Idol worship Kiss of the Spider Woman, Women on the Verge of HRT BY CAROLYN CLAY

There hasn’t been such a collision of violence and Vegas since Siegfried’s friend Roy got mauled by his own tiger. The 1993 Kander & Ebb musical, with book by Terrence McNally, based on Argentine writer Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, won seven Tony Awards, but it remains a jarring piece of work. SpeakEasy Stage Company offers a razzle-dazzle revival (at the Roberts Studio Theatre in the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion through December 3), but it can’t solder the disconnection between suffering and sequins that is the musical’s tragicomic flaw.

Puig’s novel (which was also made into a 1985 Hector Babenco film) focuses on Molina, a gay window dresser, and Valentín, a Marxist revolutionary, who get stuck together in a jail cell, where they’re terrorized by factotums of a fascist Latin American government. The book is also a paean to the seductive, healing power of the movies, with childhood cinéaste Molina sharing in minute detail his favorites with his at-first-contemptuous cellmate. "The more you face reality," he asserts in song, "the more you scar."

The ritual forges a humane connection between the incarcerated odd couple that leads to a futile if mensch-making act of sacrifice. But the B-movies Molina chronicles in Puig’s novel to distract Valentín from his physical and political agonies are dark and dangerous (if arguably cheesy) adventures involving panther women, witch doctors, and zombies. In the musical, naturally, the vehicles of Molina’s beloved Aurora (whose one scary character was the death-dispensing Spider Woman) become movie musicals — Technicolor amalgams of song, dance, and artifice that make an unseemly distraction from the painful business at hand in the prison. Neither is the score by the iconic team of composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago) one of their best: rather than steal from their estimable selves, they provide Latin-tinged numbers that can echo Andrew Lloyd Webber, Les Misérables, or A Chorus Line.

Probably because of its less-than-crowd-pleasing merger of serious content and Broadway glitz (not to mention its tender depiction of Molina’s ministrations to Valentín after a bout of diarrhea), Kiss of the Spider Woman, for all its plaudits, is not often done. Mixing off-stage screams and the parading of bloody torture victims with old-movie scenarios done up like Vegas takes on Bird of Paradise and Anna Karenina is risky business. It’s also a hell of an undertaking, one that SpeakEasy pulls off without stinting on excess, Fosse-tinged choreography, or human feeling (despite McNally’s gag-strewn book).

For the three principal roles, director Paul Daigneault has turned not to Boston musical theater’s usual solid suspects but to three singers who are largely unknown, and the gamble pays off. John King is a flamboyant yet innocent Molina who whether worshipping his Aurora or showboating through a smoky morphine-induced dream (complete with dazed "male" nurses in skewed caps) displays an effortless singing voice and boyish beatitude. Recently minted Boston Conservatory MFA Brendan McNab is a gnarled, priggish Valentín who rises to the "One Day More" occasion of "The Day After That." (It’s not his fault the script makes Valentín more romantic and calculating than revolutionary.) And engineering-student-turned-A-Chorus-Line-stalwart-turned-lawyer-turned-full-time-mom Christine A. Maglione steps right into the tall silver shoes of Chita Rivera as hootchy-kootchy River Styx–wading bombshell Aurora. Abetted by a cocky quartet of male dancers, she pulls off the centerpiece moves of David Connolly’s choreography, climbs Eric Levenson’s cage/web of a set, glimmers in Seth Bodie’s elaborate costumes, and exudes a sinister seductiveness without coming off as some camp combination of Carmen Miranda and the Reaper. Musical director Paul S. Katz conducts an unseen but appreciated 12-person orchestra, and there is a vocally sweet performance by Veronica Kuehn as the woman Valentín loves better than he does the revolution.

Women don’t do much about loving themselves in Marie Jones’s Women on the Verge of HRT, which is getting its New England premiere from Súgán Theatre Company (at the BCA Plaza Theatre through November 20). This 1995 work by the author of the Olivier Award–winning Stones in His Pockets means to be a defiant feminist comedy, but it comes across as self-negating, with its two 40-something protagonists — Belfast women who have traveled to Irish country crooner Daniel O’Donnell’s annual Donegal open house for his fans — bemoaning having been relegated to the "sexual slag heap," from which the only options seem to be to settle into the dross and dream or to decry one’s fate.

Women on the Verge of HRT (the initials refer to hormone replacement therapy) is a strange, potentially intriguing work in which a sit-com first act is followed by a surreal second in which the two women and a romantic waiter called Fergal venture into the Donegal dawn to invoke the spirit of the banshee — a mythical woman unlucky in love and ostensibly transformed into a withered and bitter spectral presence whose windy wailing foreshadows death (whether hormonal or actual). But the play, which probably means to assert that women "of a certain age" have passion aplenty, seems to acquiescence to rather than thumb its nose at the notion that ladies over 40 are hags who had best hang it up.

Certainly the disparities raised in the play are real: how often has it been observed that male movie stars with maps of hard living on their faces are repeatedly paired with Botox-pumped women half their age? Also real, it would seem, are the legion of Irish women who worship at the shrine of the unctuous O’Donnell, who’s "just as big as Barry Manilow on a smaller scale." Women begins, hilariously, with Súgán artistic director Carmel O’Reilly’s winsome if aging Anna settling down in her hotel room with an "Anna loves Daniel" pillow case and a video of her icon warbling "What ever happened to old-fashioned love?" before emerald hills and his own grandiose estate as women disembark from buses to have their photos taken or present him with a teapot. (My favorite detail of Robert Scanlan’s spitfire of a production is that, Anna having frozen the video, the countenance of O’Donnell presides over the rest of the act, looking like a slick, sick cow.) Then Anna’s feistier companion, pissed-off divorcée Vera (a bristling Judith McIntyre), turns up with a chip on her shoulder big enough to marry. But Vera doesn’t so much want a husband as she wants to remain sexually "visible" in a society where youth is the lodestar of poets and porn purveyors alike.

The most interesting parts of act one are the little out-of-nowhere musical interludes (written by Neil Martin with accompaniment by musical director Jeffrey Goldberg, who with keyboard is whisked into view by the drawing of a curtain). These songs are rendered in clear, unornamented voices, whether the spurned Anna and Vera are demanding "the right to reply/When told my passion should lie down and die" or Derry Woodhouse’s Fergal is morphing into O’Donnell to work the BCA crowd. The second act takes a deeper swerve from reality, with the women joining Fergal on the beach where the fabled banshee burps up whoever the ladies wish to question, including Vera’s preening ex, his young wife, and Anna’s uncommunicative husband, Marty, to take the last nick of sheen off their dull union. All these spirits are whimsically rendered by Woodhouse, in bits and pieces of costume, and allowed a shard of woundedness beneath the caricature. In the end it all goes up in a puff of smoke that only further obscures Jones’s intent. Women on the Verge of HRT has apparently enjoyed success in Ireland and England. There’s even a sequel called Women on the Verge Get a Life. Now you’re talking.