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Monday, September 26, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
Meat Loaf Enlists Lil Jon, Chuck D for Upcoming 'Hell'-ish Album
by Gary Graff, Detroit
August 01, 2011 6:35 EDT
As he continues to tour in support of his 2010 album "Hang Cool Teddy Bear" -- and to commemorate his 40th anniversary as a recording artist -- Meat Loaf has three new projects in the works, including a studio album that will feature rappers Chuck D from Public Enemy and Lil Jon.
"Ever since we started with ('Hang Cool Teddy Bear' producer) Rob Cavallo, from that minute on I've been back in the music business and having a really, really great time -- which I haven't had for five years before that," Meat Loaf, who's returned to Sony Music -- which released three of his albums, including 1977's multi-platinum "Bat Out of Hell" -- tells Billboard.com.
First up will be "Hell in a Handbasket," due out in February (except for Australia and New Zealand) and an album Meat Loaf calls "the most personal record I've ever made. It's about how I feel the world's gone to hell in a handbasket. It's really the first record that I've ever put out about how I feel about life and how I feel about what's going on at the moment." Meat Loaf says the album is finished -- no release date has yet been established -- and "sounds different," although he adds that "it's rock, definitely rock," produced by Paul Crook, who's part of his current touring band, with Cavallo consulting.
As for the rappers, Meat Loaf met Lil Jon when the two appeared on "Celebrity Apprentice" this past spring, while Chuck D came through Anthrax's Scott Ian, who is Meat Loaf's son-in-law. "(D) was going to do one thing, and he came back and did something else and we flipped out," Meat Loaf reports.
Meat Loaf also has about nine songs towards another studio album, who's title we won't reveal. "We've started to do drum tracks on those songs, and we'll get more in pretty soon," he says. Meanwhile he's planning a 2012 Christmas album called "Hot Holidays" that will feature guests such as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire "and different rock people and some actors...After I played Sony ('Hell in a Hand Basket') I said, 'Look, I've got two other records. I've got a Christmas record and I've got another record,' and they said, 'Well, get us the Christmas record and start working on the other one.' So there you go -- I'll just keep recording."
Meat Loaf -- whose first album, "Stoney & Meatloaf" with current Bob Seger backup singer Shaun Murphy, came out in 1971 on Motown's Rare Earth label -- says he's also keeping an eye out for further acting opportunities, although at this point "I'm more focused on the music than I've been in a long time." But he's also happy to be name-checked in an new TV ad for Allstate Insurance. "I liked it. I think it's funny," he notes. "They showed it to me, and they paid me for (use of) my picture. It's autographed, by the way; it goes by so fast you can't really read it, but it says, 'To the professor...' It's pretty cool."
Meat Loaf is recording in-between tour dates, which go into early September in the U.S. He's also booked a run of Australia and New Zealand for for October, including a spot on the A Day on the Green festival Oct. 8 in Hunter Valley. "Hell in a Handbasket" will be released in those countries to coincide with the tour.
http://www.billboard.com/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story#/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story
August 01, 2011 6:35 EDT
As he continues to tour in support of his 2010 album "Hang Cool Teddy Bear" -- and to commemorate his 40th anniversary as a recording artist -- Meat Loaf has three new projects in the works, including a studio album that will feature rappers Chuck D from Public Enemy and Lil Jon.
"Ever since we started with ('Hang Cool Teddy Bear' producer) Rob Cavallo, from that minute on I've been back in the music business and having a really, really great time -- which I haven't had for five years before that," Meat Loaf, who's returned to Sony Music -- which released three of his albums, including 1977's multi-platinum "Bat Out of Hell" -- tells Billboard.com.
First up will be "Hell in a Handbasket," due out in February (except for Australia and New Zealand) and an album Meat Loaf calls "the most personal record I've ever made. It's about how I feel the world's gone to hell in a handbasket. It's really the first record that I've ever put out about how I feel about life and how I feel about what's going on at the moment." Meat Loaf says the album is finished -- no release date has yet been established -- and "sounds different," although he adds that "it's rock, definitely rock," produced by Paul Crook, who's part of his current touring band, with Cavallo consulting.
As for the rappers, Meat Loaf met Lil Jon when the two appeared on "Celebrity Apprentice" this past spring, while Chuck D came through Anthrax's Scott Ian, who is Meat Loaf's son-in-law. "(D) was going to do one thing, and he came back and did something else and we flipped out," Meat Loaf reports.
Meat Loaf also has about nine songs towards another studio album, who's title we won't reveal. "We've started to do drum tracks on those songs, and we'll get more in pretty soon," he says. Meanwhile he's planning a 2012 Christmas album called "Hot Holidays" that will feature guests such as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire "and different rock people and some actors...After I played Sony ('Hell in a Hand Basket') I said, 'Look, I've got two other records. I've got a Christmas record and I've got another record,' and they said, 'Well, get us the Christmas record and start working on the other one.' So there you go -- I'll just keep recording."
Meat Loaf -- whose first album, "Stoney & Meatloaf" with current Bob Seger backup singer Shaun Murphy, came out in 1971 on Motown's Rare Earth label -- says he's also keeping an eye out for further acting opportunities, although at this point "I'm more focused on the music than I've been in a long time." But he's also happy to be name-checked in an new TV ad for Allstate Insurance. "I liked it. I think it's funny," he notes. "They showed it to me, and they paid me for (use of) my picture. It's autographed, by the way; it goes by so fast you can't really read it, but it says, 'To the professor...' It's pretty cool."
Meat Loaf is recording in-between tour dates, which go into early September in the U.S. He's also booked a run of Australia and New Zealand for for October, including a spot on the A Day on the Green festival Oct. 8 in Hunter Valley. "Hell in a Handbasket" will be released in those countries to coincide with the tour.
http://www.billboard.com/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story#/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Love Never Dies (but the West End musical has)
By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies, which has divided fans and critics throughout its brief history, will close in London's West End in August after just under 18 months playing at the Adelphi Theatre.
A spokesperson for the production confirmed that the show would close after it was revealed yesterday that another show, One Man, Two Guvnors, currently playing at the National Theatre, would transfer to the Adelphi from November.
The spokesperson said: "I can confirm that the show's run will end on 27 August." A spokesperson for Lord Lloyd-Webber's Really Useful Group refused to comment further.
The lavish production, which cost £5.5m, has had a troubled run, not least because of Phantom fans objecting to the production through a Facebook group and a website, loveshoulddie.com. The group has branded the show a "train wreck" and a bastardisation of the original early 20th century story by the French writer Gaston Leroux, subsequently made into a 1986 hit musical composed by Lord Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Charles Hart.
According to The Stage theatre critic Mark Shenton, the show, which stars Ramin Karimloo as the phantom and is set 10 years after the original story, "suffered from a series of production miscalculations". These included Lord Lloyd-Webber's "hubristic" plans to open the show simultaneously on three continents, something which never materialised.
Lord Lloyd-Webber later admitted it was a mistake to continue with the show in the wake of his cancer diagnosis in October 2009. "I had a unique issue because I got cancer in the middle of all of it," he said this month. "With hindsight we should have said, 'Let's put the whole thing on hold until I'm 100 per cent again.' Frankly I wasn't feeling very well."
In the same interview the impresario admitted that the show suffered from the lack of an outside producer to help steer its progress.
The show received mixed reviews when it opened last year, with one critic branding it "Paint Never Dries". In November it was postponed for changes to be made, and it bounced back from early box-office jitters to pick up seven nominations at the Olivier Awards this year.
In October it was reported that a planned Broadway run of the show was "indefinitely postponed". In May an Australian version of the show opened to more positive reviews than the original.
Shenton said: "I can hear the gloating already from the mad 'Love Should Die' lobby of Love Never Dies detractors, who have run their disgraceful campaign of intimidation and aggravation, lies and deceit around the show since before it even opened. But now they are finally getting their wish."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/love-never-dies-but-the-west-end-musical-has-2299298.html
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies, which has divided fans and critics throughout its brief history, will close in London's West End in August after just under 18 months playing at the Adelphi Theatre.
