Spider-Man faces his biggest battle on Broadway
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the new Julie "The Lion King" Taymor musical SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK.
The show has undergone almost two years of delays, starts and stops, loss of
stars, loss of funds, loss of producers, the death of one of the original
producers, numerous injuries of cast members, a budget ballooning to the most
expensive Broadway show in history - over $65 million - and more negative
rumors and buzz than any show I can remember.
The show was supposed to have opened last winter, then it was suppose have
opened in January, then February 7 and is now scheduled to officially open on
March 15. Well, yesterday, critics from newspapers, magazines and the media
decided wouldn't wait any more. Like the Sinister Six they all attacked
Spider-Man on February 7, the day he was supposed to open, and the results are
pretty dire. The reviews - many of which I have reprinted below - have been
uniformly bad.
I'm a huge Julie Taymor fan, having known of her work long before "Lion King".
And of course, I'd root for any show with a whole bunch of Spider-Men running,
jumping and swinging around. I've seen the show, and unfortunately I must
admit that the reviews are fairly accurate.
There are some interesting theatrical elements and moments in the show, but on
the whole it is a misguided, constantly misfiring mess. It is an uneven mix of
visual and theatrical styles with a convoluted book and weak music and lyrics.
One moment you're watching "Stomp", the next moment teenage angst, the next
moment - Cirque du Soleil, then "Guys and Dolls", then a bizarre Lady Gaga type
number, then a super villain fashion show, then Julie Taymor puppet theatre,
then super villain camp ala "Batman". Add in scenes where a geek chorus of
comic book fans or characters in the show explain or interpret what's going on.
This device is used because you can't always recreate all the action and fantasy
of comics and movies on stage, but these scenes stop the show dead. Bottom
line, and most importantly, the show doesn't make you care about Peter Parker
like you do in the books and the movies. That's where the creators should have
put more time and money.
All that said and no matter how many delays the producers have had, I think it's
wrong to review the show before the scheduled opening date. I'm not sure what
the creators will do to improve the show by March 15 but I'll be curious. Like
many of the reviewers said, the show may be unfixable without changing a lot of
the book and a lot of the music. Both the creators and the critics may succeed
in killing off Spidey where countless villains have failed. Will the audience
come to his aid? Only time will tell.
Your Friendly WeHo Spider-Man
Follow the history of the show in The Web of Spider-Man:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/08/theater/20110208-spiderman.html?ref=reviews
See a slideshow of Spideys:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/02/08/theater/20110208-spiderman.html?ref=reviews
And now more reviews than you can thwip a web at:
From The New York Times
Ben Brantley February 7, 2011
Good vs. Evil, Hanging by a Thread
Finally, near the end of the first act of "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," the
audience at the Foxwoods Theater on Saturday night got what it had truly been
waiting for, whether it knew it or not.
Calamity struck, and it was a real-life (albeit small) calamity ? not some
tedious, confusing tripe involving a pretty girl dangling from a skyscraper and
supervillains laying siege to Manhattan. And not the more general and seriously
depressing disaster that was the sum of the mismatched parts that had been
assembled onstage.
No, an honest-to-gosh, show-stopping glitch occurred, just as the title
character of this new musical was about to vanquish or be vanquished by the evil
Green Goblin. Never fully explained "mechanical difficulties" were announced by
an amplified voice (not immediately distinguishable from the other amplified
voices we had been hearing for what felt like forever), as the actors in the
scene deflated before our eyes. And for the first time that night something like
genuine pleasure spread through the house.
That glee soon took the form of spontaneous, nigh-ecstatic applause, a sound
unheard in the previous hour. After vamping on a green fake piano (don't ask),
Patrick Page (who plays the Goblin with a gusto unshared by any other member of
the cast) ad-libbed a warning to Reeve Carney (who stars as Spider-Man), who had
been awkwardly marking time by pretending to drink Champagne.
"You gotta be careful," Mr. Page said. "You're gonna fly over the heads of the
audience, you know. I hear they dropped a few of them."
"Roar," went the audience, like a herd of starved, listless lions, roused into
animation by the arrival of feeding time. Everyone, it seemed, understood Mr.
Page's reference to the injuries that have been incurred by cast and crew
members during the long (and officially still far from over) preview period for
this $65 million musical. Permission to laugh had been granted, and a bond had
temporarily been forged between a previously baffled audience and the
beleaguered souls onstage.
All subsequent performances of "Spider-Man" should include at least one such
moment. Actively letting theatergoers in on the national joke that this
problem-plagued show has become helps make them believe that they have a reason
to be there.
This production should play up regularly and resonantly the promise that things
could go wrong. Because only when things go wrong in this production does it
feel remotely right ? if, by right, one means entertaining. So keep the fear
factor an active part of the show, guys, and stock the Foxwoods gift shops with
souvenir crash helmets and T-shirts that say "I saw `Spider-Man' and lived."
Otherwise, a more appropriate slogan would be "I saw `Spider-Man' and slept."
I'm not kidding. The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man
comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central
question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from "How can $65 million
look so cheap?" to "How long before I'm out of here?"
Directed by Julie Taymor, who wrote the show's book with Glen Berger, and
featuring songs by U2's Bono and the Edge, "Spider-Man" is not only the most
expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.
I would like to acknowledge here that "Spider-Man" doesn't officially open until
March 15; at least that's the last date I heard. But since this show was looking
as if it might settle into being an unending work in progress ? with Ms. Taymor
playing Michelangelo to her notion of a Sistine Chapel on Broadway ? my editors
and I decided I might as well check out "Spider-Man" around Monday, the night it
was supposed to have opened before its latest postponement.
You are of course entitled to disagree with our decision. But from what I saw on
Saturday night, "Spider-Man" is so grievously broken in every respect that it is
beyond repair. Fans of Ms. Taymor's work on the long-running musical "The Lion
King," adapted from the animated Walt Disney feature, will have to squint
charitably to see evidence of her talent.
