Word: ebb
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kiss is the first new musical success for director Hal Prince since The Phantom of the Opera, which he staged in London in 1986. It is the first new musical success for composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb since The Rink in 1984. For star Chita Rivera, a seven-time Tony nominee still dancing at 60, Kiss is her first Broadway show since Jerry's Girls in 1986. During that run, she broke her leg in a car accident and was told she might never again walk, let alone skitter, strut and tango eight times a week...
...start of the turnabout may fairly be dated to the night Rivera saw the original version as a guest of Kander and Ebb. Like the critics, she wasn't enchanted: "The stage was so big that the tension just went bye-bye, there was so much space between the two men in that cell." Tactfully, her hosts did not tell her she had been considered, and passed over, for the title role as the fantasy creature of the decorator's reveries. Having cast an actress a generation younger, they belatedly realized they needed, as Rivera laughingly phrases it, "a diva...
AUTHOR: MUSIC BY JOHN KANDER; LYRICS BY FRED EBB; BOOK BY TERRENCE McNALLY...
...rousing and moving musical to reach the West End since Miss Saigon -- is Kiss of the Spider Woman, which retells the story of Manuel Puig's novel and the noted film. The new version comes from a North American cast and creators, headed by composer John Kander, lyricist Fred Ebb and director Harold Prince -- the makers of Cabaret, which Kiss often recalls in its silvery visual shimmer, sexual ambiguity, bursts of surreality and blend of grim politics and show-biz glitter. But unlike Cabaret, which used a Berlin nightclub for satiric comment on the rise of the Nazis, Kiss looks...
...social insurrection of homosexuality (Brent Carver). This musical must be among the first to feature torture, mutilation and threats of anal rape and is surely the first to portray one character washing another after a bout of diarrhea. Book writer Terrence McNally and nonpareil lyricist Ebb make the points, not always beloved of the Marxist left represented by the revolutionary, that there is no political freedom without sexual freedom and that love outdoes ideology at breeding bravery...