Toronto: St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, Bluma Apple Theatre; June
1992 - August 1992
London: Shaftesbury Theatre, opened October 20, 1992
Broadway: Broadhurst Theater - 235 W. 44th St.
First Broadway Preview:
April 19, 1993
Opening Night: May 3, 1993
Closed: Jul 1, 1995 (Chita was succeeded by Vanessa Williams and Maria Conchita Alonso. Carol Lawrence filled in for her during vacations).
Total Broadway Performances: 904
Rumors that Chita Rivera would play the title role in Kiss of the Spider Woman began to circulate from the time the project was first announced. She had starred in another Kander-Ebb-McNally musical, The Rink. After a preliminary workshop production of the show was staged on the SUNY Purchase campus in the summer of 1990 the rumor became even more persistent.
The quality of the initial workshop, starring John Rubenstein as Molina, was obscured by the controversy surrounding the desire of the producers to keep critics out, and the desire of critics to see and review the work. For a while it seemed as if Broadway would never see the completed work -- and indeed, Broadway had to wait until after the show debuted in Toronto and had an extended run in London.
Given the rocky road, the fact that the show won the London Evening Standard Drama Award for "Best Musical" within a couple of weeks of its West End premiere at the Shaftesbury Theatre in October 1992, was a considerable triumph. The award honored the creative team (composer and lyricist John Kander and Fred Ebb, librettist Terrence McNally, director Harold Prince), the producer Garth H Drabinsky and The Live Entertainment Corporation of Canada, and the cast led by Chita Rivera, Brent Carver, and Anthony Crivello, as well as the scenic designs of Jerome Sirlin and the choreography of Vincent Paterson and Rob Marshall.
London’s Sheridan Morley wrote that the award “established that even in the depths of a recession, while many managements were tempted to play safe with songbook analogies or classical revivals, there was still room in the West End for a musical which has the courage to think while it sings and dances. As can be heard from the original cast recording, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a challenging, difficult, dangerous show; but songs like ‘Dear One’ are going to haunt us forever, as is the memory of an odd-couple prison partnership and a heart-breaking love story about the movies of the mind and the realities of a prison cell.”
The story of the show goes back to 1986, when Fred Ebb saw the Hollywood film made of Manuel Puig's brilliant novel about the gay window-dresser and the political activist who share a South American prison cell. Hostile to each other at first, Molina tells the stories of movies he has seen to distract them from their surroundings and in time the two travel, within their confines, from mutual distrust to a remarkable, if burdened, kind of love.
Ebb took the idea of Kiss of the Spider Woman as a musical to composer John Kander, and together they took it to director Harold Prince. Prince, of course, was the man who had the first brought Kander & Ebb together for Flora the Red Menace and then Cabaret, two shows on unlikely subjects, turning the latter, a musical about the rise of Nazi Germany into a Tony Award-winning hit.
Harold Prince brought Argentine novelist Manuel Puig to New York City to meet Kander and Ebb, though playwright Terrence McNally would eventual join Kander and Ebb (with whom he had previously collaborated with on The Rink) in shaping Kiss of the Spider Woman into a stage musical. The McNally script is more closely aligned with Puig’s novel than the film version. The novel makes use of numerous movie narratives (not just the single Nazi story employed in the film version) and is more hard-hitting than the Hollywood film script.
When the cast for the full-blown production was announced, Chita, indeed, had been cast as Aurora, (once again reunited with Kander/Ebb/McNally, the same team responsible for her Tony Award-winning triumph in The Rink) as well as Canadian star Brent Carver, celebrated for his classical, contemporary and musical theatre repertoires, as Molina, and Anthony Crivello, who had worked on Broadway in both Evita and Les Miserables, as the revolutionary Valentin. The new staging brought in at least eight new songs, a drastically revised book, and a set and lighting design by Jerome Sirlin and Howell Binkley which relied more on state-of-the-art computerized projections than Hollywood camp for Molina's movie fantasies. The result was a total transformation. The strategy of routing the show through Toronto and London first allowed Spider Woman to arrive as a bona fide hit.
Hirschfeld's drawing of Spider Woman
The eye-popping publicity for Spider Woman featured Chita's face.
Biography 