True, signature Taymor touches like airborne puppets, elaborate masks and
perspective-skewing sets (George Tsypin is the scenic designer) are all on hand.
But they never connect into a comprehensible story with any momentum. Often you
feel as if you were watching the installation of Christmas windows at a fancy
department store. At other times the impression is of being on a soundstage
where a music video is being filmed in the early 1980s. (Daniel Ezralow's
choreography is pure vintage MTV.)
Nothing looks truly new, including the much-vaunted flying sequences in which
some poor sap is strapped into an all-too-visible harness and hoisted uneasily
above the audience. (Aren't they doing just that across the street in "Mary
Poppins"?) This is especially unfortunate, since Ms. Taymor and her
collaborators have spoken frequently about blazing new frontiers with
"Spider-Man," of venturing where no theater artist (pardon me, I mean artiste)
has dared to venture before.
I'm assuming that frontier is supposed to exist somewhere between the second and
third dimensions. "Part of the balance we've been trying to strike is how `comic
book' to go and how `human' to go," Ms. Taymor has said about her version of the
adventures of a nerdy teenager who acquires superhuman powers after being bitten
by a radioactive spider.
Anyway, there are lots of flat, cardboardish sets, which could easily be
recycled for high school productions of "Grease" and "How to Succeed in Business
Without Really Trying," and giant multipanel video projections (by Kyle Cooper).
That takes care of the two-dimensional part. The human aspect has been assigned
to the flesh-and-blood cast members, and it is a Sisyphean duty.
Some wear grotesque masks that bring to mind hucksters on sidewalks handing out
promotional material for fantasy-theme restaurants. (Eiko Ishioka is the costume
designer.) Those whose own features are visible include ? in addition to Mr.
Carney (looking bewildered and beautiful as Spider-Man and his conflicted alter
ego, Peter Parker) ? a strained Jennifer Damiano as Mary Jane Watson, Peter's
spunky kind-of girlfriend, and T. V. Carpio as Arachne, a web-weaving
spider-woman of Greco-Roman myth who haunts Peter's dreams before breaking into
his reality. (I get the impression that Arachne, as the ultimate all-controlling
artist, is the only character who much interests Ms. Taymor, but that doesn't
mean that she makes sense.)
There is also the Geek Chorus (Gideon Glick, Jonathan Schwartz, Mat Devine,
Alice Lee), a quartet of adolescent comic-book devotees, who would appear to be
either creating or commenting on the plot, but in any case serve only to obscure
it even further. They discuss the heady philosophical implications of
Spider-Man's identity while making jokes in which the notion of free will is
confused with the plot of the movie "Free Willy."
For a story that has also inspired hit action movies, it is remarkably static in
this telling. (A lot of the plot-propelling fights are merely reported to us.)
There are a couple of picturesque set pieces involving Arachne and her chorus of
spider-women and one stunner of a cityscape that suggests the streets of
Manhattan as seen from the top of the Chrysler Building.
The songs by Bono and the Edge are rarely allowed to take full,
attention-capturing form. Mostly they blur into a sustained electronic twang of
varying volume, increasing and decreasing in intensity, like a persistent
headache. A loud ballad of existential angst has been written for Peter, who
rasps dejectedly, "I'd be myself if I knew who I'd become." That might well be
the official theme song of "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark."
__________________________________________________________________________________
From The Washington Post:
No superpowers needed to sniff out this stinker
by Peter Marks
If you're going to spend $65 million and not end up with the best musical of all
time, I suppose there's a perverse distinction in being one of the worst.
Mind you, I haven't seen every stinker ever produced, so I can't categorically
confirm that "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" belongs in the dankest subbasement
of the American musical theater. But its application certainly seems to be in
order.
What's apparent after 170 spirit-snuffing minutes in the Foxwoods Theatre -
interrupted by the occasional burst of aerial distraction - is that director
Julie Taymor, of "The Lion King" fame, left a few essential items off her lavish
shopping list:
1. Coherent plot
2. Tolerable music
3. Workable sets
To be sure, Taymor has found a way to send her superhero soaring above the
audience. And yet, the creature that most often spreads its wings in the
Foxwoods is a turkey.
As you no doubt are aware, "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" has made one of the
most snakebitten (and heavily publicized) forays onto Broadway in memory. Money
problems were followed by mechanical mishaps that sent several seriously injured
actors to the hospital. Preview performances began Nov. 28; a formal opening
night had been scheduled for Dec. 21. The musical's producers pushed back the
date to Jan. 11, and later to Feb. 7, and then to March 15.
Reasonable observers can differ on how long a news organization should wait to
inform readers about the merits of any production once it has been running for
months (and charging as much as $275 for an orchestra seat). Based on the
preview period's ever-expanding length and the intense public interest generated
by the nationwide news coverage, this newspaper decided, like many other
outlets, not to wait out the latest delay and observe Feb. 7 as the opening.
At the outset of the preview I attended, a man appeared onstage to read a short
speech about the production's technical issues and to assure us that "the [New
York State] Department of Labor has approved all of our aerial sequences." It
should be noted that no significant glitches occurred over the ensuing two hours
and 50 minutes.
Clearly, though, the Department of Lucidity has not been in the building in
quite a while. Story-wise, "Spider-Man" is a shrill, insipid mess, a musical
aimed squarely at a Cub Scout demographic. Looking at the sad results, you're
compelled to wonder: Where did all those tens of millions go?
The 8-year-old boys in the audience might be able to key on the Cirque du
Soleil-style stunts on wires and video-game graphic elements and probably not
worry too much that "Spider-Man" is a tangle of disjointed concepts, scenes and
musical sequences that suggests its more appropriate home would be off a highway
in Orlando. Come to think of it, the optimal audience might be
non-English-speaking.
The tale doesn't so much unfold as ooze out, on the operating theory that if you
throw everything against a theater wall, something might stick. It essentially
begins with the superhero metamorphosis of nerdy Peter Parker, played by the
likable Matthew James Thomas at the performance I attended; he alternates in the
role with Reeve Carney. From there, things get convoluted, fast.
