‘Kiss Of The Spider Woman’: World Premiere Of Jennifer Lopez Musical Receives Standing Ovation At Sundance

Anthony D'Alessandro and Natalie Sitek

26 January 2025 at 10:37 pm·2-min read

If Sundance was looking for a way to raise the temperature of this year’s festival they found it Sunday night with Jennifer Lopez and the feature take of the Broadway musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, which played a packed Eccles house with plenty of turnaways. Buyers in attendance included Searchlight and Mubi. The movie is up for sale from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity.

Taking the stage, Lopez, filmmaker Bill Condon and big screen discovery Tonatiuh (who plays Molina) received a standing ovation. When Sundance Director Eugene Hernandez said Tonatiuh’s name again on stage, the entire Eccles roared. “What a way to get to know you!” beamed Hernandez.

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“I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life,” Lopez told the crowd as she remembered watching West Side Story as a kid. She said it was always her goal to star in musicals and the movie gave her the chance to do it.

A marquee title in this year’s lineup, Kiss of the Spider Woman has Lopez starring in the role made famous by Chita Rivera in the early 90s musical and by Sonia Braga in the 1985 Oscar-winning film. Lopez plays Aurora/Ingrid Luna and the Spider Woman, all figments of the imagination of Molina, who has been jailed during a time of dictatorship in Argentina. He’s in for an indecent act. His revolutionary cellmate, Valentin, is played by Diego Luna.

For Condon, the independently-financed feature musical repped a big homecoming to the festival which launched his career back in 1998 with Gods and Monsters.

Condon showed the movie to Sundance programmers after the election; the movie speaking to the current conservative climate which is contra non-binary and LGBTQ+ groups.

Said the director, “The promise of the movie is that somehow people can see each other as individuals.”

Lopez spoke about how the filmmaker was committed to making a full bloodied MGM musical, complete with full dance numbers with long shots sans cuts.

Beamed Condon, “I do love working with a diva.”

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