Kiss of the Spider Woman- Bristol Old Vic ★★★★

Kiss of the Spider Woman has long occupied a curious place in the musical theatre landscape, a show spoken of far more often than it is encountered. Since its Broadway premiere in 1992, it has lingered at the margins of the canon, half‑remembered, half‑mythologised. Which makes its appearance at Bristol Old Vic feel not so much like a revival as an emergence, something long submerged breaking the surface again. What immediately becomes apparent is just how singular this musical remains. Set within an Argentinian prison under a fascist regime, the framework is stark, two men sharing a cell, one a Marxist revolutionary, the other imprisoned for “corrupting public morals.” But the show refuses to stay locked inside that realism. Instead, it fractures. It drifts. From the darkness of the cell, a second world is conjured, one built from old Hollywood romances, Technicolor melodrama and cinematic glamour, and gradually, insistently, that world begins to seep into the first. Molina’s stories…