Solemn comic-book myths merge with solemn Greek myths and apocalyptic
environmental visions for the origin stories of heroes and villains, who
multiply in numbers (and ever more outrageous get-ups) as the production wears
on. Shapeless expository scenes in laboratories and newsrooms elongate the
proceedings. A perfunctory romance lurches along between Peter and the love of
his life, budding actress Mary Jane Watson (Jennifer Damiano).
A so-called "Geek Chorus" of caffeinated Marvel comic fanatics (Gideon Glick,
Jonathan Schwartz, Mat Devine and Alice Lee) hangs out on the edge of the stage,
offering utterly superfluous commentary. Maybe they'd earn their place up there
if they could explain the ludicrous role of Arachne (T.V. Carpio), a woman
transformed by the goddess Athena into a spider who has spent several millennia
awaiting the arrival of another spider-human hybrid. She's a New Agey sort of
bad gal who has the worst song in the show, something to do with a raid on 50
shoe stores by Arachne's gang of eight-legged Furies. The high-heeled spoils are
affixed to, yes, the spider-ladies' extremities.
Or wait, maybe the bottom of the barrel is a weird on-the-runway sequence, in
which a cadre of second-tier villains with names like Swiss Miss and Carnage do
a bit of high-fashion sashaying. In the running, too, is a bizarre military
number, as well as the first-act closer, a rip-off of a Rodgers and Hart song.
The latter is sung by - get out your score cards - the other main-event
evildoer, the Green Goblin, a former scientist played by the talented classical
actor Patrick Page.
Page and the other principal actors, burdened by Taymor and Glen Berger's
lumbering book, never stand a chance.
The score, by Bono and the U2 guitarist the Edge, is an ineffectual bystander.
It's loud and pulsing and devoid of personality. I've rarely experienced a
production in which the music is so completely drowned out by the sets. Designer
George Tsypin uses elaborate hydraulics to conjure the Chrysler Building and
other Manhattan skyscrapers from all sorts of angles and perspectives.
The images are intended to showcase the musical's star. That would not be a
person, but a rope trick. Spider-gliding is what this show is selling, and so
you wait for the wires to be hooked to the phalanx of stunt men who take turns
being guided from midair onto ledges on the theater's upper levels.
If watching actors in latex land in the mezzanine is your idea of an evening
well spent, "Spider-Man" won't seem a gargantuan waste. Musical lovers, however,
might wish the whole unsalvageable thing would just take a flying leap.
___________________________________________________________________________________
From the New York Post:
Can "Spidey" Fly?
by Elisabeth Vincentelli
** 1/2 (out of four)
Giving a blank check to Bono, The Edge and Julie Taymor to create a musical
seemed like a brilliant idea, once upon a time.
U2's worldwide success and the director's track record ("The Lion King," the
Met's "The Magic Flute") meant that their "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" could
have rebooted Broadway the way "The Dark Knight" galvanized Hollywood's
superhero films.
But then it went awry. A snowballing budget, broken bones, a concussion,
multiple delays, rewrites . . . and what do we get? An inconsistent, maddening
show that's equal parts exciting and atrocious.
On one level, the story follows the Marvel Comics canon: Dorky high-schooler
Peter Parker (Reeve Carney or Matthew James Thomas, depending on the
performance) is bitten by a mutated spider and acquires superpowers. He
struggles to win girlfriend Mary Jane Watson (Jennifer Damiano) and battles the
wicked Green Goblin (Patrick Page).
To that familiar canvas Taymor and co-author Glen Berger added twists of their
own, with varying degrees of success.
Four smart-aleck teens ? the Geek Chorus ? provide a running commentary that
quickly becomes grating.
Another new character is the spidery mythical figure Arachne (T.V. Carpio).
Pulled from the depths of Greek mythology, her role is confusing. Is this
webslinger real or merely a figment of Peter Parker's dreams? Why and how does
she come back from wherever she was, and why does she leave again? Inquiring
minds would want to know, if only they cared.
Then again, Arachne gets the single best number, "Behold and Wonder," only a few
minutes into the show. As a way to recount her origins, five performers swirl in
the air, suspended by saffron-colored sashes as strips of fabric are woven up
behind them. The effect is both deceptively simple and visually enchanting.
But then it ends, and we're suddenly thrown into Peter's high school, with what
looks like the cast of a road show of "Grease" executing banal hip-hop
choreography.
So this erratic musical goes, constantly seesawing between the galvanizing and
the lame.
The first act holds it together because it follows the Marvel mythos, but when
Taymor's id takes over after intermission, the story goes out the window. You
won't soon forget ? hard as you may try ? a preposterous number featuring
Arachne's spidery minions and their stolen shoes, or the supervillain runway
show that introduces another new character ? Swiss Miss, the lovechild of
Alexander McQueen and a Home Depot.
And so it goes.
A breathtakingly beautiful scene is followed by a laughable one. The flying
sequences can be thrilling, as when Spider-Man first takes off over the
orchestra; other times, they look barely good enough for Six Flags, the
harnesses making the movements clunky.
High-tech CGI projections are juxtaposed with such cheap effects as cardboard
cutouts and Spidey shooting off Silly String.
Taymor couldn't decide what decade it was, so she went for all of them. The
Daily Bugle scenes look as if they're set in the 1940s, the villain's lab is out
of a 1960s sci-fi B movie and there's talk of the Internet.
Fortunately, the score has its moments. Though Bono and The Edge seemingly
recycled a few old lyrics and riffs, they've also written some solid pop songs.
The best are performed by Peter and Mary Jane, and they soar with U2's trademark
grandiose angst.
The rock-trained Carney ? whose brother, Zane, plays guitar on the side of the
stage ? gives his numbers heartfelt passion; Thomas, the matinee Spidey, is the
better actor. Damiano creates an appealingly spunky Mary Jane ? and she's in
great voice ? while Page is crowd-pleasingly cartoonish as the Green Goblin.
But in any Taymor spectacle, the performances are almost beside the point: It's
all about creating magic and transporting the viewer.
