Jennifer Lopez Cries After Premiere of Spectacular ‘Kiss of a Spider Woman’

PARK CITY, Utah—“I pity people who don’t like musicals.”

Filmmaker Bill Condon, the writer-director behind a murderer’s row of film adaptations of musicals including Chicago (heh), Dreamgirls, The Greatest Showman, and Beauty and the Beast, added that line to his new adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Suffice it so say, it’s a mantra for Condon, who repeated the line—and gladly took credit for scripting it—in front of a packed audience at Kiss of the Spider Woman’s very well-received premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where anticipation of the film’s debut (and star Jennifer Lopez’s arrival in Park City) had been the talk of the town for days.

In fact, it became clear that an enthusiastic, unabashed love for musicals was shared by a very emotional Lopez and co-star Tonatiuh, the young queer actor in his star-making debut as a film lead.

Telling the audience in a Q&A after the screening that watching West Side Story every Thanksgiving with her mother growing up is what made her want to be a performer, Lopez—sporting a spider-web dress that hypnotized with its glittering—broke down into tears. “I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life,” she said. “That was always my goal, and this is the first time I’ve gotten to do it. It’s my dream come true.”

Condon’s movie-musical Kiss of the Spider Woman is an adaptation of the 1993 Broadway musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, which was expanded from the 1985 film version of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which was based on the 1976 novel by Argentinian writer Manuel Puig.

It’s timeless by design, particularly in Condon’s version of technicolor, MGM-era musical sequences. They’re all brought to life with an incredible stop-the-show (after each of her 11 musical numbers) song-and-dance performance from Lopez. And it’s timely by circumstance. Introducing the film, Condon read a line from President Trump’s executive order that the U.S. government would only recognize two sexes, male and female. The characters in the film, the people involved in making it, and, perhaps, the audience affected by the story, Condon said, might not agree with that sentiment.

The film follows two cellmates in an Argentinian prison in 1981. Valentin Arregui (Diego Luna) is a Marxist revolutionary who has remained tight-lipped in the face of torture by those trying to extract information about his fellow dissidents. Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) is a femme gay window dresser imprisoned over his sexuality, who becomes Valentin’s new cellmate, accepting an offer from the warden to work as a mole and siphon secrets from Valentin in exchange for an early release.

To establish a connection, Molina confesses a lifelong obsession with movies, once a coping mechanism to retreat from his self-loathing growing up as queer—and now an escapism from the horrors of prison. Posters of his favorite films wallpaper his side of the cell, including one featuring the actress he’s most obsessed with: Ingrid Luna (Lopez), a star of classic movie musicals and Latina icon.

As Molina and Valentin forge an unlikely bond, Molina brings an initially begrudging Valentin along with him to the movies, spending their nights narrating the plot of Ingrid Luna’s most impressive cinematic triumph, the musical romance Kiss of the Spider Woman. As he recounts the tale, the scenes come to life in a daydream, with Lopez acting out the tale.

These sequences are thrilling. Condon lights and stages them as if they were filmed on a MGM soundstage 70 years ago during the genre’s Golden Age. The colors are saturated and vibrant, and the sets all dressed to look like a utopian version of the locations they’re meant to represent. The costumes, the hair—they’re all dripping with glamor. And then there’s the dancing.

Lopez’s emotion while explaining that she’s waited her entire life for a part in a movie musical like this one is understandable, because she was clearly born to do this. Condon shoots the numbers like they would in the Old Hollywood days, with long, uninterrupted shots filmed from a distance, so you can see the entire cast dance as if the camera was a proscenium at a theater. Lopez spins through the choreography like a celluloid tornado, her almost blinding radiance cracking through her voracious storm of talent.

If you can get over the “wow, I’m watching J.Lo absolutely kill it” of it all, you’re instantly transported to that movie-musical heyday; Lopez’s A-list status then would’ve deservedly been alongside the genre’s icons like Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Cyd Charisse.

But these sequences are, remember, an escape. They’re a fantasy, and the reality that they are a respite from is, as tempting as it is to focus solely on raving about Lopez in those numbers, at the backbone and the heart of Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Molina and Valentin’s world is grim. Forget about the torture within the prison walls. They both have identities they bravely refuse to strip themselves of: Molina, their sexuality and desire to feel like a woman, and Valentin, his political righteousness—no matter how dangerous that is. The world outside their cell, they know from experience, has little for them in the way of happiness, so they have resigned themselves to the agony of their existence.

The fictional movie that Molina is recounting to Valentin is about a successful, beautiful woman cursed by a Spider Woman with the inability to be in love. Should she give into that romance, she’d have to sacrifice her paramour to the Spider Woman. The further into the plot Molina’s dramatization extends, the clearer the parallels are to Molina and Valentin’s own lives, and their burgeoning, increasingly intimate relationship. As they evolve from cellmates to friends to lovers, questions haunt about what is their curse, and what will be their sacrifice.

There’s remarkable contrast between these scenes and the splashy musical numbers. The dim, damp, claustrophobic cell is a far cry from the exuberantly bright universe of the Lopez-led film sequences. Tonatiuh and Luna’s easy, yet intense chemistry and Condon’s direction finds a tenderness in all that would otherwise be dismal and depressing. Together, they find an emotional crescendo that rivals the exuberance of the movie-within-the-movie.

Condon confirms that he’s simply unrivaled when it comes to directing movie musicals, and the three leads deliver a trifecta of tour de forces. But there is a gripe to be had, and it’s at risk of being a fatal one: The songs in Kiss of the Spider Woman just aren’t…great. The music was written by the legendary duo John Kander & Fred Ebb, known for smash hits Chicago and Cabaret. Aside from the title number, there’s nothing in Kiss of the Spider Woman that rises to those productions’ level of iconic.

Even that, though, doesn’t really matter. I pity people who don’t like musicals. And I pity even more people who can’t find a reason to champion this one.