A spokesperson for the production confirmed that the show would close after it was revealed yesterday that another show, One Man, Two Guvnors, currently playing at the National Theatre, would transfer to the Adelphi from November.
The spokesperson said: "I can confirm that the show's run will end on 27 August." A spokesperson for Lord Lloyd-Webber's Really Useful Group refused to comment further.
The lavish production, which cost £5.5m, has had a troubled run, not least because of Phantom fans objecting to the production through a Facebook group and a website, loveshoulddie.com. The group has branded the show a "train wreck" and a bastardisation of the original early 20th century story by the French writer Gaston Leroux, subsequently made into a 1986 hit musical composed by Lord Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Charles Hart.
According to The Stage theatre critic Mark Shenton, the show, which stars Ramin Karimloo as the phantom and is set 10 years after the original story, "suffered from a series of production miscalculations". These included Lord Lloyd-Webber's "hubristic" plans to open the show simultaneously on three continents, something which never materialised.
Lord Lloyd-Webber later admitted it was a mistake to continue with the show in the wake of his cancer diagnosis in October 2009. "I had a unique issue because I got cancer in the middle of all of it," he said this month. "With hindsight we should have said, 'Let's put the whole thing on hold until I'm 100 per cent again.' Frankly I wasn't feeling very well."
In the same interview the impresario admitted that the show suffered from the lack of an outside producer to help steer its progress.
The show received mixed reviews when it opened last year, with one critic branding it "Paint Never Dries". In November it was postponed for changes to be made, and it bounced back from early box-office jitters to pick up seven nominations at the Olivier Awards this year.
In October it was reported that a planned Broadway run of the show was "indefinitely postponed". In May an Australian version of the show opened to more positive reviews than the original.
Shenton said: "I can hear the gloating already from the mad 'Love Should Die' lobby of Love Never Dies detractors, who have run their disgraceful campaign of intimidation and aggravation, lies and deceit around the show since before it even opened. But now they are finally getting their wish."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/love-never-dies-but-the-west-end-musical-has-2299298.html
Monday, June 27, 2011
Really Useful Group maps out split
Posted: Sat., Jun. 25, 2011, 4:00am PT
Really Useful Group maps out split
Webber company planning restructure
By David Benedict
London-- In the midst of ongoing industry whispers about the future of Andrew Lloyd Webber and his 35-year-old Really Useful Group, the org is laying the groundwork for a 2013 split that will divide the company and its 70-strong staff into two divisions, both entirely owned by Lloyd Webber.
Really Useful chair Mark Wordsworth tells Variety that one company will manage and program the seven West End theaters owned or co-owned by Lloyd Webber, while the second will oversee "brand Lloyd Webber," producing the composer's musicals and controlling the rights to his popular body of work. Restructuring won't take place until 2013 due to employment and tax issues.
The company unveils the plan just as questions about the future of Really Useful have gained traction in the wake of last week's news of the early shuttering of the West End production of "Love Never Dies," Lloyd Webber's much-vaunted sequel to the seemingly unstoppable "The Phantom of the Opera." Word of the August closing leaked out unsupported by any press statement from the company.
That only added to a list of woes. Last year's deal to sell four of Really Useful's West End theaters to Michael Grade and Michael Linnit collapsed, and soon thereafter came the announcement that Andre Ptaszynski would be stepping down as the company's chief exec at the end of June. Further, although London box office figures are never published, insiders indicate that Lloyd Webber's current production of "The Wizard of Oz," cast via a primetime-TV reality show, is underperforming at the 2,255-seat London Palladium.
Small wonder, then, that questions are being asked. Yet Wordsworth roundly refutes the analysis that the company's future is fueled by a past now low on gas.
He concedes that no Really Useful production is slated for London until the "Cats" revival with Cameron Mackintosh in 2013. "But five top-grade productions in one city in a five-year period -- 'Evita,' 'The Sound of Music,' 'Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,' 'Love Never Dies' and 'The Wizard of Oz,' three of which were cast via TV shows -- is a heavy creative output for any company," he says.
Counterbalancing the all-quiet on the West End front, he points to future worldwide productions.
"The Australian 'Love Never Dies' is very successful, so we're deciding where that might go and how we develop it. Michael Grandage's production of 'Evita' is on Broadway in 2012, and 'The Wizard of Oz' will go at some point."
He and Lloyd Webber are also enthusiastic about Des McAnuff's production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" at the Stratford Festival in Ontario: "We're looking for Broadway slots and also talking about an arena tour," Wordsworth says.
And there's a Mandarin production of "Cats" opening next year in a prestigious new opera house in Guangzhou, China.
The structural change is an attempt to better manage such upcoming activity.
"RUG exists to support Andrew in all his creative activities: not just his new productions and the seven theaters but to manage his copyrights, royalties, stock and amateur rights," Wordsworth says, adding that over the past five years, rights management has taken a back seat to the London productions.
Once the group dissolves into two companies, one will concern itself with theater ownership and programming. That indicates a change of heart regarding the earlier attempt to sell off the venues.
According to Wordsworth, when last year's deal fell through, the company was approached by "everyone else on the planet" to buy the theaters.
But having recovered from prostate cancer, Lloyd Webber is now intent upon developing the properties himself, not least because three of them -- Her Majesty's, New London and Cambridge -- have their futures settled with, respectively, long-running hits "Phantom," "War Horse" and the Royal Shakespeare Company's incoming critical and audience smash "Matilda." No longer liabilities, they're now looking like prime assets.
The company's rights arm will be akin to the Gotham-based Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization (sold in 2009 to Imagem Music Group), which controls the rights to the legendary canon of the duo ("The Sound of Music," "South Pacific").
"It will take forward Andrew's new ideas, anything from shows being cast by TV in the U.S. through stadium tours, online video and games with Andrew's content. It will also beef up the stock and amateur side and be more proactive."
Even Ptasynski's departure is explained by the fact that the group will no longer exist as such. Besides working as an independent producer, he remains with Really Useful to manage and program the theaters.
As a composer, Lloyd Webber's last major profit-maker was "Phantom" a quarter of a century ago. His subsequent offerings "Sunset Boulevard," "Whistle Down the Wind," "The Beautiful Game," "The Woman in White" and (so far) "Love Never Dies" have failed to make it into the black.
But if his recent writing has disappointed financially, the business -- what Wordsworth terms "brand Lloyd Webber" -- may be strong enough to silence the naysayers.
Contact David Benedict at benedictdavid@mac.com
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118039120
Really Useful Group maps out split
Webber company planning restructure
By David Benedict
London-- In the midst of ongoing industry whispers about the future of Andrew Lloyd Webber and his 35-year-old Really Useful Group, the org is laying the groundwork for a 2013 split that will divide the company and its 70-strong staff into two divisions, both entirely owned by Lloyd Webber.
Really Useful chair Mark Wordsworth tells Variety that one company will manage and program the seven West End theaters owned or co-owned by Lloyd Webber, while the second will oversee "brand Lloyd Webber," producing the composer's musicals and controlling the rights to his popular body of work. Restructuring won't take place until 2013 due to employment and tax issues.
The company unveils the plan just as questions about the future of Really Useful have gained traction in the wake of last week's news of the early shuttering of the West End production of "Love Never Dies," Lloyd Webber's much-vaunted sequel to the seemingly unstoppable "The Phantom of the Opera." Word of the August closing leaked out unsupported by any press statement from the company.
That only added to a list of woes. Last year's deal to sell four of Really Useful's West End theaters to Michael Grade and Michael Linnit collapsed, and soon thereafter came the announcement that Andre Ptaszynski would be stepping down as the company's chief exec at the end of June. Further, although London box office figures are never published, insiders indicate that Lloyd Webber's current production of "The Wizard of Oz," cast via a primetime-TV reality show, is underperforming at the 2,255-seat London Palladium.
Small wonder, then, that questions are being asked. Yet Wordsworth roundly refutes the analysis that the company's future is fueled by a past now low on gas.
