THEATER : Untangling the Web : With ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ Vanessa Williams can add ‘Broadway star’ to a resume once most notable for the term ‘deposed Miss America.’ Which is not to say she’s finished setting the record straight.

Under a yearbook picture of Vanessa Williams--Horace Greeley High School, Class of 1981, Chappaqua, N.Y.--the caption reads, “Follow your dream and I’ll see you on Broadway.”

Thirteen years later, the dream has finally come true. Vanessa Williams, in top hat, tails and a big grin, is on Broadway through Labor Day starring in the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” having taken over the title role from Chita Rivera. As both a ‘40s movie queen and an angel of death, Williams spins a web of menace and fantasy over this tale of two men sharing a cell in a South American prison--one a Marxist revolutionary, the other a gay window-dresser. (Critics will start re-reviewing the show this week, and, according to a spokeswoman for the show, ticket sales already are strong.)

There have been a few unexpected detours along Williams’ way, and the 31-year-old pop star, former beauty queen and mother of two daughters and one son arrives on the Great White Way with, as she herself puts it, “more excess baggage” than most newcomers. The intervening years of celebrity--and one bout of unexpected notoriety--have left her with a few scars.

For one, the big grin is not much in evidence offstage. Despite her fawn-like appearance, Williams is all business when she sits down for an interview between matinee and evening performances in a dressing room crowded with floral tributes. Dressed in a simple white blouse and short ruffled skirt and perched on a divan, the green-eyed beauty is remarkably steely and self-contained, speaking safely in platitudes. Even when discussing difficult emotional moments in her life, she is unnervingly detached, as though the betrayal of any real feeling might somehow leave her endangered.

“Yeah, I guess I was probably a little nervous,” she says coolly, speaking of her audition for “Kiss” director Harold Prince and composer John Kander. “I mean, these guys are heavyweights of the musical theater, and it obviously meant a lot to me.”

The actress’s reticence around the press is understandable. Williams, after all, is married to a former publicist, Ramon Hervey, who is now her manager and who, no doubt, over the years has given her endless tips on how to handle the Fourth Estate.

“Vanessa’s not an easy person to get to know,” says her husband of seven years. “She has a few really good friends that she’s open with, but she considers publicity both an intrusion and a necessary evil. It’s not a fear, but I think she feels she has to protect certain aspects of her life.”

Tall, handsome and 13 years her senior, Hervey came into Williams’ life at a crucial juncture. Almost 10 years ago to the day, in July, 1984, she was embroiled in a media scandal that ended with her abdication as the first black Miss America after nude photos of her surfaced in Penthouse.

“I advised her to be honest, to be real,” Hervey recalls. “It was something that was going to stay with her for the rest of her life. She was very young and wasn’t in any way emotionally prepared for the onslaught of media attention. She’s become far less vulnerable and wiser in the maturing of her career.”

Williams was only 21 at the time, and the euphoria that greeted her trailblazing ascension to the beauty crown was equaled by the dismay that met her precipitous fall from grace.

“What got me through it?” she says, not too pleased the topic has surfaced again. “Oh, a sense of humor and detaching oneself from the situation.

“What did I learn from it?” she adds, idly playing with a loose strand of her tawny-streaked hair. “At that point, I was cruising. So you realize . . . that life has a lot of ups and downs, peaks and valleys, and you’ve got to forge ahead. I knew it was just a momentary thing. I knew that my life wouldn’t end, my career wouldn’t be over. After all the dust settled, I knew that I’d get my chance to prove myself.”

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Indeed, Broadway is just the latest front in Williams’ determined drive to prove herself, one that has taken her from occasional guest stints on television shows, to a featured role in a 1985 Off Broadway musical, “One Man Band,” to forgettable cameos in films (1991’s “Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man”) and to breakthrough success as a top-selling pop recording artist with “The Right Stuff” in 1988 and “The Comfort Zone” in 1991. (Her third album, on Mercury, will be released this fall in conjunction with a concert tour.)

The opportunity to make her Broadway debut came late last year, when she traveled to Toronto to audition to replace Lonette McKee as Julie in Harold Prince’s revival of “Show Boat.” Garth Drabinsky, the Canadian producer of both the Broadway-bound “Show Boat” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” suggested Williams might be more comfortable in a limited summer run as the replacement for Chita Rivera. That way she would not have to uproot her family from their Westchester County home.

“When she auditioned for Julie, I saw that Vanessa had a strong vocal prowess that could blow an audience away,” Drabinsky said. “Vanessa has a youthful elegance in contrast to Chita’s maturity and command, and she represents a different demographic to the theater. She also brings her own very sexy and sensual quality to the role.”

While acknowledging a certain trepidation in taking over the role from a musical legend like Rivera, Williams says she saw it as her “perfect showcase,” with none of the pressure of opening in a Broadway show.

“It combines Las Vegas glitz with songs of drama and suspense as well as traditional Broadway top-hat-and-tail routines,” she says. “It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to do in theater.”

She betrays a rare vulnerability in talking about her first performance June 27, observing that she was more nervous than she had ever been. “Singing on the Grammys was just another gig compared to this,” she says. Even her deli-counter man in Westchester called to wish her luck. “My mother, who never cries, got teary-eyed backstage afterward. Friends were sobbing. It was an unbelievable night because I knew I was living a dream.”

Not having seen Hector Babenco’s 1985 film “Kiss of the Spider Woman” or read Manuel Puig’s 1976 book on which the musical is based, Williams says, she was less worried about the emotional subtext of the role than “falling on my face out there.” Indeed, a scab just below her knee is the result of one of the bone-banging crawls she must make across the metal-mesh webbing of the set.