Here, as impressive as the flying is, the wires are all too visible. They're
meant to make the characters soar, but they keep the audience tethered to the
ground.
__________________________________________________________________________________
From The Hollywood Reporter:
"Spider-Man" trapped in web of monumental folly
by David Rooney
As the dominant parent of the problem child "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,"
Julie Taymor does herself no favors by including a program note about a
mythological creature brought down by hubris. In an ungainly mess of a show that
smacks of out-of-control auteurial arrogance, the parallel speaks for itself.
Official opening is not until March 15, but following repeat postponements and
what feels like 30 years of previews, The Hollywood Reporter is observing the
previously scheduled opening of February 7 with this review. The capitalization
hiccups, cast reshuffles, technical glitches and series of injuries have been
too exhaustively chronicled to require a recap here. But the big shock when
sitting down finally to assess this $65 million web-slinging folly, is what a
monumental anticlimax it turns out to be.
Sure, there's still five pre-opening weeks to keep tinkering, but the point at
which any savvy producer would have sent for script doctors is long past. While
much has been said about the decision to begin performances without an ending in
place, this "rock circus drama" has no beginning or middle either.
There's one thrillingly beautiful image about ten minutes in -- during a song
appropriately titled "Behold and Wonder" -- as aerialists suspended from
saffron-colored sashes weave an undulating fabric wall that fills the stage. And
the impressive speed and agility of the flying sequences is a major leap forward
in action terms from the slow glide of Mary Poppins.
But mostly, "Spider-Man" is chaotic, dull and a little silly. And there's
nothing here half as catchy as the 1967 ABC cartoon theme tune.
The absence of the word "musical" from Taymor's definition of the show seems
key. The songs by Bono and The Edge display minimal grasp of music's function in
goosing narrative or illuminating character. And despite all the wailing-guitar
attitude, they only squeak by as atmospheric enhancement. Aside from one or two
stirring anthems in familiar messianic U2 mode, this is strictly album filler,
with echoes of everyone from T. Rex to Alice Cooper, plus an occasional nod to
The Who's Tommy. The lyrics -- when you can decipher them -- are either too
vague or too literal.
But an underwhelming score is the least of the show's worries. What really sinks
it is the borderline incoherence of its storytelling.
Diehard fans of the Marvel Comics classic or Sam Raimi's big-screen iterations
are likely to be irked by the dismissive handling of the origin story in Taymor
and co-writer Glen Berger's book.
Establishing scenes with Peter Parker (Reeve Carney) and Mary Jane (Jennifer
Damiano), the death of Uncle Ben (Ken Marks), the entomological experimentation
of mad scientist Norman Osborn (Patrick Page), Peter's radioactive spider bite
and Osborn's transformation into the Green Goblin are all dealt with almost
perfunctorily.
You sense Taymor's impatience with this nuts-and-bolts stuff as she keeps
digressing to check in on a useless "Geek Chorus" of comic-strip fanatics. Their
debates over the direction the action should take succeed only in bringing it to
a halt.
The director's strength has always been creating stage pictures and visual
coups, not developing characters or story, so it's perhaps no surprise that
everything between Spidey's first flight and his overhead Green Goblin battle is
a shapeless blur.
But it's in the second act that internal logic disintegrates. That's when
Taymor's interpolation from Ovid steps out of the shadows. A mortal who took on
the Goddess Athena in a weave-off and won, Arachne (T.V. Carpio) was transformed
into a spider. Exiled to the astral plane, she eyes Peter as the man-candy to
end her loneliness.
Arachne launches her initial attack via an illusory band of supervillains dubbed
the Sinister Six, whose "Ugly Pageant" is among the show's more superfluous
set-pieces. Their clashes with Spider-Man also expose the limited applications
of stage ingenuity to this type of action, relying on filmed inserts that look
like generic video-game samples.
The show really jumps the shark, however, in a number titled "Deeply Furious,"
in which Arachne and her Furies go shoe-shopping before entering the human
world. Seriously. The much-ballyhooed climactic face-off between Spidey and
Arachne is now in place, but the diminishing returns of the airborne sequences
rob the ending of excitement.
Like choreographer Daniel Ezralow's flying work, George Tsypin's designs also
dilute their impact through repetition. Taking his cue from the Marvel
superhero's co-creator Steve Ditko by way of Fritz Lang, Tsypin fills the stage
with looming skyscrapers and vertiginous columns, making striking use of forced
perspective. Eiko Ishioka's villain costumes plunder a different comic-strip
source, borrowing their grotesque exaggerations from Dick Tracy. But the
sameness and cluttered disharmony of the visuals becomes wearing.
The cast do fine within the limited scope of their roles, and Carney, Damiano
and Carpio all have expressive voices. But only Page as the larger-than-life
Osborn/Goblin fleshes out a character.
"Spider-Man" at least can be considered a success in making Broadway part of the
pop-cultural conversation, and ticket sales have boomed. How long they will
continue to do so is the question. For rubberneckers eager to see what the fuss
is about, there may be enough noisy spectacle here to convince them they've seen
something. But when this amount of time and money is tossed at a show, even
demanding theatergoers should be awed, not bored.
__________________________________________________________________________________
From the New York Daily News:
Aerial scenes thrill, sets soar but songs and dialogue are dull
by Joe Dziemianowicz
Broadway's 'Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark' is still very much a work in
progress.
The show must go on - but what about opening night?
This was supposed to be a review of "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" following a
gala opening at the Foxwoods Theater on 42nd St.
But producers postponed the official opening until March 15. After more than 60
preview performances, "Spidey" is still a work in progress, they say.
It'll be different when we open, they vow. It'll be better, they mean.
But between now and then, thousands of people will pay $140 a pop to see the
still-under-construction musical.
Last Wednesday night, I did, too - without an invitation. I skirted Broadway
protocol; after all, as the production team keeps saying, "Spider-Man" is a
special case.
What I saw is a big production going in too many directions and in need of a lot
of work to make it entertaining, satisfying and understandable.
