Jennifer Lopez to Star in KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN Film — Page 21

It's such a bland poster, especially that Canva title treatment.

I like the image too, would have been a great basis for a poster, maybe silhouetted or framed in a Saul Bass-y web or something, but it just looks like a social media post to me as is. Not the one-sheet that represents a whole film!

joevitus said: "I have a question about the two cast recordings. Is the reprise of "Morphine Tango" missing from the Vanessa Williams revivalbecause they just oddly left it off, or is it something that luckily was captured because the original castwas recorded in London, and it was dropped for the Broadway transfer?"



Although I don't have a direct answer to that question, the Vanessa Williams CD was recorded on the cheap by reusing the orchestra recordings for the OBC. Perhaps it was a cost-cutting measure?

That Vanessa Williams cast recording feels like such a marvel considering how rare it is for a replacement to get a cast recording. Even rarer when that replacement has a record deal to consider. Rarer still when the show was bleeding money. You'd think Garth would've been a bit tighter with the purse strings to try and keep the fraud going longer. But I love that recording so thanks Garth!

joevitus said: "The Distinctive Baritone said: "
Although I don't have a direct answer to that question, the Vanessa Williams CD was recorded on the cheap by reusing the orchestra recordings for the OBC. Perhaps it was a cost-cutting measure?"

Oh, wow, that is really fascinating because the twodon't sound the same to me, though I put a lot of that down to how theywere produced(the OBC has a much warmer sound). Interesting that in fact the same orchestral tracks are being used."

Well it's simply not true that the recording was done on the cheap (Drabinsky never did anything on the cheap) or that they reused any of the tracks (which is obvious if you listen--in particular since Williams sings in different keys and different musical material is covered.)

As I said I love both recordings for different reasons but I think the second recording gives a better sense of the show due to it being produced by Thomas Z Shepard, probably the best cast album producer we have (at least since his mentor, Godard Lieberson.) He talks about the recording in his memoir last year, Recording Broadway, and trust me, he would have mentioned if he was using pre-recorded tracks as he does mention that when discussing other recordings. Here's some of what he has to say (I can't say I agree with him about the cast being better, but fascinating stuff) Any errors are due to my own typos and a poor attempt to scan from the book itself :

"Kiss of the Spider Woman finally made it to Broadway on May 3, 1993, with the same principal performers and proved to be worth the wait. The New York reviews were much better (even Frank Rich, whose 1990 review had been particularly scath-ing, found some good things to say about the show), and Carver, Crivello, and Rivera all won Tony Awards, as did McNally's book and Kander & Ebb's score. The show ultimately ran for more than two years.

So far it was a classic Broadway story about The Little Show That Could, but the surprises weren't finished. By the end of June 1994, the three Tony-winning stars had all departed, but their replacements, Howard McGillin as Molina, Brian Mitchell (later Brian Stokes Mitchell) as Valentín, and Vanessa Williams as Spider Woman/Aurora, proved to be so good that many critics reported the show, already an acclaimed hit, was actually better with the new cast.

Apparently Drabinsky agreed, because in the fall of 1994 he asked me to produce a replacement-cast album, and on December 4 we went into the studio. (We returned on December 11 for some more work-one advantage of a replacement-cast album is less-pressing deadlines.)

I deliberately didn't listen to the original-cast album before setting to work on my own recording. I was certainly curious about it I'm a big Chita Rivera fan, I love Kander & Ebb, and plenty of people had told me how great the show was but that wasn't the show I had been hired to record, and I didn't want that album to color my decisions in making my own recording.

It was almost thirty years before I finally listened to the original, out of simple curi-osity. I knew the record had been both produced and engineered by Martin Levan, an Englishman primarily known as an innovative theatrical sound designer. He had a few previous credits as a producer, mostly on Andrew Lloyd Webber shows-notably the Broadway original-cast album of Cats (1982)—but that was his only other Broadway credit. Most of the others were London-cast recordings, and I don't know that I'd ever heard his work before.

Listening to the recording, all those years later, I tried to be as objective as I could, but I have to say I didn't think much of it. It struck me as a great opportunity missed.