He concedes that no Really Useful production is slated for London until the "Cats" revival with Cameron Mackintosh in 2013. "But five top-grade productions in one city in a five-year period -- 'Evita,' 'The Sound of Music,' 'Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,' 'Love Never Dies' and 'The Wizard of Oz,' three of which were cast via TV shows -- is a heavy creative output for any company," he says.
Counterbalancing the all-quiet on the West End front, he points to future worldwide productions.
"The Australian 'Love Never Dies' is very successful, so we're deciding where that might go and how we develop it. Michael Grandage's production of 'Evita' is on Broadway in 2012, and 'The Wizard of Oz' will go at some point."
He and Lloyd Webber are also enthusiastic about Des McAnuff's production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" at the Stratford Festival in Ontario: "We're looking for Broadway slots and also talking about an arena tour," Wordsworth says.
And there's a Mandarin production of "Cats" opening next year in a prestigious new opera house in Guangzhou, China.
The structural change is an attempt to better manage such upcoming activity.
"RUG exists to support Andrew in all his creative activities: not just his new productions and the seven theaters but to manage his copyrights, royalties, stock and amateur rights," Wordsworth says, adding that over the past five years, rights management has taken a back seat to the London productions.
Once the group dissolves into two companies, one will concern itself with theater ownership and programming. That indicates a change of heart regarding the earlier attempt to sell off the venues.
According to Wordsworth, when last year's deal fell through, the company was approached by "everyone else on the planet" to buy the theaters.
But having recovered from prostate cancer, Lloyd Webber is now intent upon developing the properties himself, not least because three of them -- Her Majesty's, New London and Cambridge -- have their futures settled with, respectively, long-running hits "Phantom," "War Horse" and the Royal Shakespeare Company's incoming critical and audience smash "Matilda." No longer liabilities, they're now looking like prime assets.
The company's rights arm will be akin to the Gotham-based Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization (sold in 2009 to Imagem Music Group), which controls the rights to the legendary canon of the duo ("The Sound of Music," "South Pacific").
"It will take forward Andrew's new ideas, anything from shows being cast by TV in the U.S. through stadium tours, online video and games with Andrew's content. It will also beef up the stock and amateur side and be more proactive."
Even Ptasynski's departure is explained by the fact that the group will no longer exist as such. Besides working as an independent producer, he remains with Really Useful to manage and program the theaters.
As a composer, Lloyd Webber's last major profit-maker was "Phantom" a quarter of a century ago. His subsequent offerings "Sunset Boulevard," "Whistle Down the Wind," "The Beautiful Game," "The Woman in White" and (so far) "Love Never Dies" have failed to make it into the black.
But if his recent writing has disappointed financially, the business -- what Wordsworth terms "brand Lloyd Webber" -- may be strong enough to silence the naysayers.
Contact David Benedict at benedictdavid@mac.com
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118039120
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
1 Radioactive Bite, 8 Legs and 183 Previews
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 14, 2011
There is something to be said for those dangerous flying objects — excuse me, I mean actors — that keep whizzing around the Foxwoods Theater, where the mega-expensive musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” has entered the latest chapter of its fraught and anxious existence. After all, if you’re worried that somebody might fall on top of you from a great height, the odds are that you won’t nod off.
Those adrenaline-raising acrobatics are a necessary part of the lumpy package that is “Spider-Man,” which had its long-delayed official opening on Tuesday night, after 180-some preview performances. First seen and deplored by critics several months ago — when impatient journalists (including me) broke the media embargo for reviews as the show’s opening date kept sliding into a misty future — this singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February. It’s just a bore.
So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”
The first time I saw the show, it was like watching the Hindenburg burn and crash. This time “Spider-Man” — which was originally conceived by the (since departed) visionary director Julie Taymor with the rock musicians Bono and the Edge (of U2) — stirred foggy, not unpleasant childhood memories of second-tier sci-fi TV in the 1960s, with blatantly artificial sets and actors in unconvincing alien masks.
“Spider-Man” may be the only Broadway show of the past half-century to make international headlines regularly, often with the adjective “troubled” attached to its title. So I’m assuming you already know at least a bit of its long and tortuous history of revision, cancellation, indecision and injury (from production-related accidents), and of its true star.
That would be Ms. Taymor (who retains an “original direction by” credit), who in the 1990s was hailed as the new Ziegfeld after reinventing a Disney animated film, “The Lion King,” as a classy, mass-appeal Broadway blockbuster. The prospect of her hooking up with Spidey, the nerdy-cool Marvel Comics crime fighter, seemed like a swell opportunity for another lucrative melding of pageantry, puppetry and culture high and low.
Those elements were certainly in abundance in the “Spider-Man” I saw several months ago. That production, which featured a script by Ms. Taymor and Glen Berger, placed its young superhero in a broader meta-context of Greek mythology and American Pop art, with a “geek chorus” of commentators and a classical goddess named Arachne as the morally ambiguous mentor of Spidey and his awkward alter ego, Peter Parker.
Unfortunately, traditional niceties like a comprehensible plot and characters got lost in the stew. After critics let loose with howls of derision, “Spider-Man” took a three-week performance hiatus to reassemble itself, with tools that included audience focus groups. Exit Ms. Taymor. (Bono, the Edge and Mr. Berger stayed put.)
Enter Philip William McKinley — a director whose credits include several versions of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” — and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a writer of both plays and comic books. Now if you check out the directory of paid theater listings in The New York Times, you’ll see that the title “Spider-Man” is prefaced by the promising (if slightly desperate-sounding) words: “REIMAGINED! New Story! New Music!”
This is not false advertising. “Spider-Man” now bears only a scant resemblance to the muddled fever dream that was. It is instead not unlike one of those perky, tongue-in-cheek genre-spoof musicals (“Dames at Sea,” “Little Shop of Horrors”) that used to sprout like mushrooms in Greenwich Village, with witty cutout scenery and dialogue bristling with arch quotation marks.
Well, that is, if you could imagine such a show being stripped of its irony and supersized by a diabolical mad scientist with an enlarging ray. Though “Spider-Man” has shed its geek chorus and scaled down the role of Arachne (T. V. Carpio), it retains the most spectacular-looking centerpieces from the Taymor version. (George Tsypin is the set designer.) They include a vertiginous vision of Manhattan as seen from the top of the Chrysler Building, judiciously repositioned for plot purposes.
But they do seem out of proportion to what has become a straightforward children’s entertainment with a mildly suspenseful story, two-dimensional characters, unapologetically bad jokes and the kind of melodious rock tunes that those under 12 might be familiar with from listening to their parents’ salad-day favorites of the 1980s and ’90s. The puppet figures and mask-dominated costumes worn by the supporting villains still seem to have wandered in from a theme park. The projection designs by Kyle Cooper continue to suggest vintage MTV videos, as does the unimaginative choreography by Daniel Ezralow and Chase Brock.
The bonus is that anyone can follow the story now. (Boy is bitten by radioactive spider, boy acquires amazing powers, boy fights crime, boy has doubts, boy triumphs.) And the performers no longer seem overwhelmed by what surrounds them. Their characters now register as distinct if one-note personalities.
In the title role Reeve Carney is an appropriately nonthreatening crush object for tweens, an appealingly agitated Everydweeb with great cheekbones and a sanitized, lite version of a concert rocker’s voice. He is well paired with the wryly sincere Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal”) as Mary Jane Watson, Peter’s girlfriend.
Ms. Carpio’s Arachne (now a beneficent fairy godmother rather than an erotically troubling dream spider) provides the most arresting vocal moments with her ululating nasality. Michael Mulheren is suitably blustery and fatuous as the pandering newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. And Patrick Page, as the megalomaniacal scientist who becomes the evil mutant called the Green Goblin, provides the one reason for adults unaccompanied by minors to see the show.
His role has been expanded, and Mr. Page uses the extra time not just to terrorize the audience amiably, as you expect mean green scene stealers to do. (He has charmingly reinvented that staple of melodramatic villains, the sustained insane cackle.) He also has become the show’s entertaining id, channeling and deflecting our own dark thoughts about this lopsided spectacle.
“I’m a $65 million circus tragedy,” he crows at one point. “Well, more like 75 million.”