“I didn’t really think about the role being Latin at all,” Williams says. “I think the music takes you there. And I didn’t want to go Carmen Miranda with the ‘40s glamour stuff. That would’ve been too camp.”

As far as playing the angel of death, she adds, “I thought her presence should be so still that it made you uncomfortable. Not menacing, not stalking, not overly dramatic but also with lots of power. So she’s a little scary but not as gloomy or dark as she could be.”

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The seeds of Williams’ own disciplined presence were planted early in the environment in which she grew up, as the only daughter of Helen and Milton Williams, both of whom taught music. Her mother performed in amateur theatricals and took the family often into Manhattan to see the latest Broadway musicals or dance performances, like those of Alvin Ailey’s company.

“It was a happy time for me,” Williams says. Although she and her brother, Chris, were raised in the small, predominantly white Westchester community of Millwood, the actress says, she experienced hardly any racism in her youth.

“We were taught to be the classic overachievers,” Williams says. “My mother always said we’d have to be 100% better than anybody else just to be considered equal.”

Williams studied French horn, piano, modern dance and voice, and she uses her classically trained command of music in the meticulous way she approaches her work today. “When you have a brain, people listen,” she says.

By the time she entered the theater arts department at Syracuse University, she was single-minded about pursuing a Broadway career. Even before she would break the beauty queen color barrier, she had auditioned for the 1981 Broadway musical “Oh, Brother,” which later flopped.

She makes clear that entering the series of pageants that would make her famous was an afterthought, which occurred when “Cyrano de Bergerac,” an Equity production on the college campus she was set to play in, was canceled. She never went back to college, and now, she says, she misses finishing her degree and “beating the streets” with her college buddies, many of whom are still close friends and who were present at her first performance of “Kiss.”

“It was sheer fate, luck,” she says. Thinking it over, she corrects herself. “Well, I don’t know about . . . , “ she adds with a grimace. “Happenstance, maybe.”

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During her nine-month reign as Miss America, Williams was quite outspoken, supporting abortion rights and denigrating pageants as “exploitative meat shows.” (Today, she wouldn’t allow her daughters to enter a pageant. “They wouldn’t have a choice,” she says.) Her comments hardly endeared her to pageant officials, who were distinctly unsupportive when the scandal broke.

Her family and close friends, however, stood staunchly by her. And some in the media observed that the incident had revealed her to be “more human” and far more appealing than the Barbie-doll perfectionism of most beauty queens. Furthermore, when Williams met Hervey, she found a champion who could not only help her navigate the Penthouse controversy but also pick up the pieces afterward in a shared vision of what her career could be. They faced quite a few closed doors at first, however.

“It was frustrating knowing that you had the talent but that people couldn’t see past all the excess baggage,” she says.

In fact, Williams was ready to make her Broadway debut in 1984 replacing Twiggy in the Gershwin musical “My One and Only.” “Tommy Tune, everyone was in my corner,” she recalls, “but Lee Gershwin, Ira’s wife, vetoed the idea because she thought I was not appropriate theater material.”

Then, when “Checkmates,” a play in which she appeared in Los Angeles, moved to Broadway, Williams was not taken along. And she was also considered briefly for a role in the musical “Carrie” but dropped when the producers decided not to “go black with the role,” she says.

“I’m sure it was a disappointment at the time,” she says. “I wasn’t jaded at that point. It hurts for a couple of days and then you move on. You can’t dwell on the negative aspects.”

Williams says she was never sure whether she was being rejected because of the past scandal, because she is black or because she simply didn’t fit the requirements of the role.

“Two years ago when I auditioned for a Disney project that is out now (“The Lion King”), the head of the animation department said I wouldn’t be appropriate for Disney animation but that I was fine for Touchstone,” she says, referring to the Disney Co. label geared toward more adult fare. “That was probably the last blatant conflict between my talent and my past.”

Although Peter Schneider, president of feature animation for Disney, says he has no recollection of such an exchange with Williams, he says, “We would never exclude a person based on his or her past history. If she was right for a role, we would certainly cast her.”

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Williams concedes that she now is far less bitter and vindictive about the ridicule she endured at the hands of talk-show hosts like Joan Rivers and David Letterman. That is partly because of her success and partly because her strong family orientation supersedes career. One reason she and her husband moved from Los Angeles back to suburban New York was so they could give their children a more traditional upbringing away from the what she calls the “hype and the wealth” of Hollywood.

“We don’t travel in elite circles,” Williams says. “I just show up and do my job and leave. I don’t live in that world. I don’t care if my makeup is perfect when I go out on the street by myself. I enjoy my life and my independence too much to let fame or the industry ruin it for me. So much of my life is taken up with baking cakes, Brownie meetings, meeting the bus that takes them to public schools.”

Nonetheless, Williams’ ambitions still cut a wide swath. She says she’s eager to demonstrate she can manage light comedy in feature films as well as more dramatic fare. The life story of Dorothy Dandridge appeals to her because she was the “black Marilyn Monroe”--a talented, beautiful but tragically insecure movie star who eventually took her own life. Like Williams, she was a trailblazer, the first black woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar (for the 1954 film “Carmen Jones”). But unlike the assertive and forthright Williams, Dandridge had little reinforcement for her sense of self-worth.

“When I speak to groups of troubled teens,” Williams says, “I tell them the story of my life. This is what happened to me, this is how I fought through it. What made me strong was believing in myself. If you believe in yourself, you can endure anything.”*

* Vanessa Williams performs in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” through Sept. 24 at the Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St., New York; (212) 239-6200.