Kiss of the Spider Woman: ‘a triumph all round’

Everyone is familiar with their hits “Cabaret” and “Chicago”, said Clive Davis in The Times. Yet John Kander and Fred Ebb’s later musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman” – “a fiercely intelligent portrait” of two men who form an unlikely bond in a prison cell in Argentina during its Dirty War – “has slipped from view”.

Now, though, a new film version is about to land, and we also have this “glorious, scaled-down” stage production in Leicester (then Bristol). Based on Manuel Puig’s novel, and with a book by Terrence McNally, the piece is “as bold and thoughtful as any Sondheim”, and the “dynamics of a drama” played out in a cramped space are well served by Paul Foster’s “chamber approach” here. With deft choreography, and a full sound drawn from a small band, the evening “is a triumph all round”.

It’s an “exceptional” production, agreed Holly O’Mahony in The Stage – as “smooth as spider’s silk”. Fabian Soto Pacheco gives a wonderfully layered turn as Molina, the gay window-dresser jailed for gross indecency, who survives his incarceration by retreating into “elaborate fantasies” based on old movies, said Susan Novak on British Theatre. His flamboyance never tips into caricature, and along with wit and warmth there is real pain. “Opposite him, George Blagden brings steely conviction” to the part of Valentin, the committed political activist whose “ideological armour gradually develops cracks”. The pair provide the drama with its “beating heart”, while Anna-Jane Casey thrills as the film star Aurora (and her sinister Spider Woman alter ego), who appears in fantasy sequences to embody fear, desire and death.

Kander and Ebb have form in mixing gritty with glamorous, said Holly Williams in The Telegraph. They pulled it off perfectly in “Cabaret” and “Chicago”. But this brutal tale, which switches from scenes of torture to high-camp fantasia, sets a greater challenge. Foster’s production (the show’s first major revival in the UK since 1992) has much to recommend it, but it “can’t quite untangle the Spider Woman’s knotty web”.

Curve Theatre, Leicester. Until 23 April, then Bristol Old Vic and on