But even Mr. Page is only a sideshow (not to switch metaphors) to the main event. And that’s the sight of real people — mostly stuntmen — flying over the audience, and the implicit danger therein. (An amplified voice warns the audience not only to turn off their cellphones but also to avoid trying to catch a ride with the professional fliers.)
Unlike the first time I saw “Spider-Man,” the flying (the first instance of which occurs about 45 minutes into the show) went off without a hitch on this occasion. The potential magic is undercut, though, by the very visible wires and harnesses that facilitate these aerodynamics.
Partly because the performers are masked, you experience little of the vicarious wonder and exhilaration that comes from watching Peter Pan or even Mary Poppins ride the air in other musicals. The effect is rather like looking at anonymous daredevils who have been strapped into a breakneck ride at an amusement park. Come to think of it, Coney Island might be a more satisfying choice.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/theater/reviews/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-opens-after-changes-review.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1308122895-pwrrSYQgYFTJz5YrRVYAfg
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 14, 2011
There is something to be said for those dangerous flying objects — excuse me, I mean actors — that keep whizzing around the Foxwoods Theater, where the mega-expensive musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” has entered the latest chapter of its fraught and anxious existence. After all, if you’re worried that somebody might fall on top of you from a great height, the odds are that you won’t nod off.
Those adrenaline-raising acrobatics are a necessary part of the lumpy package that is “Spider-Man,” which had its long-delayed official opening on Tuesday night, after 180-some preview performances. First seen and deplored by critics several months ago — when impatient journalists (including me) broke the media embargo for reviews as the show’s opening date kept sliding into a misty future — this singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February. It’s just a bore.
So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”
The first time I saw the show, it was like watching the Hindenburg burn and crash. This time “Spider-Man” — which was originally conceived by the (since departed) visionary director Julie Taymor with the rock musicians Bono and the Edge (of U2) — stirred foggy, not unpleasant childhood memories of second-tier sci-fi TV in the 1960s, with blatantly artificial sets and actors in unconvincing alien masks.
“Spider-Man” may be the only Broadway show of the past half-century to make international headlines regularly, often with the adjective “troubled” attached to its title. So I’m assuming you already know at least a bit of its long and tortuous history of revision, cancellation, indecision and injury (from production-related accidents), and of its true star.
That would be Ms. Taymor (who retains an “original direction by” credit), who in the 1990s was hailed as the new Ziegfeld after reinventing a Disney animated film, “The Lion King,” as a classy, mass-appeal Broadway blockbuster. The prospect of her hooking up with Spidey, the nerdy-cool Marvel Comics crime fighter, seemed like a swell opportunity for another lucrative melding of pageantry, puppetry and culture high and low.
Those elements were certainly in abundance in the “Spider-Man” I saw several months ago. That production, which featured a script by Ms. Taymor and Glen Berger, placed its young superhero in a broader meta-context of Greek mythology and American Pop art, with a “geek chorus” of commentators and a classical goddess named Arachne as the morally ambiguous mentor of Spidey and his awkward alter ego, Peter Parker.
Unfortunately, traditional niceties like a comprehensible plot and characters got lost in the stew. After critics let loose with howls of derision, “Spider-Man” took a three-week performance hiatus to reassemble itself, with tools that included audience focus groups. Exit Ms. Taymor. (Bono, the Edge and Mr. Berger stayed put.)
Enter Philip William McKinley — a director whose credits include several versions of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” — and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a writer of both plays and comic books. Now if you check out the directory of paid theater listings in The New York Times, you’ll see that the title “Spider-Man” is prefaced by the promising (if slightly desperate-sounding) words: “REIMAGINED! New Story! New Music!”
This is not false advertising. “Spider-Man” now bears only a scant resemblance to the muddled fever dream that was. It is instead not unlike one of those perky, tongue-in-cheek genre-spoof musicals (“Dames at Sea,” “Little Shop of Horrors”) that used to sprout like mushrooms in Greenwich Village, with witty cutout scenery and dialogue bristling with arch quotation marks.
Well, that is, if you could imagine such a show being stripped of its irony and supersized by a diabolical mad scientist with an enlarging ray. Though “Spider-Man” has shed its geek chorus and scaled down the role of Arachne (T. V. Carpio), it retains the most spectacular-looking centerpieces from the Taymor version. (George Tsypin is the set designer.) They include a vertiginous vision of Manhattan as seen from the top of the Chrysler Building, judiciously repositioned for plot purposes.
But they do seem out of proportion to what has become a straightforward children’s entertainment with a mildly suspenseful story, two-dimensional characters, unapologetically bad jokes and the kind of melodious rock tunes that those under 12 might be familiar with from listening to their parents’ salad-day favorites of the 1980s and ’90s. The puppet figures and mask-dominated costumes worn by the supporting villains still seem to have wandered in from a theme park. The projection designs by Kyle Cooper continue to suggest vintage MTV videos, as does the unimaginative choreography by Daniel Ezralow and Chase Brock.
The bonus is that anyone can follow the story now. (Boy is bitten by radioactive spider, boy acquires amazing powers, boy fights crime, boy has doubts, boy triumphs.) And the performers no longer seem overwhelmed by what surrounds them. Their characters now register as distinct if one-note personalities.
In the title role Reeve Carney is an appropriately nonthreatening crush object for tweens, an appealingly agitated Everydweeb with great cheekbones and a sanitized, lite version of a concert rocker’s voice. He is well paired with the wryly sincere Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal”) as Mary Jane Watson, Peter’s girlfriend.
Ms. Carpio’s Arachne (now a beneficent fairy godmother rather than an erotically troubling dream spider) provides the most arresting vocal moments with her ululating nasality. Michael Mulheren is suitably blustery and fatuous as the pandering newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. And Patrick Page, as the megalomaniacal scientist who becomes the evil mutant called the Green Goblin, provides the one reason for adults unaccompanied by minors to see the show.
His role has been expanded, and Mr. Page uses the extra time not just to terrorize the audience amiably, as you expect mean green scene stealers to do. (He has charmingly reinvented that staple of melodramatic villains, the sustained insane cackle.) He also has become the show’s entertaining id, channeling and deflecting our own dark thoughts about this lopsided spectacle.
“I’m a $65 million circus tragedy,” he crows at one point. “Well, more like 75 million.”
But even Mr. Page is only a sideshow (not to switch metaphors) to the main event. And that’s the sight of real people — mostly stuntmen — flying over the audience, and the implicit danger therein. (An amplified voice warns the audience not only to turn off their cellphones but also to avoid trying to catch a ride with the professional fliers.)
Unlike the first time I saw “Spider-Man,” the flying (the first instance of which occurs about 45 minutes into the show) went off without a hitch on this occasion. The potential magic is undercut, though, by the very visible wires and harnesses that facilitate these aerodynamics.
Partly because the performers are masked, you experience little of the vicarious wonder and exhilaration that comes from watching Peter Pan or even Mary Poppins ride the air in other musicals. The effect is rather like looking at anonymous daredevils who have been strapped into a breakneck ride at an amusement park. Come to think of it, Coney Island might be a more satisfying choice.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/theater/reviews/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-opens-after-changes-review.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1308122895-pwrrSYQgYFTJz5YrRVYAfg
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Love Never Dies is Phantom, take two
Simon Plant
From: Herald Sun
May 28, 2011 12:00AM
THE man who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and The Phantom of the Opera knows a hit when he sees one.
So, right after he saw the first dress rehearsal in London of his Phantom sequel, Love Never Dies, Lord Lloyd Webber rang his wife, Madeleine Gurdon, and said: "Darling, it's not going to work.
"I'm sorry, we'll make the best of it, but it isn't."
That was March last year. Flash forward to Melbourne a week ago. Lloyd Webber is in the stalls of the Regent Theatre to view the first run-through of a radically different Australian version of Love Never Dies starring two relative unknowns: Ben Lewis as the Phantom and Anna O'Byrne as Christine.
Later that evening, the world's most successful living composer rings his wife and says: "I've got to tell you, it's the other end of the scale. This one is bliss!"
What happened in between could almost make a musical. How Lloyd Webber overcame harsh reviews and a cancer scare to restage the show by collaborating with a creative team on the other side of the world.