Director Julie Taymor, who co-wrote "Spider-Man" with Glen Berger, calls the
show a "circus-rock-'n'-roll-drama."
There's ambition in that, but her disjointed hybrid jerks along when it should
flow.
Except for the anthem "Rise Above," songs by Broadway rookies Bono and The Edge
of U2 lack hooks to make them stand out. As if written in invisible ink, tunes
are there and then slip from your mind.
On the fun meter, "Spider-Man" rates a 5 out of 10. Its moments of thrill come
in the flying sequences staged by Daniel Ezralow, including a wild midair battle
between Spidey and the villainous Green Goblin.
Taymor, who did "The Lion King," is famous for vivid and colorful stage
pictures. George Tsypin's soaring sets push perspective while conjuring gleaming
cutouts of the Chrysler Building and tidy Queens rowhouses that flip open like
pages in a book.
The show reportedly cost $65 million and that's clearly gone into mechanics,
hydraulics and aerial rigging. It seems only 10 cents has gone into the
confusing story and humorless dialogue.
Nerdy teen Peter Parker's transformation into a web-slinging wonder has been
co-opted by Taymor's mythical concoction Arachne, an evil Spiderwoman who steals
the second act right out from under the hero's nose.
Reeve Carney does a fine job in the title role, channeling Bono's rasp when he
sings. Jennifer Damiano's sweet voice works well as his girlfriend Mary Jane.
Patrick Page brings mad menace as the Green Goblin, while T.V. Carpio sounds
Enya-like as Arachne. Michael Mulheren's nonstop barking as a crusty editor gets
old quick.
"Spider-Man" may improve before the Ides of March. Surprises do happen on
Broadway. Let's hope they get the tangles out, for the sake of Taymor and
company - and for theatergoers shelling out all that dough.
__________________________________________________________________________________
From the Los Angeles Times:
Incoherent and no fun
by Charles McNulty
Well, it turns out there is a valid reason the producers of "Spider-Man: Turn
Off the Dark" have been keeping critics at bay. Julie Taymor's $65-million,
accident-prone production, featuring an erratic score by U2's Bono and The Edge,
is a teetering colossus that can't find its bearings as a circus spectacle or as
a rock musical.
The endlessly postponed official opening was last moved from Feb. 7 to March 15,
but the battle over healthcare reform has a better shot at being resolved before
the manifold problems of this frenetic Broadway jumble get fixed.
In the meantime, "Spider-Man" has been making lucrative lemonade out of all the
lemons the media has thrown an embarrassing spotlight on. (The show, previewing
since late November at the Foxwoods Theatre, has already beaten "Wicked" in the
weekly box office tallies.) Not even a nuclear bomb detonation, as the satiric
newspaper the Onion joked, can stop this juggernaut, which has survived
financial crises, a spate of cast member injuries and enough bad press to sink a
presidential candidate.
But the time has come to assess the work, not the hullabaloo surrounding it. So
much emphasis has been placed on the technological hurdles, the notion that
"Spider-Man" is trying things that have never been attempted before in a
Broadway house. What sinks the show, however, has nothing to do with glitches in
the special effects. To revise a handy little political catch phrase, "It's the
storytelling, stupid." And on that front, the failure rests squarely on Taymor's
run-amok direction.
This is, after all, her vision, and it's a vision that has been indulged with
too many resources, artistic and financial. The production, lacking the clarity
that's born out of tough choices, adds when it should subtract, accelerates when
it should slow down. Taymor's inventive staging of "The Lion King" was a
victory for the craft and commerce of theater alike. But the investors of
"Spider-Man" have inadvertently bankrolled an artistic form of megalomania.
__________________________________________________________________________________
From USA Today:
'Spider-Man' deftly spins substance, spectacle
by Elysa Gardner
Broadway's Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark won't open until March 15, but by now
you've probably heard a few rumblings. The $65 million collaboration between
U2's Bono and The Edge and celebrated director Julie Taymor has seen its opening
pushed back several times. Injuries also have made news, not to mention comic
monologues. What has been less widely reported is this: Beyond the offstage
drama and lavish budget, and all the feats and flash accompanying them, lies an
endearingly old-fashioned musical.
Spider-Man's primary goal ? based on a preview this critic saw last week ? is to
tell a thrilling, moving story through song, dialogue and, yes, a little
razzle-dazzle. OK, a lot of razzle-dazzle ? and not much of it old-fashioned.
At the preview, a crewmember warned the audience in advance that the production
could be halted at any time for technical reasons. The show was stopped once,
briefly, then proceeded without a hitch.
History has taught us to be wary of musicals boasting too many bells and
whistles, but substance and spectacle aren't always mutually exclusive. In
January, Taymor, also Spider-Man's co-writer, spoke to USA TODAY about using
technology and circus-like acrobatics to help propel a narrative involving a
reluctant hero "pulled between the responsibility that comes with his powers and
his desire to be a regular man."
Taymor and Glen Berger's libretto provides Peter Parker, Spider-Man's sweetly
nerdy alter ego, with two love interests, including Arachne, a mythical figure
who evolves from protector to seductress to nemesis. The underlying humanity of
all characters is stressed; Peter's ambivalence makes Spider-Man more heroic,
just as the frustrated ambitions fueling scientist Norman Osborn's
transformation into the Green Goblin make that super-villain more chilling.
And while the state-of-the-art visuals can be stunning ? not just the aerial
sequences, but Kyle Cooper's blazing projection design ? some of the most
affecting touches are low-tech. Before Spider-Man first takes flight, the
dancers doing his stunts leap and twitch like giddy children perfecting a new
trick.
Bono and Edge's songs aspire to the same emotional sweep. In a USA TODAY
interview in November, Bono described the "operatic" scope of U2's music. There
are tunes here, melodic and undeniably theatrical, that confirm that
determination to transcend sentimentality that links them to tunesmiths from
Bruce Springsteen to Rodgers and Hammerstein.
