Kiss of the Spider Woman Trailer Goes Full Musical Extravaganza

A good story can spark a franchise, but a great story can be adapted again and again into countless forms. Les Misérables, for example, started as an 1862 epic wartime novel by Victor Hugo, but in the years since, it’s been adapted into movies, TV shows, comics, manga, radio plays, and stage plays. But probably the best known version of the vast story is the Broadway musical and its 2012 film adaptation.

Now, another oft-adapted work is getting the same treatment: a star-studded movie adaptation of a Broadway musical, and it’s being lauded as a return to form for the movie musical genre as a whole.

In 1976, Manuel Puig wrote Kiss of the Spider Woman, an experimental novel told in dialogue and stream-of-consciousness thoughts. It followed two prisoners as they passed the time in their cell by recounting old movies. It was later adapted into a stage play, a movie starring William Hurt and Raul Julia, and then a Broadway musical in 1993 starring Chita Rivera. Now, that musical is getting a glitzy movie adaptation starring Diego Luna, Jennifer Lopez, and Tonatiuh. Check out the trailer below:

This new adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman is written and directed by Bill Condon, who previously wrote the Academy Award-winning movie adaptation of Chicago. Much like Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman plays with the concept of fantasy. In classic movie musical fashion, characters go from the prison cell to a glitzy Hollywood set and back again in the blink of an eye.

Of course, it’s not all about having fun imagining Jennifer Lopez in different flashy outfits singing and dancing: these “movies” only serve as distraction for the political unrest both characters are embroiled in, prompting their relationship to change from enemies to cautious allies to something else entirely.

This story is made for a movie musical adaptation: it hinges on the power of imagination and the movies to get its characters through the most devastating circumstances, and movie musicals are entirely about fantasy. As Diego Luna’s Valentin says in the trailer, “Nobody sings in real life,” only to prompt Tonatiuh’s Molina to reply, “Well maybe they should.”

Movie musicals are one of the few mediums where this fantasy can be accepted as fact over and over, and that’s exactly what Kiss of the Spider Woman relies upon — accepting glitzy Hollywood dreams as reality when the real reality is much worse.

Kiss of the Spider Woman premieres in theaters on October 10.