"I can't really even put it into words but I feel very deeply that this show takes what I originally did (The Phantom) into another dimension," he says. "It sort of closes a chapter."
We will know if there's a happy ending tonight, when the new $9 million production of Love Never Dies has its Australian premiere in front of an audience containing top producers from North America and Asia.
Whether or not they surrender to its passions, Lloyd Webber believes he is seeing Love Never Dies "as I always hoped it would one day be. I didn't know that would happen here but, honestly, it is an absolutely extraordinary piece of work".
Lloyd Webber sensed the new approach was right even before the overture ended. Gobsmacked by the sight of dome-capped towers and twinkling lights signifying New York's Coney Island fairground, he decided: "You just know that you're in the world where it's supposed to be."
For the past week, Lloyd Webber's world has orbited around the gloriously gothic Regent and a theatre suite overlooking Collins St.
The morning we meet, his lordship looks relaxed in a navy blazer, grey slacks and black slip-on shoes - as if he's wandered in off the deck of a yacht - but producer Tim McFarlane (The Really Useful Group Asia Pacific) advises that Lloyd Webber has been haunting the Regent since he arrived from London: dashing off notes to cast and crew, slogging through tech runs and fine-tuning every aspect of a show he calls "97 per cent there".
"Yes, I've had six days doing what I love doing," he says, "which is actually being a composer working with the director."
Simon Phillips (retiring artistic director of the MTC) is directing this second version of Love Never Dies. It was McFarlane who suggested he meet Lloyd Webber in the UK about restaging the show Down Under and they agreed it would benefit from "going back to the drawing board and reconceiving everything".
That meeting led to another at Lloyd Webber's Mediterranean home, where Phillips's preferred designer, Gabriela Tylesova, unveiled a scenic model with swooping roller-coaster curves.
"I've never seen anything like it before," an astonished Lloyd Webber told her. And standing before the real thing this week, the composer was still dumbfounded by its daring, saying: "Wow, wow."
MILLIONS say the same thing about The Phantom. Lloyd Webber's mega-hit musical has been seen in 149 cities and taken more than $5 billion. But, almost from the moment that famous chandelier rattled in 1986, Lloyd Webber was looking at ways to extend the story of the Phantom, Christine and Raoul.
"I care very much for those characters and the love triangle that exists there," he says.
In 1994, Lloyd Webber discussed the idea of a sequel with novelist Frederick Forsyth. Ten years later, he and comic writer Ben Elton came up with a story that placed the trio on the other side of the Atlantic.
Lloyd Webber was especially attracted to Coney Island - "The only place you could go to where everybody was a freak of some kind" - and imagined a romantic trap being laid there in 1907: 10 years after the Phantom's dramatic disappearance from the Paris Opera House.
"This is a very personal piece for me," he says. "There's probably more of my real self in this than anything else I've ever done."
For his new tale of unrequited love, Lloyd Webber crafted music with a darker, more operatic hue than its classical-pop predecessor and imagined an electrically charged carnival world where his songs could soar.
Shaping a clear storyline proved harder. As he says: "If the book is not fundamentally right, you can be in an awful lot of trouble."
A "perfect storm" of trouble engulfed Love Never Dies as its West End debut approached. Phantom fanatics who objected to a sequel staged what he calls a "professionally run internet campaign against us".
Then Lloyd Webber was diagnosed with cancer. He expected to recover quickly from a prostate operation but explains: "I wasn't back properly and I wasn't on the case as I could normally be with a production that actually wasn't right ... all of us involved with it should have said, 'We've got to put it on hold'."
The theatre critics in London pounced and bloggers cruelly dubbed the show Paint Never Dries. Lloyd Webber says now: "Because I was ill and everything, it probably would have been better if it had been actually produced by someone else."
Second time round, Lloyd Webber has focused on the script and the score and allowed the Australians maximum creative space - a privilege he and lyricist Tim Rice enjoyed in the late 1960s and '70s.
"I sometimes wonder whether Jesus Christ Superstar (1972) would even have been heard of if we'd (first) done it in the theatre," he muses. "Instead, we just made it as an album and said, 'If you want to stage it, you're just going to do what we wrote or not'. Because we were kids and you could say those sorts of things."
Recently reunited on a production of The Wizard of Oz, Rice told Lloyd Webber: "The thing is, Andrew, when we started off, you just did it and didn't listen to anybody. Now, at this stage of our careers, we end up with so many people and don't always come up with the right result."
Love Never Dies mark II could be an exception.
LLOYD Webber's only "real reservation" about Melbourne was the size of the Regent, but those doubts eased after he saw Phillips's "consummate staging".
"Simon seems to know exactly what he wants. I have to say, I'm incredibly impressed," he says.
He is full of praise also for choreographer Graeme Murphy, musical supervisor Guy Simpson, and the cast. Asked about plans to take Love Never Dies overseas, he hesitates, then says: "I would like to see this production go everywhere. It's just the best."
What about New York?
"This is the show that should go to Broadway without any question."
For now, Lloyd Webber is probing every crochet in his score for Love Never Dies. This week, he even penned some new music.
"Only a little touch," he stresses, "but these things are cumulative. I want to do a little bit of work with the orchestra still."
That's my cue to leave but as I go, I ask why we identify so powerfully with the Phantom. "I don't know the answer to it," he sighs. "Maybe it's to do with everybody wanting to change something about themselves."
What would Lord Lloyd Webber change about himself?
"If you know what you want to do in life, you're a very lucky person. If you are then successful and able to make a career out of the one thing you want to do, you're an extraordinarily lucky person. Sometimes, I think I'm the luckiest person alive," he says.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/love-never-dies-is-phantom-take-two/story-e6frf96f-1226064421319
From: Herald Sun
May 28, 2011 12:00AM
THE man who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and The Phantom of the Opera knows a hit when he sees one.
So, right after he saw the first dress rehearsal in London of his Phantom sequel, Love Never Dies, Lord Lloyd Webber rang his wife, Madeleine Gurdon, and said: "Darling, it's not going to work.
"I'm sorry, we'll make the best of it, but it isn't."
That was March last year. Flash forward to Melbourne a week ago. Lloyd Webber is in the stalls of the Regent Theatre to view the first run-through of a radically different Australian version of Love Never Dies starring two relative unknowns: Ben Lewis as the Phantom and Anna O'Byrne as Christine.
Later that evening, the world's most successful living composer rings his wife and says: "I've got to tell you, it's the other end of the scale. This one is bliss!"
What happened in between could almost make a musical. How Lloyd Webber overcame harsh reviews and a cancer scare to restage the show by collaborating with a creative team on the other side of the world.
"I can't really even put it into words but I feel very deeply that this show takes what I originally did (The Phantom) into another dimension," he says. "It sort of closes a chapter."
We will know if there's a happy ending tonight, when the new $9 million production of Love Never Dies has its Australian premiere in front of an audience containing top producers from North America and Asia.
Whether or not they surrender to its passions, Lloyd Webber believes he is seeing Love Never Dies "as I always hoped it would one day be. I didn't know that would happen here but, honestly, it is an absolutely extraordinary piece of work".
Lloyd Webber sensed the new approach was right even before the overture ended. Gobsmacked by the sight of dome-capped towers and twinkling lights signifying New York's Coney Island fairground, he decided: "You just know that you're in the world where it's supposed to be."
For the past week, Lloyd Webber's world has orbited around the gloriously gothic Regent and a theatre suite overlooking Collins St.
The morning we meet, his lordship looks relaxed in a navy blazer, grey slacks and black slip-on shoes - as if he's wandered in off the deck of a yacht - but producer Tim McFarlane (The Really Useful Group Asia Pacific) advises that Lloyd Webber has been haunting the Regent since he arrived from London: dashing off notes to cast and crew, slogging through tech runs and fine-tuning every aspect of a show he calls "97 per cent there".
"Yes, I've had six days doing what I love doing," he says, "which is actually being a composer working with the director."
