Jennifer Lopez shares why Broadway might not be in her future despite her love for musicals

Jennifer Lopez has ensnared audiences in her web, starring in Kiss of the Spider Woman.But is the multi-hyphenate star ready to take her musical theater chops to Broadway? “I’ve always thought about it,” the star admits to Entertainment Weekly. “I’ve always had a fantasy of doing Broadway, but my life has always been the music and the movies, so there’s never been a time.” Now Lopez has proven herself ready to conquer an old-fashioned musical, doing triple duty in the new big-screen adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman as classic Hollywood movie star Ingrid Luna and the characters Luna plays, fashion magnate Aurora and the deadly Spider Woman. The film, written and directed by Bill Condon, gives Lopez an opportunity to show off her inner theater kid in unprecedented fashion, dancing in long takes through musical numbers and singing her face off.

“It would be a nice thing to slow down and just do one thing for a period of time,” Lopez says of the prospect of starring in a Broadway show. “But it’s a bigger commitment. And I don’t know if I could do eight shows a week.” Lopez, who has toured the world as a global superstar and music artist, is likely selling herself short. Indeed, she originally grew up with a dream of starring in musicals on stage and screen — and that is what she trained to do.
“These were the styles that I learned when I was a very little girl,” Lopez says of the variety of dance in the film. “I learned jazz, I learned ballet. I learned a Broadway style of dancing. Then, when I was a teenager, I started doing hip-hop and street dances because I grew up in the Bronx. When I started doing my own music, I stayed in that style. So, people saw me more in that style for a long time.” “But,” she continues, “Spider Woman was like coming back to something that I had always done. It took time, but I was so excited. I had that vocabulary in my body already. So, it was dusting it off of the shelf and making it shiny and new again.”

One thing Lopez had to really work at was being able to shoot an entire musical number without cuts. “Bill told me, ‘I wanted you to do this because I know that you can perform a number from beginning to end, and I won’t have to edit it,'” Lopez recalls. “And I was like, ‘But we can do coverage?’ He was like, ‘I really don’t want to do it. I want you to be able to do it from top to bottom.'” Lopez met Condon’s expectations if the final film is any indication. Spider Woman is her first major movie musical, though she’s been theater adjacent, playing Tejano superstar Selena early in her career and dancing and singing in personal projects like This Is Me…Now. Most notably, Lopez was once attached to a potential live TV production of Bye Bye Birdie, in which she was slated to play Rosie. It’s still on her wish list. “I would die to do Bye Bye Birdie,” she gushes. “It went away. That was going to be more of a movie, but it would be nice to revive that on Broadway, too.”Ultimately, it’s all about timing. “These shows like Kiss of the Spider Woman, they come up to the surface when they need to be seen,” Lopez reflects. “At the right time with the right people and the right person, who knows? We’ll see what comes to fruition when that time comes. But I do think Broadway is in my future.”