artificial scenes from the in-story film. I love classic Hollywood musicals. I have seen A LOT of them. This never quite feels like one. The design is accurately simplified and “almost hurts to look at” in its vibrant colors. The musical numbers are pretty believable. The aspect ratio changes to fit the time. Yet it is always clearly a twenty-first-century version of a classic Hollywood musical. The design has moments of dissonance; the dancing has moments of anachronism, and Lopez’s acting (on a scale of Glindas) is more Ariana Grande than Billie Burke.
Still, if you love musicals and don’t mind that the “real life” plot is almost as silly as the “fantasy” one, it’s a film you may want to check out. At the very least, you’ll get a passable performance of the title song.