For more, tune in again in March. But know this for now: Spider-Man's creative
team is trying to bring musical theater back to the future. And that's a mission
worth rooting for.
__________________________________________________________________________________
From Bloomberg News:
Gorgeous, Dumb `Spider-Man' Remains Inert After 65 Previews
by Jeremy Gerard
** (out of four)
There were two showstoppers during the 65th preview of "Spider-Man: Turn Off the
Dark" on Saturday night, and they weren't songs.
This was meant to be the weekend critics came, though the producers of this
elaborately afflicted musical once again postponed opening night until March 15.
No dice. Critics from the New York Times, local tabloids, the Washington Post
and the Los Angeles Times, among others, dropped in anyway. And so did I, for
the second time, to re- review a show I had found close to unsalvageable on Dec.
26.
Preview number 65 was no improvement over number 30. In fact, it was worse.
At around midpoint in Act I, Reeve Carney couldn't take flight as he was
supposed to. While the crew futzed with the wires, Spidey and his nemesis the
Green Goblin (Patrick Page) sauntered over to a downstage piano and ad libbed
what turned out to be the funniest lines of the night.
"Better be careful with that Champagne," warned the Goblin as Spider-Man lifted
a glass.
"Pretty soon you'll be flying over the audience's heads." He paused. "I hear
they've dropped a few of `em." That drew a great laugh.
Minutes later, during their big, 30-second battle scene, Spider-Man had to be
helped onto one of his high perches and the Goblin was left dangling for several
minutes over the pricey seats.
Director Julie Taymor had said she would be crafting a new second act that
required time. Back in December, the show ended ambiguously, with a morose
super-hero. That's been replaced by a crowd-pleasing buss that Mary Jane plants
on him as he bungees, upside-down, from the rafters.
The best thing about "Spider-Man" remains George Tsypin's sets, a giddy-making
color-saturated mash-up of bold comic-strip tableaux and ingenious,
perspective-altering views of the Chrysler building, a teeny subway train, a
threatening city schoolyard.
They frame Taymor and costume designer Eiko Ishioka's outlandishly bedecked
villains and life-size puppets. Donald Holder has unleashed every exclamatory
trick of the lighting designer's trade to make the show a heart-quickening
visual trip, pumped up by Daniel Ezralow's acrobatic choreography.
Bono and The Edge, mostly out touring with U2 when not at Davos, have dropped in
from time to time without changing the songs, which remain loud, dull and
unmemorable.
Neither Taymor nor her co-writer, Glen Berger, have found a way to improve the
book, a protofeminist stew that foolishly decants the myth of the weaver Arachne
into a story that's incoherent to begin with.
After all this expenditure of talent and money, "Spider- Man" is probably
unfixable because too much has gone into making humans fly, which is not what
they are good at. It imitates poorly what the "Spider-Man" movies do brilliantly
with computer graphics -- and without putting live actors in jeopardy.
They are fine actors. In addition to Carney and Page, I liked Jennifer Damiano,
who has little to do as girlfriend Mary Jane Watson, but does it winningly, and
Michael Mulheren as crass Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson.
Maybe the show eventually will run for several performances in a row without
having to stop to untangle someone. Some triumph.
__________________________________________________________________________________
From New York Magazine:
Scott Brown Sees Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark
Some of my colleagues have wondered aloud whether Spider-man will ever be
finished ? whether it is, in fact, finishable. I think they're onto something: I
saw the show on Saturday night, and found it predictably unfinished, but
unpredictably entertaining, perhaps on account of this very quality of Death
Star?under?construction inchoateness. Conceptually speaking, it's closer to a
theme-park stunt spectacular than "circus art," closer to a comic than a
musical, closer to The Cremaster Cycle than a rock concert. But "closer" implies
proximity to some fixed point, and Spider-man is faaaar out, man. It's by turns
hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing,
distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and
clinically bipolar.
But never, ever boring. The 2-D comic art doesn't really go with Taymor's foamy,
tactile puppetry, just as U2's textural atmo-rock score doesn't really go with
the episodic Act One storytelling. Yet even in the depths of Spider-man's
certifiably insane second act, I was riveted. Riveted, yes, by what was visible
onstage: the inverted Fritz Lang cityscapes, the rag doll fly-assisted
choreography, the acid-Skittle color scheme and Ditko-era comic-art backdrops.
But often I was equally transfixed by the palpable offstage imagination willing
it all into existence. See, Spider-man isn't really about Spider-man. It's about
an artist locked in a death grapple with her subject, a tumultuous relationship
between a talented, tormented older woman and a callow young stud. Strip out the
$70 million in robotic guywires, Vari-lites, and latex mummery, and you're
basically looking at a Tennessee Williams play.
First, some background for the six people out there who remain (miraculously)
unpolluted by Spidey-leaks. (Skip this paragraph if you have been in the loop.)
Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark is a much-delayed project announced years ago;
producers have come and gone like fall foliage. Taymor, a revered visual artist
and anointed director of The Lion King, is at the helm, and co-wrote the book. A
proud control freak, she saw in the Spider-man character a peculiarly American
expression of ancient myth, and sought to put him in dialogue with the
storytelling traditions that bore him. Meanwhile, Marvel Comics and the show's
producers sought to put Spidey in dialogue with tens of millions in front money,
on the perfectly reasonable expectation that they'd see a healthy return. (This
was back when the movie franchise was alive and kicking.) Since then, the show's
suffered several delays of its opening, the slings and arrows of a skeptical
(and shut-out) press, and at least four high-profile accidents, some of them
extremely serious.
The plot of the show leaked early, but still defies understanding. Sure, the
first act is simple enough. It's Spider-man's familiar origin story, his
transformation from mild-mannered dweeb Peter Parker into the famous Web
Slinger. That arc is scripture for mass audiences, thanks to the first movie,
and it's charmingly carried out here by the L.A. rocker Reeve Carney in the lead
role. The storytelling is assisted by a "Geek Chorus" of four nerds ? one female
(Alice Lee) and demonstrably sharper than the rest. (She goes by "Miss Arrow,"
the name of Peter Parker's feminine nemesis and "opposite number" from the
comics.) They dream up a new story of Spider-man, complete with lots of swinging
around ? and here, Taymor delivers. Once the characters start flying (about 30
minutes in), they don't stop. The entire theater becomes a human aviary, and at
least four sequences are devoted exclusively to showing off the aerial rig.
