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An angel and an arachnid presided over the biggest week of the season as two long-awaited productions touched down on Broadway, Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and the Harold Prince musical Kiss of the Spider Woman. Hype or no hype, "Millennium" is the biggest, most intelligent, most passionate American play in recent memory. Kushner's 3 1/2 -hour work (the first half of his "Gay Fantasia on National Themes") ranges far and wide in 34 scenes that shift with cinematic speed from sharp-focus emotions to wide-angle ideas. His 20 characters (played by an intrepid eight-actor ensemble) are centered by two couples, gay lovers Prior and Louis, and Joe and Harper, a Mormon husband and wife. The AIDS that attacks Prior not only drives the fearful Louis to desert him, but becomes a metaphor for the breakdown of conjugal relationships, political systems and cosmic forces. Kushner embodies this breakdown in the real-life person of Roy Cohn, the ruthless wheeler-dealer lawyer and homophobic closet gay. Power-driven, self-hating, Cohn is also wickedly funny: he is the appallingly seductive Satan in Kushner's contemporary Paradise Lost.
George C. Wolfe is the perfect director for the play's ricochet rhythm between realism and fantasy, although only a theatrical Superman could have nailed down every nuance in this epic without at least six months' rehearsal time. "Angels" is essentially an ensemble play, and Ron Leibman, in a bravura performance as Cohn, comes within an inch of cracking the show's unity. But this play is too big to crack, and watching Leibman's Cohn scheme, scorn, plead, rage, threaten, hate, love, fear and defy is a rare chance to see a worldclass American virtuoso act to the max.
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The virtuosity in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" belongs to Harold Prince. Staging this musical version of Argentine Manuel Puig's novel (with side glances at Hector Babenco's 1985 movie), Prince, with his brilliant set designer Jerome Sirlin, creates an entire world out of a prison cell. The cell contains Molina (Brent Carver), a gay window dresser, and Valentin (Anthony Crivello), a revolutionary. Molina escapes prison through his B-movie fantasies starring his favorite schlock actress, Aurora (Chita Rivera). Egged on by the sadistic warden to betray Valentin, Molina instead falls in love with the macho Marxist.
Prince's stagecraft and a punchy score by the veteran composer-lyricist team of John Kander and Fred Ebb can't quite mesh the show's serious and glitzy sides into a coherent whole. "Spider" is a dazzling Broadway show that Broadwaylays itself into trouble. The amazing 60-year-old Chita Rivera is irresistible in her singing, dancing, shake-it-and-take-it production numbers. But the true heart of the show is the superb performance by the Canadian Carver-emotionally true, musically strong. Unfortunately, this performance is undermined by Terrence McNally's book. Puig had the cellmates come together in two poignant love scenes. But in the show Valentin makes love only to get Molina to deliver a message when he's released. "Angels in America" presents the realities of gay life with no apologies. Apparently, "Spider" didn't trust its audience to accept the truth.
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