Copyright 1992 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.   The Toronto Star August 19, 1992, Wednesday, FINAL EDITION SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. B1 LENGTH: 1027 words HEADLINE: The sweet kiss of success It's sending Brent Carver to London BYLINE: BY VIT WAGNER TORONTO STAR BODY: The television lights from one interview have barely dimmed and Brent Carver has already re-situated himself across the hotel lobby, cheerfully poised to start the process all over again. But before the questions can begin, a publicist takes a moment to win Carver's consent for yet another media session. Sure, he nods amenably, whatever's convenient. If anyone is deserving of this kind of attention it is Carver, an extraordinarily talented performer who has done almost everything during his 20-year career on the Canadian stage. The occasion for this sudden flurry of interest is the 40-year-old Cranbrook, B.C. native's acclaimed performance in Kiss Of The Spider Woman, a Canadian commercial production financed by Garth Drabinsky's Live Entertainment Corp. The musical has been extended until Aug. 29, after enthralling audiences all summer at the St. Lawrence Centre's Bluma Appel Theatre. But that isn't the end of the story. Reversing the usual flow that brings British and American hit shows to Toronto, Kiss Of The Spider Woman is moving to London's West End, where it opens in October at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Then plans are to move it to Broadway. For Carver, whose stage work outside this country is limited to a 1979 production of The Tempest with Anthony Hopkins in Los Angeles, the success of Spider Woman is being touted as the "big moment" or "career break." Don't expect him to see it that way. Despite frequent previous moments in the spotlight, the path of his career is not so conventionally plotted. But he admits to feeling a certain excitement at the prospect of having his work seen by entirely new audiences, critics and producers. "I just think that it would be great to work in London and live there for five or six months," Carver says. "That's a thrill. And I don't take it lightly at all. "You never know what might happen. It's great that I'm working with these wonderful people, which is not to say that I haven't been fortunate in this business in Canada to work with great, great people. But it's a new venue. "It is conducive to expanding my career and taking it somewhere else. But I think you always have to go by your instincts." By that, Carver means that when the curtain eventually closes on Kiss Of The Spider Woman, he might just as easily take a part in a small, alternative theatre production, as he did in 1990 when he garnered his second Dora Mavor Moore Award for helping to make the creepy fringe drama Unidentified Human Remains And The True Nature Of Love into one of the surprise hits in recent Toronto stage history. "I think that those are the kinds of things that allow you to change your perspective all the time," he says. "When I did Unidentified Human Remains, I got a phone call and I read the play and I went, 'Ah. It's interesting that they'd be interested in casting me in this.' It meant working with another, totally different group of people. And I said yes." Carver is as aware as anyone of life's uncertainties. His success in Kiss is the upside of an emotional roller coaster ride that began last December when his close friend and colleague, actress Susan Wright, died with her parents in a fire while staying at Carver's house in Stratford. He was working in Edmonton at the time. Although reluctant to discuss those events in any detail, Carver credits Wright for having encouraged him to go after the part in Kiss, when auditions began last September. "It was really Susan who said, 'Of course you have to do this.' We talked about everything, in terms of advice and those things. So I always think that she was the one who said, 'Yeah. Do it.' We were the greatest of friends. And I just wish she was around to see this." Kiss is something of a revelation for theatre patrons who know Carver primarily as a dramatic actor, whether from his work as the nihilistic waiter in the unmistakably contemporary Unidentified Human Remains, as Hamlet at Stratford, in an Opera Atelier production of Andromache or in the title role of last year's wacky, Alberta-influenced adaptation of Tartuffe. Although Carver has yet to establish much of a profile for himself in the movies, that may change with his starring role in the Gail Harvey-directed feature The Shower, slated for general release Sept. 4. But music has always been an important part of Carver's work as a performer, right from the time when he started singing publicly at age 7 in Cranbrook. "I was always being hired out to sing at weddings and for the Oddfellow's and Lions and things like that," he recalls. "And I was in all sorts of church and school choirs." Carver's professional debut came in a Vancouver Arts' Club 1972 production of Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris, which he joined before concluding his fourth year of theatre studies at the University of British Columbia. Subsequent musical credits include productions of Cabaret and Pirates Of Penzance at Stratford, where he spent four seasons, as well as a 20th anniversary revival of Jacques Brel in 1988 at Massey Hall, his last singing role prior to Kiss. "To me, music always seems to be part of the inner drama," he says. "There's always some musicality to any story." Unlike many skeptics, Carver says he never doubted that Kiss Of The Spider Woman - a novel by Manuel Puig that had already been made into a stage play and a movie - would work as a musical. "I think that everyone sensed that there was a wonderful story to tell and the question was how to tell it," he says. Carver plays Molina, a gay shop window designer who shares a South American prison cell with the political detainee, Valentine (Anthony Crivello). Molina, who is being used by authorities to dig up information on Valentine, must decide much of his life in a movie-fed fantasy world inhabited by his dreaded, imaginary nemesis the Spider Woman, played by Chita Rivera. "The musical is about liberation and making choices in one's life," he says. "It's about being willing to be the master of your own fate." And that is something Carver knows more than a little bit about. GRAPHIC: Star photo (Faught): Brent Carver plays Molina, a gay shop window designer who shares a South American prison cell with a political detainee in the musical Kiss Of The Spider Woman. LANGUAGE: ENGLISH LOAD-DATE: August 20, 1992