Simon Phillips (retiring artistic director of the MTC) is directing this second version of Love Never Dies. It was McFarlane who suggested he meet Lloyd Webber in the UK about restaging the show Down Under and they agreed it would benefit from "going back to the drawing board and reconceiving everything".
That meeting led to another at Lloyd Webber's Mediterranean home, where Phillips's preferred designer, Gabriela Tylesova, unveiled a scenic model with swooping roller-coaster curves.
"I've never seen anything like it before," an astonished Lloyd Webber told her. And standing before the real thing this week, the composer was still dumbfounded by its daring, saying: "Wow, wow."
MILLIONS say the same thing about The Phantom. Lloyd Webber's mega-hit musical has been seen in 149 cities and taken more than $5 billion. But, almost from the moment that famous chandelier rattled in 1986, Lloyd Webber was looking at ways to extend the story of the Phantom, Christine and Raoul.
"I care very much for those characters and the love triangle that exists there," he says.
In 1994, Lloyd Webber discussed the idea of a sequel with novelist Frederick Forsyth. Ten years later, he and comic writer Ben Elton came up with a story that placed the trio on the other side of the Atlantic.
Lloyd Webber was especially attracted to Coney Island - "The only place you could go to where everybody was a freak of some kind" - and imagined a romantic trap being laid there in 1907: 10 years after the Phantom's dramatic disappearance from the Paris Opera House.
"This is a very personal piece for me," he says. "There's probably more of my real self in this than anything else I've ever done."
For his new tale of unrequited love, Lloyd Webber crafted music with a darker, more operatic hue than its classical-pop predecessor and imagined an electrically charged carnival world where his songs could soar.
Shaping a clear storyline proved harder. As he says: "If the book is not fundamentally right, you can be in an awful lot of trouble."
A "perfect storm" of trouble engulfed Love Never Dies as its West End debut approached. Phantom fanatics who objected to a sequel staged what he calls a "professionally run internet campaign against us".
Then Lloyd Webber was diagnosed with cancer. He expected to recover quickly from a prostate operation but explains: "I wasn't back properly and I wasn't on the case as I could normally be with a production that actually wasn't right ... all of us involved with it should have said, 'We've got to put it on hold'."
The theatre critics in London pounced and bloggers cruelly dubbed the show Paint Never Dries. Lloyd Webber says now: "Because I was ill and everything, it probably would have been better if it had been actually produced by someone else."
Second time round, Lloyd Webber has focused on the script and the score and allowed the Australians maximum creative space - a privilege he and lyricist Tim Rice enjoyed in the late 1960s and '70s.
"I sometimes wonder whether Jesus Christ Superstar (1972) would even have been heard of if we'd (first) done it in the theatre," he muses. "Instead, we just made it as an album and said, 'If you want to stage it, you're just going to do what we wrote or not'. Because we were kids and you could say those sorts of things."
Recently reunited on a production of The Wizard of Oz, Rice told Lloyd Webber: "The thing is, Andrew, when we started off, you just did it and didn't listen to anybody. Now, at this stage of our careers, we end up with so many people and don't always come up with the right result."
Love Never Dies mark II could be an exception.
LLOYD Webber's only "real reservation" about Melbourne was the size of the Regent, but those doubts eased after he saw Phillips's "consummate staging".
"Simon seems to know exactly what he wants. I have to say, I'm incredibly impressed," he says.
He is full of praise also for choreographer Graeme Murphy, musical supervisor Guy Simpson, and the cast. Asked about plans to take Love Never Dies overseas, he hesitates, then says: "I would like to see this production go everywhere. It's just the best."
What about New York?
"This is the show that should go to Broadway without any question."
For now, Lloyd Webber is probing every crochet in his score for Love Never Dies. This week, he even penned some new music.
"Only a little touch," he stresses, "but these things are cumulative. I want to do a little bit of work with the orchestra still."
That's my cue to leave but as I go, I ask why we identify so powerfully with the Phantom. "I don't know the answer to it," he sighs. "Maybe it's to do with everybody wanting to change something about themselves."
What would Lord Lloyd Webber change about himself?
"If you know what you want to do in life, you're a very lucky person. If you are then successful and able to make a career out of the one thing you want to do, you're an extraordinarily lucky person. Sometimes, I think I'm the luckiest person alive," he says.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/love-never-dies-is-phantom-take-two/story-e6frf96f-1226064421319
Thursday, February 10, 2011
U2 Spiderman musical is "a stinker"
By Anthony Lund on 09/02/2011
New York theatre critics have united in their condemnation of the project.
There are some musicals that never make it to Broadway and remain lost forever in some writers’ bottom drawers forever. Jim Steinman’ Batman is one such example of what could have been a great hit. There are others such as the U2-scored Spiderman musical which do make it to the stage, then fall flat on their face.
The musical, which has the subtitle, “Turn Off The Dark” is turning off almost very theatre critic in New York while still in its preview period.
The musical has been in production for a few years, but has suffered a bit of development hell that has continually stalled its release. It may as well have remained there as far as those who have seen the musical unanimously agree.
In its first reviews, the musical has been called a “Stinker”, “the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway and may rank among the worst”, and last but not least, “broken in every respect beyond repair.” All in all not the most appealing of introductions, and surely not what Bono and Co were hoping for.
Then again, will this be one of those cases where the bad reviews have people flocking to see just how terrible it is for themselves.
http://www.musicrooms.net/rock/26201-u2-spiderman-musical-is-a-stinker.html
New York theatre critics have united in their condemnation of the project.
There are some musicals that never make it to Broadway and remain lost forever in some writers’ bottom drawers forever. Jim Steinman’ Batman is one such example of what could have been a great hit. There are others such as the U2-scored Spiderman musical which do make it to the stage, then fall flat on their face.
The musical, which has the subtitle, “Turn Off The Dark” is turning off almost very theatre critic in New York while still in its preview period.
The musical has been in production for a few years, but has suffered a bit of development hell that has continually stalled its release. It may as well have remained there as far as those who have seen the musical unanimously agree.
In its first reviews, the musical has been called a “Stinker”, “the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway and may rank among the worst”, and last but not least, “broken in every respect beyond repair.” All in all not the most appealing of introductions, and surely not what Bono and Co were hoping for.
Then again, will this be one of those cases where the bad reviews have people flocking to see just how terrible it is for themselves.
http://www.musicrooms.net/rock/26201-u2-spiderman-musical-is-a-stinker.html
'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' producer blasts critics -- EXCLUSIVE
Feb 8 2011 02:47 PM ET
by Adam Markovitz
In the wake of the critical drubbing endured today by the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, producer Michael Cohl is speaking up in defense of his show — and in contempt of the critics who he says aren’t giving it a fair shot. “Any of the people who review the show and say it has no redeeming value are just not legitimate reviewers, period,” says Cohl, who claims the show’s detractors (The New York Times and The Washington Post both called Spider-Man one of the worst productions in Broadway history) are out of touch. “It’s hard to have people that don’t get pop culture reviewing a pop culture event, isn’t it?” (Cohl isn’t the only Spider-Man insider bashing the critics — the show’s spokesman, Rick Miramontez, released an exclusive statement to EW earlier today about the reviews: “The PILE-ON by the critics was ridiculous and uncalled for. Their actions are unprecedented and UNCOOL.”)
The costliest show ever mounted on Broadway, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has rarely been out of the headlines in recent months, thanks to the recurring safety issues that contributed to a series of postponed opening dates. Cohl insists that the show will still be a work in progress until it officially opens on March 15. But when asked whether critics would be invited to the show’s official opening night, Cohl declined to give a yes or no response, saying only, “We didn’t invite them this week. They clearly don’t need an invite, do they?” Still, he says the reviews haven’t sunk his spirits yet. “I woke up this morning more determined and more positive than ever. I said, ‘Here we go.’”
http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/02/08/spider-man-producer-critics/
by Adam Markovitz
In the wake of the critical drubbing endured today by the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, producer Michael Cohl is speaking up in defense of his show — and in contempt of the critics who he says aren’t giving it a fair shot. “Any of the people who review the show and say it has no redeeming value are just not legitimate reviewers, period,” says Cohl, who claims the show’s detractors (The New York Times and The Washington Post both called Spider-Man one of the worst productions in Broadway history) are out of touch. “It’s hard to have people that don’t get pop culture reviewing a pop culture event, isn’t it?” (Cohl isn’t the only Spider-Man insider bashing the critics — the show’s spokesman, Rick Miramontez, released an exclusive statement to EW earlier today about the reviews: “The PILE-ON by the critics was ridiculous and uncalled for. Their actions are unprecedented and UNCOOL.”)