The three leads give very strong performances, and the recording is clear and well balanced; but that's the best I can say for it.

The problem is that Levan had simply put the singers in front of a microphone and let them sing. In my opinion he didn't make much effort to tell the story of the show, or to capture the unique atmosphere that defines Kiss of the Spider Woman as a one-of-a-kind musical (as most Kander & Ebb shows are) that lives or dies by its bruising story, its tormented characters, and its darkly romantic tone, none of which comes across in the original-cast album.

The differences are most pronounced when it comes to Chita. As always, she sings beautifully, but her songs are different in kind from the ones sung by Carver and Criv-ello as Molina and Valentín, because in the context of the play they don't actually hap-pen-they're Molina's fantasies. They're snippets from movies he's seen featuring the actress Aurora and at face value don't have anything to do with the story. When Levan recorded her simply standing in front of a microphone, he didn't capture sonically the essence of the character. She is not real. She is a figment of Molina's fantasies.

It's rare for me to get a chance to sit back, listen, and find out what somebody else brought to a project that I came in late for. The only previous time I'd had that expe-rience had been with A Little Night Music, in the end I preferred Goddard's recording, mostly because I liked the American cast better than the British cast-but it was also a beautifully produced recording. As for Spider Woman, in my opinion, I think this revival had the better cast!

As Brian Stokes Mitchell, Brian Mitchell would later become one of Broadway's biggest stars, with three Tony nominations as Best Actor in a Musical and one as Best Actor in a Play between 1999 and 2003, including a win for his performance in Kiss Me, Kate (2000). Brian was not particularly well known in 1995, but he was on his way up, having previously replaced Greg Hines in Jelly's Last Jam. Valentin is another demanding role because he's so angry and bigoted that it can be hard for an audience to take to him. But Brian's performance was absolutely brilliant. He did a wonderful job tracing Valentín's arc from his hostile, tough-as-nails earlier scenes to the more human, more vulnerable man he is by the end of the show.

As for Vanessa, she was making her Broadway debut. She'd majored in musical theater at Syracuse University but had left in 1983 before completing her degree (she ultimately got it in 2008 ). She had gotten nice reviews for her work in two professional productions in 1985 and 1989, but Broadway was definitely a big step up.

The year before joining Kiss of the Spider Woman, she'd had her first No. 1 single with "Save the Best for Last," which she sang live at the 1993 Grammy Awards. (I was there, nominated three times for Crazy for You, Jelly's Last Jam, and The Secret Garden, though I lost to Jay Saks and Guys and Dolls.)

John Kander was there the whole day, smiling all the way through the sessions. He and David Krane, who orchestrated and arranged the dance music, were the only two of the creative team who came back to the studio for the replacement-cast sessions, and I did miss the input of Fred Ebb and Terrence McNally.

The editing and mixing were a lot of fun because the recording is full of sound effects and unusual acoustic textures-prisoners screaming in the distance, sirens going off, dream sequences, etc. We brought Vanessa's vocals in and out as if in Molina's dreams.

One of my fondest memories of this recording is that the sessions were at a studio in New York and were going very, very well-we were actually on schedule! So when the singers and the orchestra musicians went out for dinner, John Kander and I opted not to go with them. We'd been there for nine hours, so we were tired but happy, and we just sat there in the studio where we had paper cups and where we sipped from a bottle of scotch.

It wasn't me who brought the bottle; it was either John or somebody else, but there it was. It was a most enjoyable time."