Then comes the second act, which cliff-dives headlong into the realm of dream
and myth, allowing Taymor to interrogate the Spider-man character (and, one
senses, her own artistic rationale for taking a corporate job). But her primary
interest in Peter Parker is announced early on, in Act One: Where did he get the
suit? (He obviously didn't make it. It's too beautiful to have been created by a
heterosexual teenage boy.)
As a Spidey-story, Taymor's show is a solid B-minus. (Some of the story basics
get garbled and whiplashed, and basic foreknowledge of Spidey 101 is strongly
recommended, especially for patrons over the age of 9.) As a pop-art
installation treating the subject of pop art, however, the thing is off the
scale. What you're watching is the stem cells of a protean imagination dividing
and dividing and dividing, right out of control. Taymor's mind discards what
she's made as fast as she makes it, always on the move, in search of its next
impulse. A series of frames have been erected, one inside the other ? the
chorus, the superhero "origin story" ? in an attempt to contain this monadic,
nomadic Creator-force. But it's no use. The result is savage and deeply
confusing ? a boiling cancer-scape of living pain ? that is nevertheless
thrilling.
Did I mention there's a number where leggy lady-spiders try on shoes?
Focus!
For those of you who insist on paying a century note for unfinished goods, I'll
try to respond to the burning-est of your burning questions, point by point.
1. Why does Glenn Beck like this show so much? The short answer is: Because it
is a kid's show. (Which contains not one but two chalkboard scenes!) The longer
answer: It's a kid's show with somebody's cockeyed gender-studies thesis stapled
to its back. The even-longer answer: Beck and Spider-man both exist in a state
of perpetual adolescence; both are serious little Trapper Keeper scribblers,
stream-of-consciousness free-associaters totally enamored of their own bad
poetry. The key distinction: Taymor's bad poetry is still pretty ravishing.
(Though both kinda make you want to stock up on canned food and gold.)
2. Do people fall and die? Not on my night. But it wasn't exactly smooth
sailing, either. There was a technical glitch at the end of Act One, which
apparently recurs on several nights: It has something to do with a climactic
aerial battle between Spider-man and the Green Goblin (Broadway superhero
Patrick Page) on top of the Chrysler Building. (The Chrysler pistons in and out
of this show so relentlessly, it must violate blue laws.) These were the only
delays and stoppages I witnessed, but they were enough to mangle an already
contorted late-act storyboard into total nonsense.
Not to worry, though: Tech screw-ups are apparently just a cue for Page to start
vamping. He's a master, and one gets the feeling he's had plenty of practice. He
was in the middle of an evil cackle when the stage manager called for a caesura.
"That just takes the villainy right out of ya!" he cracked, to enormous laughs.
Then he plopped himself down in full foam-villain drag at a prop piano and
"played" a reprise of "(I'll Take) Manhattan," which Gobby taunts Spidey with,
atop the Chrysler. (Yes, it's true: The show's most delightful musical moment
comes not via Bono and Edge, but Rodgers and Hart.) Carney, his Spidey mask
doffed, joined him, sipping a prop champagne flute. "Careful there," said Page,
still half in character, "you gotta fly out over the audience in a minute." This
broke up Spidey, and the audience, too. Page surfed it, swiveled into an aside:
"You know, I hear they dropped a couple of 'em." Huge, ghoulish laughs. For a
moment, we get a glimpse of the show's potential as English "pantomime" ? the
sprawling, winking family entertainments they enjoy across the pond. Irony-wise,
could it be Julie Taymor's done by accident what Dance of the Vampires tried so
hard to do on
purpose?
At this point, I honestly hope they never fix the (non-injurious) glitches: They
puncture the show's pretense and furnish meta-theatrical opportunities that
can't be staged. We've had Epic Theater, we've had Poor Theater ? is this the
dawn of Broken Theater?
Corollary: Is it ghoulish that I'm half-expecting someone to fall? You bet! But
don't worry about it: Your gleeful morbidity is part of a larger cultural
disease, of which Spidenfreude is only the outermost protrusion. And isn't that
half the fun of "circus art," anyway? The phrases "death-defying!" and "without
a net!" weren't invented by Julie Taymor and Bono. Look, we're sick fucks. We've
always been sick fucks. The only difference is, nowadays we pay more for it than
we did in the 1890s.
3. Is this really Spidey? Or something else Julie Taymor made up in her
Krang-like crazybrain and labeled "Spider-man"? No, it's Spidey. Or rather, it's
just as Spidey as Alan Moore's Swamp Thing was Swamp Thing. Taymor's doing what
any big-name writer does when she takes over a comic-book title: She's grafting
her own obsessions onto it. Comics, despite all their surface pieties and
supposed obsession with "continuity," are an incredibly plastic form, a
substrate for almost any sort of storytelling. Taymor's taken full advantage of
that, and announces her intention to meddle in the mythology by hauling out her
"Geek Chorus." The fanboys, who are engaged in some vague act of comics
creation, announce their intention to create the most "disgustingly extreme"
version of the Spider-man story. They're challenged by Miss Arrow, speaking for
Taymor, who argues with the received Spider-wisdom and posits a higher
authority, Arachne (Across the Universe's T.V.
