Bill Condon knows how to bring a musical to the big screen.
His screenplay for the 2002 Oscar-winning “Chicago” helped reinvigorate the genre after a long fallow period. He then stepped behind the camera to write and direct 2006’s “Dreamgirls,” a movie that won Jennifer Hudson an Academy Award for her debut feature role. In 2017, he pulled double-duty, directing the live-action “Beauty and the Beauty” and sharing writing credit on “The Greatest Showman,” both massive hits. And today, he sees the release of his latest movie musical, “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” featuring Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna and newcomer Tonatiuh.
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The secret to a good musical adaptation? Condon has a seemingly simple answer. “The crucial question you have to ask when you are revisiting something is: is it necessary?” he admits. “Why do it?”
In the case of this new “Spider Woman,” there were several factors. Condon had read the 1976 Manuel Puig novel and seen both the 1985 film adaptation and the 1993 Broadway musical with music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, the duo behind “Chicago.” The story focuses on the relationship between two political prisoners — a gay window dresser named Molina (Tonatiuh) and a revolutionary named Valentin (Luna) — and how the power of movies helps them survive imprisonment. In Condon’s version, it’s one film in particular, a Golden Age musical called “Kiss of the Spider Woman” that Molina recounts to his cellmate.
Condon had an appreciation for the previous adaptations. “Each version was groundbreaking in its time,” he says. “And as a gay man who didn’t have that many stories being told in either mainstream cinema or on Broadway, it felt important and personal.” As he thought about making his film, he revisited the novel and was struck by how ahead of its time Puig’s work had been. “There are so many ways in which the world was finally catching up to what he’d written about,” he notes. “There was this examination of gender fluidity and this real commitment to these characters and their stories.” And though the previous versions had portrayed a sexual relationship between the pair, it had been presented as largely transactional. Says Condon, “I felt it had never really been told as a love story before.”
Though the film’s primary love story is between the cellmates, there are also the relationships playing out in the fictional movie musical set within the movie, which stars Lopez as an actress playing both the unlucky-in-love heroine and the diabolical Spider Woman of the title. Luna and Tonatiuh also appear in the film-within-the-film, their dashing personas and colorful surroundings a stark juxtaposition to the dreary prison walls.
Condon knew from the start he wanted Lopez for his film but even he was impressed by just how well she nailed the nuance of the role. “I was obviously confident she could do the singing and dancing, but it went beyond that,” he praises. “She captured the essence of a studio-trained ‘40s and ‘50s musical diva, the little adjustments, their elocution style, the way they moved.”
Casting Lopez and then Luna helped relieve the pressure to cast a big-name as the male lead, paving the way for a revelatory star turn from Tonatiuh. And Condon took other big risks, making some major changes from the stage incarnation.
In the stage version, there is no delineation between the worlds when it comes to the music — both the prisoners and the fictional film characters sing. But Condon choose to eliminate the numbers in the prison scenes so as not to “ask the audience to make the leap to watching hard-bitten political prisoners sing out loud” — something he notes works better on stage.
Instead, he says, “There was a chance to let the musical numbers exist in the world of performance and, because it’s about movie musicals, that’s where the numbers naturally live.” So, the songs are all diegetic, where everyone present acknowledges them. (As opposed to non-diegetic singing, which is for the audience and not necessarily heard by all the characters.) Condon had made a similar choice with “Chicago,” where the musical numbers exist only in the fantasies of the main protagonist.
When it came to “Dreamgirls,” Condon struck a happy medium – at the start of the film, the characters are singing as part of live performances. It isn’t until several songs in, “Steppin’ to the Bad Side,” where the singing is non-diegetic. Condon admits he made this choice to help ease audiences into the format. “It was intentional, and maybe a mistake,” he notes. “Maybe we should have just embraced it right from the start.” But he wasn’t sure that audiences were yet accustomed to fully sung-through musicals. “With some sung-through musicals made to movies, they can sort of collapse under their own weight,” he notes. “I think in a movie, when everything’s sung at you for over two hours, there’s a relentlessness to it that I think slowly undermines the dramatic kind of power of it.”
He knew, however, that Hudson’s show-stopping “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” could not be done as part of a performance in the film. Says Condon, “That’s a number where a woman is singing her heart out to the man she’s losing. You can’t put that in the quotation marks of a stage performance.” It also helped that, by that time, audiences had begun embracing movie musicals again thanks to films like “Chicago” and “Moulin Rouge!”
Musicals are still a tough sell for some, and we’ve all seen those trailers that seem to want to obscure the fact they’re advertising a musical. But Condon says that was never an issue with his distributor, Roadside Attractions, Lionsgate and LD Entertainment. “I really applaud [them] because they went the other way,” he says. “All the materials make it clear we’re selling a musical.”
Condon admits such an experience, from shooting to release, has been both unusual and remarkable. “I’d call this a unicorn movie,” he adds. “It’s a tough time for unicorn movies and a tough time for theatrical exhibition in general. But the people who wound up buying the movie did it in the way that all great show business things happen, which is forgetting the logic, forgetting the business, and just doing it out of love.”
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