Kiss of the Spider Woman review – Hollywood high kicks into a slick musical revival

Curve, Leicester
Two prisoners escape their grim Buenos Aires jail into golden age fantasy sequences that elicit big belting showtunes from Anna-Jane Casey’s baddie

Kander and Ebb’s early-90s musical is having a moment. Next week, Bill Condon’s movie, starring Diego Luna, Tonatiuh and Jennifer Lopez, goes on general release. And here, touring to Bristol and Southampton, is a slick, earnest revival by director Paul Foster. Despite the sudden focus, this is a rarity: fans of the musical and the Manuel Puig novel on which it is based have had to wait since 1992 for a major new staging.

There are possible reasons for this. The setting in a Buenos Aires prison is one of them, although it is not simply that Kiss of the Spider Woman is grim. There are other musicals with grim settings: Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret among them. More than that, it is hard for a production to make it grim enough without distressing the audience. Yet the more of a sanitised Broadway version it becomes, the less the fantasy sequences seem like an escape.