The costliest show ever mounted on Broadway, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has rarely been out of the headlines in recent months, thanks to the recurring safety issues that contributed to a series of postponed opening dates. Cohl insists that the show will still be a work in progress until it officially opens on March 15. But when asked whether critics would be invited to the show’s official opening night, Cohl declined to give a yes or no response, saying only, “We didn’t invite them this week. They clearly don’t need an invite, do they?” Still, he says the reviews haven’t sunk his spirits yet. “I woke up this morning more determined and more positive than ever. I said, ‘Here we go.’”
http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/02/08/spider-man-producer-critics/
U2 Spiderman musical is "a stinker"
By Anthony Lund on 09/02/2011
New York theatre critics have united in their condemnation of the project.
There are some musicals that never make it to Broadway and remain lost forever in some writers’ bottom drawers forever. Jim Steinman’ Batman is one such example of what could have been a great hit. There are others such as the U2-scored Spiderman musical which do make it to the stage, then fall flat on their face.
The musical, which has the subtitle, “Turn Off The Dark” is turning off almost very theatre critic in New York while still in its preview period.
The musical has been in production for a few years, but has suffered a bit of development hell that has continually stalled its release. It may as well have remained there as far as those who have seen the musical unanimously agree.
In its first reviews, the musical has been called a “Stinker”, “the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway and may rank among the worst”, and last but not least, “broken in every respect beyond repair.” All in all not the most appealing of introductions, and surely not what Bono and Co were hoping for.
Then again, will this be one of those cases where the bad reviews have people flocking to see just how terrible it is for themselves.
http://www.musicrooms.net/rock/26201-u2-spiderman-musical-is-a-stinker.html
New York theatre critics have united in their condemnation of the project.
There are some musicals that never make it to Broadway and remain lost forever in some writers’ bottom drawers forever. Jim Steinman’ Batman is one such example of what could have been a great hit. There are others such as the U2-scored Spiderman musical which do make it to the stage, then fall flat on their face.
The musical, which has the subtitle, “Turn Off The Dark” is turning off almost very theatre critic in New York while still in its preview period.
The musical has been in production for a few years, but has suffered a bit of development hell that has continually stalled its release. It may as well have remained there as far as those who have seen the musical unanimously agree.
In its first reviews, the musical has been called a “Stinker”, “the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway and may rank among the worst”, and last but not least, “broken in every respect beyond repair.” All in all not the most appealing of introductions, and surely not what Bono and Co were hoping for.
Then again, will this be one of those cases where the bad reviews have people flocking to see just how terrible it is for themselves.
http://www.musicrooms.net/rock/26201-u2-spiderman-musical-is-a-stinker.html
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Good vs. Evil, Hanging by a Thread
Theater Review | 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark'
Good vs. Evil, Hanging by a Thread
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: February 7, 2011
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, showstopping 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.”
SPIDER-MAN
Turn Off the Dark
Music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge; book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger; directed by Ms. Taymor; choreography and aerial choreography by Daniel Ezralow; sets by George Tsypin; lighting by Donald Holder; costumes by Eiko Ishioka; sound by Jonathan Deans; projections by Kyle Cooper; masks by Ms. Taymor; hair design by Campbell Young Associates/Luc Verschueren; makeup design by Judy Chin; aerial design by Scott Rogers; aerial rigging design by Jaque Paquin; projection coordinator/additional content design by Howard Werner; arrangements and orchestrations by David Campbell; music supervisor, Teese Gohl; music direction by Kimberly Grigsby; music coordinator, Antoine Silverman; vocal arrangements by Mr. Campbell, Mr. Gohl and Ms. Grigsby; additional arrangements/vocal arrangements by Dawn Kenny and Rori Coleman; associate producer, Anne Tanaka; executive producers, Glenn Orsher, Martin McCallum and Adam Silberman. Presented by Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris, Land Line Productions, Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle/Tony Adams, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norton Herrick and Herrick Entertainment, Billy Rovzar and Fernando Rovzar, Jeffrey B. Hecktman, Omneity Entertainment/Richard G. Weinberg, James L. Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, S2BN Entertainment, Jam Theatricals, the Mayerson/Gould/Hauser/Tysoe Group, Patricia Lambrecht and Paul McGuinness, by arrangement with Marvel Entertainment. At the Foxwoods Theater, 213 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; (877) 250-2929; ticketmaster.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.
WITH: Reeve Carney (Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Jennifer Damiano (Mary Jane Watson), T. V. Carpio (Arachne), Patrick Page (Norman Osborn/the Green Goblin), Michael Mulheren (J. Jonah Jameson), Ken Marks (Uncle Ben), Isabel Keating (Classics Teacher/Aunt May), Jeb Brown (M J’s Father), Mat Devine (Grim Hunter), Gideon Glick (Jimmy-6), Alice Lee (Miss Arrow), Jonathan Schwartz (Professor Cobwell), Laura Beth Wells (Emily Osborn), Matt Caplan (Flash), Dwayne Clark (Boyle/Busker) and Luther Creek (Kong).
A version of this review appeared in print on February 8, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/theater/reviews/spiderman-review.html
Good vs. Evil, Hanging by a Thread
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: February 7, 2011
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, showstopping 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.”
SPIDER-MAN
Turn Off the Dark
Music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge; book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger; directed by Ms. Taymor; choreography and aerial choreography by Daniel Ezralow; sets by George Tsypin; lighting by Donald Holder; costumes by Eiko Ishioka; sound by Jonathan Deans; projections by Kyle Cooper; masks by Ms. Taymor; hair design by Campbell Young Associates/Luc Verschueren; makeup design by Judy Chin; aerial design by Scott Rogers; aerial rigging design by Jaque Paquin; projection coordinator/additional content design by Howard Werner; arrangements and orchestrations by David Campbell; music supervisor, Teese Gohl; music direction by Kimberly Grigsby; music coordinator, Antoine Silverman; vocal arrangements by Mr. Campbell, Mr. Gohl and Ms. Grigsby; additional arrangements/vocal arrangements by Dawn Kenny and Rori Coleman; associate producer, Anne Tanaka; executive producers, Glenn Orsher, Martin McCallum and Adam Silberman. Presented by Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris, Land Line Productions, Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle/Tony Adams, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norton Herrick and Herrick Entertainment, Billy Rovzar and Fernando Rovzar, Jeffrey B. Hecktman, Omneity Entertainment/Richard G. Weinberg, James L. Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, S2BN Entertainment, Jam Theatricals, the Mayerson/Gould/Hauser/Tysoe Group, Patricia Lambrecht and Paul McGuinness, by arrangement with Marvel Entertainment. At the Foxwoods Theater, 213 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; (877) 250-2929; ticketmaster.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.
WITH: Reeve Carney (Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Jennifer Damiano (Mary Jane Watson), T. V. Carpio (Arachne), Patrick Page (Norman Osborn/the Green Goblin), Michael Mulheren (J. Jonah Jameson), Ken Marks (Uncle Ben), Isabel Keating (Classics Teacher/Aunt May), Jeb Brown (M J’s Father), Mat Devine (Grim Hunter), Gideon Glick (Jimmy-6), Alice Lee (Miss Arrow), Jonathan Schwartz (Professor Cobwell), Laura Beth Wells (Emily Osborn), Matt Caplan (Flash), Dwayne Clark (Boyle/Busker) and Luther Creek (Kong).
A version of this review appeared in print on February 8, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/theater/reviews/spiderman-review.html
'Spider-Man' deftly spins substance, spectacle
By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — 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.
More @ http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2011-02-08-spiderman08_st_N.htm
NEW YORK — 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.
More @ http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2011-02-08-spiderman08_st_N.htm
Stage Dive: 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 Björk–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.
