Broadway actors HUNTER FOSTER (left) and WILL CHASE star as two seemingly mismatched cellmates in Signature Theatre’s ‘KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN.’ (Photo by Scott Suchman)
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PATRICK FOLLIARD
Friday, March 28, 2008
After heaps of preparation, Signature Theatre is now realizing the promise of its Kander & Ebb Celebration with a stirring production of the legendary gay musical team’s Tony Award-winning “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” While not the pair’s best or best-known musical (that would probably be “Cabaret,” or maybe “Chicago”), the 1993 musical with its lively score does make for an impressive introduction to the festival as it intriguingly tracks the martyrdom of a brave gay nobody at the hands of state-backed thugs.
Set in “a Latin American prison sometime in the recent past,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (adapted by gay playwright Terrence McNally from Manuel Puig’s same-titled novel), pairs two men — Molina (Hunter Foster), a gay window dresser, and Valentin (Will Chase), a straight Marxist rebel — as unlikely cellmates in a system where torture flourishes and habeas corpus is a quaint notion. To soften the daily barbarisms of jail life, Molina reenacts the big screen scenes of his favorite film diva, Aurora, or in her death figure role, the Spider Woman (Natascia Diaz).
“I came out of the womb a cineaste,” Molina tells his repulsed cellmate before jumping right into a verbatim recap of one of Aurora’s tacky melodramas. Luckily for the audience, these recollections are told as splashy production numbers choreographed by Karma Camp, featuring glamorous Aurora backed by five shirtless, hot inmates (temporarily released from designer Adam Koch’s multi-tiered wiry warren of cells where they otherwise sit, pace and clang throughout the show). Staged by Eric Schaeffer, “Kiss” moves seamlessly from the frighteningly mundane to the fantastic within the shadowy dark confines of a stultifying prison.
FOSTER’S MOLINA IS AN impish, lovable old-school queen, a campy survivor whose sissy ways belie his core strength, while Chase’s Valentin is earnest, sexy and, ultimately, vulnerable. In time, the cellmates share glimpses of their lives over the wall: Molina typically forms unrequited romantic attachments with unavailable men; he’s lonely — his arrest and sentencing for seducing a minor were, he says, the result of entrapment at his local coffee bar. He is also a perfectionist. At work, he fought and won to make sure a mannequin’s handbag contained an unseen Balenciaga silk scarf.
Valentin fights for different things. The product of extreme rural poverty, he vowed at an early age to change things. Though vastly different, Valentin and Molina are — or become — courageous, and a bond of respect and affection is formed between the two.
On the outside, both men have a girl waiting (yes, you read correctly). Valentin speaks ardently in his sleep of Marta (a bewigged Erin Driscoll), the young lover whom he plucked unwittingly from the bourgeoisie; and for Molina, it’s his steadfast, homespun mother played by Channez McQuay — and boy does McQuay tug on a gay son’s heartstrings with “Dear One,” and again with “You Could Never Shame Me.” And of course, Molina always has his Spider Woman.
When “Kiss” opened on Broadway 15 years ago, the U.S. was not yet popularly known as a purveyor of torture; the subject then seemed something alien, strictly the territory of tin pot dictators. Signature’s haunting production with its bloodied, hooded prisoners dragged from cell to cell by two burly guards in fatigues resonates in a current way while the show’s themes of humaity’s courage and grace, especially when confronted by monsters, remain timeless.
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