Carpio, perhaps a little too itty-bitty in voice-and-presence for a goddess
role). Arachne, any student of the classics will remember, was the first spider
? a human woman transformed by Athena after she won a weaving contest against
the goddess. Turns out she's the root cause of Spider-man, the Gaean original
predating the male demiurge. In the form of that genetically modified
superspider ? for she is all spiders ? Arachne gave Spider-man his powers. The
not-so-subtle implication is that Taymor herself has now entered the stage:
Artist and art have merged. ("I'm the only real artist working today," Arachne
cracks.) At this point, we learn that Arachne's not just a weaver of cloth, but
a weaver of dreams, and Taymor begins a light pillage of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman"
mythos. (You can't accuse her of not knowing her comics.) This also gives her
free rein to break her own (already scanty) rules: Dream and reality warp and
woof into a tapestry of total confusion, and the second act descends into mostly
watchable chaos. There's a supervillain fashion show, an unforgivably punny plot
point involving
"the world wide web" (it's a web, get it?), and lots of swipes at the nasty old
news media, with all its negativity and print-the-rumor churlishness. (Guilty as
charged!)
Oh, it's all nonsense, of course. It doesn't make a lick of sense, even with the
fervent annotations of the Chorus helping us through. The show's metabolism
speeds up in the second act, even as its central nervous system breaks down, and
eventually, even Taymor seems to be feeling a little winded. She starts relying
heavily on massive video-screens, featuring naive CGI versions of a villainous
pantheon that includes Carnage, Swarm, and Lizard. The second act, taken all in
all, is basically how I've always imagined the Bj�rk?Matthew Barney honeymoon:
lots of atavistic rock-moaning, lots of 40-story phallic symbols, lots of bees.
4. Is the music any good? As far as I could tell, there are only two U2 songs in
this show: "Boy Falls From the Sky," Spidey's big motif, and "Rise Above,"
Arachne's song. The rest of the music is a warm, not unpleasant ear bath of
urgent rock pattern-building. Much of it's wonderfully cheesy, as if the Edge
stepped out for a smoke and ceded the stage to John Carpenter. (Oh, if only!) I
don't expect to see U2 back on Broadway anytime soon, but it's been fun having
them over for an extended, if inconsequential jam. Reeve Carney's voice is an
excellent instrument for this sort of thing: He's got an extremely gratifying
rock tenor, nicely shreddy but never too emo-broken, and closer to Train than
U2.
5. What's it like out there in the audience? What audience? Hate to break it to
you, Joe Ticketbuyer, but you're just part of the scenery. The orchestra seating
exists mainly to give us jeopardy (and a target) for the many flying people
hurled overhead. Nervous? Don't worry, you're allowed to drink in the theater:
Never before have I sat in a mezzanine so littered with beer cans! (Not to
worry, theater snobs: They were Heinekens!)
So that's where things stand with Spider-man, on this February 7. As maximalist
camp, it succeeds thunderously. Is that what it intends to be? Irrelevant. To
ascribe intent would be to limit the power of this show's occasionally
frightening, often confounding, always metastasizing imagination. I recommend
Spider-man never open. I think it should be built and rebuilt and overbuilt
forever, a living monument to itself.
Jeffrey
have the right to see it. The preview period is the longest in Broadway
history. They are charging full price, not discounted preview prices while they
are working on the show. Therfore with all the publicity and hype they have
gotten, charging full price the only peple who didn't get to see it was the
critics as they kept moving the goal posts. A preview should be less expensive
as it is a work in progress and this disaster obviously needs lots more work but
the have the audacity to charge full price. Just the fact that several people
have been hurt badly should have been enough to shut them down.
Steve Newport
Rock music, science fiction, and special effects. There oughta be a
three strikes law.
"There's nothing quite like the power and the passion of Broadway music.
Musicals carry us to a different time and place, but in the end, they
also teach us a little bit of something about ourselves. It's one of the
few genres of music that can inspire the same passion in an
eight-year-old that it can in an 80-year-old. It transcends musical
tastes. In many ways, the story of Broadway is also intertwined with the
story of America. Some of the greatest singers and songwriters Broadway
has ever known came to this country on a boat with nothing more than an
idea in their head and a song in their heart. And they succeeded the
same way that so many immigrants have succeeded through talent and hard
work and sheer determination. Over the years, musicals have also been at
the forefront of our social consciousness, challenging stereotypes,
shaping our opinions about race and religion, death and disease, power
and politics. But perhaps the most American part of this truly American
art form is its optimism. Broadway music calls us to see the best in
ourselves and in the world around us; to believe that no matter how
hopeless things may seem, the nice guy can still get the girl, the hero
can still triumph over evil, and a brighter day can be waiting just
around the bend."-- President Obama
"Musicals blow the dust off your soul."-- Mel Brooks
bval...@aol.com
> Rock music, science fiction, and special effects. There oughta be a
> three strikes law.
Little Shop of Horrors.
It's a Bird, It's a Plane. It's ....SUPERMAN!
Rocky Horror
David Levy
Do you really consider the score of Superman to be "rock music"?
Robert Bouton
> > > Rock music, science fiction, and special effects.
> > It's a Bird, It's a Plane. It's ....SUPERMAN!
> > Rocky Horror
>
> Do you really consider the score of Superman to be "rock music"?
I do. As does the score's composer, Charles Strouse. But I've a
feeling we've discussed this before.
David Levy
It's possible. And granted that score predates me by enough years
that I understand I have a lack of perspective but... I don't think
calling something "rock and roll" and adding drums actually makes a
song rock and roll. See also: Cole Porter's "Ritz Rock and Roll."
bval...@aol.com
They did. This WAS 1965, you understand. Certainly rock music-ish.
bval...@aol.com
> > > Do you really consider the score of Superman to be "rock music"?
> > I do. As does the score's composer, Charles Strouse. But I've a
> > feeling we've discussed this before.
> It's possible. And granted that score predates me by enough years
> that I understand I have a lack of perspective but... I don't think
> calling something "rock and roll" and adding drums actually makes a
> song rock and roll. See also: Cole Porter's "Ritz Rock and Roll."
Rock people consider NO music done in a musical to be "rock".
John W Kennedy
"Tommy"?
--
John W Kennedy
"The grand art mastered the thudding hammer of Thor
And the heart of our lord Taliessin determined the war."
-- Charles Williams. "Mount Badon"
David Levy
I am far from being a "rock person."