Updated On: 9/18/25 at 05:28 PM

AEA AGMA SM said: "
I can’t find my copy of the script to check to see what has been in the licensed script, but in the Playbill that’s on Playbill Vault the Morphine Tango Reprise is not listed, so it may indeed have been cut between London and Broadway. And of course since I’ve listened to the original recording so much, I don’t trust my memory of seeing the tour some 30 years ago as to whether it was in then or not"

I just checked my playbill from the tour (which I saw in Vancouver with Chita, John Dossett and Jeff Hyslop--as a Canadian kid growing up with Today's Special I admit it was wild seeing him first as the Phantom in the Canuck tour and then Molina.) Morphine Tango is only listed once in the same place as it is on the Williams cast album. I can't imagine TZS, who was known for making his cast albums pretty complete and, would have left it off if it was still in the show.

joevitus said: "I don't really like the idea of making Molina trans--it doesn't representeither howPuig or later McNally conceptualized the character. And it feels uncomfortably reductive. Because, yes, there were, are and always will be effeminate gay men who do not view themselves as trans women. Effeminate doesn't equal trans. It makes me wonder if, in the future, looking over the diaries, recorded conversations, etc. of men from our era and earlier eraswho used terms like "she" or "sister" or "Mary" or whatever are going to be interpreted forfuture generations as "actually trans," when in fact it is just the language of some members of the gaycommunity.

BUT we are in a period that is so hateful to trans people that I absolutely LOVEa major movie musical with a trans woman at its center--and one much more likely to gain mainstream interest than, you know, that previous one."

I don't have much to add to what has been said about the question of Molina and gender (and John Adams, you're absolutely right that I misappropriated a quote to you--I apparently still suck at the BWW system of quoting posts.) But did want to agree with others that I love the discussion this has brought up (I'm sure there'll be more thoughts when more of us have seen the film.) And Joevitus, your entire post that I quoted above is worthy of emphasizing I think, and two sentiments I share (even while I still am sticking to my perhaps reductive grumblings about a character I always have seen as an important, and still rare, gay male lead character in Broadway musicals now being trans.)

EricMontreal22 said: "joevitus said: "I don't really like the idea of making Molina trans--it doesn't representeither howPuig or later McNally conceptualized the character. And it feels uncomfortably reductive. Because, yes, there were, are and always will be effeminate gay men who do not view themselves as trans women. Effeminate doesn't equal trans. It makes me wonder if, in the future, looking over the diaries, recorded conversations, etc. of men from our era and earlier eraswho used terms like "she" or "sister" or "Mary" or whatever are going to be interpreted forfuture generations as "actually trans," when in fact it is just the language of some members of the gaycommunity.

BUT we are in a period that is so hateful to trans people that I absolutely LOVEa major movie musical with a trans woman at its center--and one much more likely to gain mainstream interest than, you know, that previous one."

I don't have much to add to what has been said about the question of Molina and gender (and John Adams, you're absolutely right that I misappropriated a quote to you--I apparently still suck at the BWW system of quoting posts.) But did want to agree with others that I love the discussion this has brought up (I'm sure there'll be more thoughts when more of us have seen the film.) And Joevitus, your entire post that I quoted above is worthy of emphasizing I think, and two sentiments I share (even while I still am sticking to my perhaps reductive grumblings about a character I always have seen as an important, and still rare, gay male lead character in Broadway musicals now being trans.)"

Aw, shucks. You make me blush.

Ah that makes sense. I remember from the Drabinsky doc that they really were bleeding money basically from the get go (well after initial financial success with the Toronto Phantom and Canadian tour, etc.) (The main other thing I remember about the doc is how hard Chita went for Drabinsky, still saying she felt he did nothing wrong... From her POV though I can see where she was coming from.)

That's a good point about Vanessa. I think she's gotten good notices in London for Prada, but her Broadway roles since Spider Woman seem to get pretty mediocre notices (I guess I'm thinking mostly of Into the Woods--although I can't really blame her for how meh people are, especially retroactively, about the Lapine revival, and Sondheim on Sondheim...)

I wish every previously released cast album had a digital booklet of those liner notes.

Haven't seen the "Spider Woman" film yet, but if I understand correctly, the two songs from the 1990 Purchase production that have been restored for the film are "Every Day" and "Never You." At Purchase, "Every Day" was begun by Molina (John Rubinstein) but then taken over by the film-within-the-musical's romantic leading man, Armando (Donn Simione), who sang it to Lauren Mitchell's Aurora; the number included an extended tap dance for Simione. "Never You" was a love ballad sung by Armando to Aurora, with Aurora eventually joining in.