I’ve been saying for weeks that the terrain for new musicals on Broadway is wide open for a spoiler. And one is on its way.

“The Visit,” starring Chita Rivera and Roger Rees, will open in the spring, producer Tom Kirdahy told me this week. Kirdahy doesn’t have a theater yet, but since he produced the fall’s No. 1 box-office draw — Terrence McNally’s “It’s Only a Play,” with Nathan Lane — the Shuberts will happily oblige him.

“It’s Only a Play,” which opened Oct. 9 at the Shuberts’ Schoenfeld Theatre, grossed $1.4 million last week.

“We’re doing a photo shoot on Dec. 19 and then launching an ad campaign,” says Kirdahy, McNally’s husband. “I’m just waiting for the phone call to find out where we’re going.”

Based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 thriller, “The Visit” has a book by McNally and a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Sources say it will mark Rivera’s final appearance on Broadway.

Rivera, 81, won Tonys in the Kander-Ebb-McNally musicals “The Rink” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” A source says “she wants to go out with one more show by them.”

She plays a wealthy woman who returns to her bankrupt hometown to exact revenge on the man who jilted her. She offers to bail out the town if its inhabitants kill her ex-lover.

This is hardly “Bye Bye Birdie,” and with “Side Show,” another dark and challenging musical, struggling at the box office, I asked Kirdahy if he thinks audiences will support “The Visit.”

“I think everybody has a revenge fantasy whether we want to admit it or not,” he says. “I remember dancing to the B-52’s at my senior high school pancake breakfast and a guy from the football team poured milk all over me. I don’t want to murder him, but . . .”

When “The Visit” premiered in 2001 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, Kirdahy didn’t think it was dark enough. “It needed less razzle-dazzle and more of a creepy, Felliniesque world,” he says.

That’s what director John Doyle gave this new production, which played Williamstown over the summer. The reviews were mixed, but the show was a sellout.

“I think ‘The Visit’ is the love child of ‘Chicago’ and ‘Sweeney Todd,’ ” Kirdahy says. “It has an astonishing score, a gripping story and a staggering performance by a Broadway legend.”