Along Comes the Spider

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Show business loves two kinds of news: the gritty comeback and the sparkling debut. One sentimentalizes the past; the other sentimentalizes the future. Both burnish the legend of individuality in a largely collaborative medium. By this yardstick, Broadway ought to cheer sevenfold the last and best musical of the season, Kiss of the Spider Woman. Its U.S. debut next week will turn the clock back to high noon for four long-absent old hands aged about 60 and herald the dawn of three substantial younger talents.

Kiss is the first new musical success for director Hal Prince since The Phantom of the Opera, which he staged in London in 1986. It is the first new musical success for composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb since The Rink in 1984. For star Chita Rivera, a seven-time Tony nominee still dancing at 60, Kiss is her first Broadway show since Jerry's Girls in 1986. During that run, she broke her leg in a car accident and was told she might never again walk, let alone skitter, strut and tango eight times a week as a combination film- noir diva and emblem of death.

The show also marks the Broadway baptism of Brent Carver, one of Canada's leading actors for a decade. As a fey, movie-obsessed interior decorator imprisoned for homosexuality, Carver far surpasses the cinematic performance of the role that won William Hurt a 1985 Oscar. In the less rewarding part of a revolutionary cell mate, Anthony Crivello acts with bluff intensity and sings with beauty and power. The men's cramped quarters and surrounding tiers of cagelike squalor become a park, a movie palace, a Russian alley, even a vast, symbolic spiderweb through inspired film projections by set designer Jerome Sirlin, making a dazzling Broadway debut after a career in the avant- garde and in opera.

Raw star power does not ensure triumph -- this season's major musical disappointment, The Goodbye Girl, was shaped by comparably gilded names -- but Kiss is a proven commodity. The same production, with the same cast, opened in London six months ago to deserved acclaim. Some reviewers were uncomfortable with the subject matter, which includes torture, threats of anal rape, and a disquieting scene in which one man washes the other after a bout of poison- induced diarrhea. Admits Prince: "We couldn't have gotten this project financed a decade ago."

For most audience members, however, the artistry of the production overcame its harshness. Many particularly enjoyed the ending, which manages to be at once cynical, unhappy, exultant and uplifting -- a bundle of contradictions faithful to the novel by the late Manuel Puig. He consulted on the script and suggested a key plot change from the film: when the mismatched cell mates briefly turn romantic, the bond is not love but a quid pro quo transaction, each using the other to serve a purpose the other has not embraced. Only after the deal goes ruinously wrong do they discover true devotion.