Kiss of the Spider Woman is not your entry-level musical. Even its characters seem to know this: One of their first conversations after becoming cellmates involves prisoners Luis Molina (played by the actor known mononymously as Tonatiuh) and Valentín Arregui (Diego Luna) debating the genre’s different merits.
It's perhaps an odd conversation for them to have, given it's taking place during Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the 1980s. Molina’s crime of having a homosexual liaison and Arregui’s as being a revolutionary organizer mean they're both facing long stints in an institution whose guards regularly taunt, torture and even poison inmates for information.
But their dialogue soon takes a lighter turn. Instead of talking about th e dripping dankness of political repression and unjust imprisonm ent, they get to chatting about Kiss of the Spider Woman, the fictional movie-in-a-movie that Molina happens to adore.
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