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http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/02/stage_dive_scott_brown_on_spid.html?imw=Y&f=most-emailed-24h5
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 Björk–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.
Follow me at Facebook and on Twitter @scottstagedive.
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/02/stage_dive_scott_brown_on_spid.html?imw=Y&f=most-emailed-24h5
Spider-Man - Turn off the Dark
Published Monday 7 February 2011 at 09:49 by Mark Shenton
Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King became the seventh longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 5,462nd performance in January. Meanwhile, her latest directorial effort - which swaps turning an animated feature into 3D to musicalise a cartoon strip instead with Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark - is currently breaking records of different kinds. Not only is it the most expensive musical of all time, with a bloated budget of a reported $65m and counting, but it is also set to become the longest previewing musical in Broadway history.
It’s a show that has repeatedly refused to officially open - a third opening night date, set for February 7, has now been moved to March 15, by which time it will have played for three and a half months and 110 previews, at full price (and more) to paying customers that also saw it overtake Wicked as the highest grossing show currently playing on Broadway one recent week. Yet every performance is being prefaced by a warning, delivered live from the stage, that the show has forgone an out of town try-out and may therefore be liable to be stopped at any point should any safety concerns arise, and that audience members should not attempt to hitch a ride on Spider-Man when he’s flying.
On the February 5 matinee I saw, over two months into the preview run, the show was duly stopped for an extended five minute pause, and while no one sought to jump on top of any of what turns out to be 11 Spider-Man’s that share the flying and other stunts, the show needs to carry another safety warning of its own, one that the majority of New York critics have, so far, been prevented from delivering (even as every blogger, tweeter and bulletin board poster has had their very vocal say), namely that the show, as it currently stands, is a thundering, over-hyped, undercooked disappointment.
It should be stressed that the creators, having bought extra preview time (at the audience’s expense, in every sense), have not yet officially finished their work on it, so this has to therefore only be an interim report; but is all the blood, sweat and tears worth it? Is it any good, or is there at least the potential for it to be so?
Expectations have been sky-high, of course, partly because a flying spectacle was promised to send the actors hurtling sky-high, over the heads of the audience across the entire theatre. So first things first - yes, as in productions of old like Peter Pan, you can see the wires, but unlike them, you also can’t always see the flying. From my balcony perch, much of the flying below and under me was invisible, while from the stalls, it would frequently be above and behind you. Expect business for osteopaths to soar not just among the cast but also audiences as they twist to follow it.
But it’s not just your body that may need twisting, your mind may also have trouble following the plotting as it seeks to first provide the back story of how Peter Parker became Spider-Man, narrated by a “geek” chorus of excitable kids who narrate some of the show but are soon perplexingly dropped from view. It then predictably morphs into a projection of the age of anxiety that we now live in with Spider-Man becoming a figure that protects the city of New York from a series of villainous threats.
Perhaps we need to ask him to protect musical theatre from opportunistic producers that are trying to hitch a ride on his leotard-covered body (just as audiences are specifically told not to). It’s been a bumpy journey so far, with lots of crash landings (including one that put a Spider-Man stunt double in hospital).
But if the technical problems may yet be ironed out, Bono and the Edge’s debut as Broadway composers also turns out to be an uninspiring disappointment - two onstage guitarists are on hand to provide the rock riffs, but the music stays stubbornly unmemorable and earthbound, even when the show is seeking to fly.
It is difficult, too, for the actors to give much human dimension to the cartoon characterisations they have been given, although Jennifer Damiano as MJ (Peter Parker’s love interest) and British actor Matthew James Thomas (the alternate whom I saw in the title role instead of the billed Reeve Carney) bring some heart, warmth and vulnerability to a show that otherwise fatally fails to have any.
http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/31188/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark
Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King became the seventh longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 5,462nd performance in January. Meanwhile, her latest directorial effort - which swaps turning an animated feature into 3D to musicalise a cartoon strip instead with Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark - is currently breaking records of different kinds. Not only is it the most expensive musical of all time, with a bloated budget of a reported $65m and counting, but it is also set to become the longest previewing musical in Broadway history.
It’s a show that has repeatedly refused to officially open - a third opening night date, set for February 7, has now been moved to March 15, by which time it will have played for three and a half months and 110 previews, at full price (and more) to paying customers that also saw it overtake Wicked as the highest grossing show currently playing on Broadway one recent week. Yet every performance is being prefaced by a warning, delivered live from the stage, that the show has forgone an out of town try-out and may therefore be liable to be stopped at any point should any safety concerns arise, and that audience members should not attempt to hitch a ride on Spider-Man when he’s flying.
On the February 5 matinee I saw, over two months into the preview run, the show was duly stopped for an extended five minute pause, and while no one sought to jump on top of any of what turns out to be 11 Spider-Man’s that share the flying and other stunts, the show needs to carry another safety warning of its own, one that the majority of New York critics have, so far, been prevented from delivering (even as every blogger, tweeter and bulletin board poster has had their very vocal say), namely that the show, as it currently stands, is a thundering, over-hyped, undercooked disappointment.
It should be stressed that the creators, having bought extra preview time (at the audience’s expense, in every sense), have not yet officially finished their work on it, so this has to therefore only be an interim report; but is all the blood, sweat and tears worth it? Is it any good, or is there at least the potential for it to be so?
Expectations have been sky-high, of course, partly because a flying spectacle was promised to send the actors hurtling sky-high, over the heads of the audience across the entire theatre. So first things first - yes, as in productions of old like Peter Pan, you can see the wires, but unlike them, you also can’t always see the flying. From my balcony perch, much of the flying below and under me was invisible, while from the stalls, it would frequently be above and behind you. Expect business for osteopaths to soar not just among the cast but also audiences as they twist to follow it.
But it’s not just your body that may need twisting, your mind may also have trouble following the plotting as it seeks to first provide the back story of how Peter Parker became Spider-Man, narrated by a “geek” chorus of excitable kids who narrate some of the show but are soon perplexingly dropped from view. It then predictably morphs into a projection of the age of anxiety that we now live in with Spider-Man becoming a figure that protects the city of New York from a series of villainous threats.
Perhaps we need to ask him to protect musical theatre from opportunistic producers that are trying to hitch a ride on his leotard-covered body (just as audiences are specifically told not to). It’s been a bumpy journey so far, with lots of crash landings (including one that put a Spider-Man stunt double in hospital).
But if the technical problems may yet be ironed out, Bono and the Edge’s debut as Broadway composers also turns out to be an uninspiring disappointment - two onstage guitarists are on hand to provide the rock riffs, but the music stays stubbornly unmemorable and earthbound, even when the show is seeking to fly.
It is difficult, too, for the actors to give much human dimension to the cartoon characterisations they have been given, although Jennifer Damiano as MJ (Peter Parker’s love interest) and British actor Matthew James Thomas (the alternate whom I saw in the title role instead of the billed Reeve Carney) bring some heart, warmth and vulnerability to a show that otherwise fatally fails to have any.
http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/31188/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark
'Spider-Man' on Broadway: No superpowers needed to sniff out this stinker
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 7, 2011; 8:39 PM
NEW YORK - 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.
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge, book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger. Directed by Taymor. Dance and aerial choreography, Daniel Ezralow; lighting, Donald Holder; costumes, Eiko Ishioka; sound, Jonathan Deans; projections, Kyle Cooper; aerial design, Scott Rogers; music direction, Kimberly Grigsby. With Isabel Keating, Michael Mulheren. About 2 hours 50 minutes. At Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St., New York. Visit www.ticketmaster.com or call 877-250-2929.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020704088_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2011020704113
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 7, 2011; 8:39 PM
NEW YORK - 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.
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge, book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger. Directed by Taymor. Dance and aerial choreography, Daniel Ezralow; lighting, Donald Holder; costumes, Eiko Ishioka; sound, Jonathan Deans; projections, Kyle Cooper; aerial design, Scott Rogers; music direction, Kimberly Grigsby. With Isabel Keating, Michael Mulheren. About 2 hours 50 minutes. At Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St., New York. