Chris Lee’s imaginative design work makes the lighting for Signature Theater’s Kiss of the Spider Woman a dynamic character in its own right in this slick and sexy production. Beams serve as bars for the jail center that is the work’s centerpiece. Hues of red, silver and blue add dramatic punch to various scenes. Flashlights perched on the top add a certain spookiness to a parade of creepy male nurses in the “Morphine Tango”. Spotlights seek out ferreting prisoners, and strobe lighting both obscures and highlights the torture they’re put through. Most of all, it is lighting that conveys the massive web in which the Spider Woman, a mythic figure never absent from the play’s proceeding, entraps her prey.

That Spider Woman is played by Natascia Diaz, and serves as a figment of prisoner Molina’s imagination and a metaphor for death (with the hint of something even more sinister) as the work progresses. Diaz was last seen in the D.C.-area in a fiery turn as Anita in Wolf Trap’s West Side Story, which coincidentally is one of the roles for which her predecessor in the Broadway production, Chita Rivera, is most well known. Clad in an array of slinky black dresses, her rich, slightly smoky alto and strutting, percussive movements accounts for much of the glimmer and sultriness of this revival, even if she doesn’t hit every low note the demanding score requires. The Spider Woman is the star of most of the show’s best production numbers, and Karma Camp’s choreography is haunted by the spirit of the tango and the influence of Bob Fosse, with its amoebas of bare-chested men and angular kicks and tosses.