Today we are revisiting a dynamic 1990s Best Musical winner poised for a Broadway revival should the recent all-star reading having proved worthwhile, KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN.
The Day After That The awe-inspiring legacy of legendary songwriting team John Kander and Fred Ebb evidences that they have produced some of the most groundbreaking, notable and memorable musicals in Broadway history - CABARET, CHICAGO and ZORBA among them - yet the subject matter of the dark and mysterious prison-set musical drama KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN provided the team with incredibly daring subject matter and complex characters beyond anything that they had embarked on prior - with some seriously spectacular results. Based on Manuel Puig's Argentinian novel of the same name, KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN has one of the most unusual production histories of any musical in history owing to the fact that it was originally first presented as part of the SUNY Purchase New Musicals program in 1990, directed by Harold Prince and choreographed by Susan Stroman, starring Kevin Gray, John Rubinstein and Lauren Mitchell. While the program at the arts university was initially intended to be a four-year experiment in which 16 new musicals were to be workshopped - eventual Tony-winner THE SECRET GARDEN among them - only a handful ever ended up actually coming to fruition, largely as a result of the controversy ascribed to the first production of KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN.
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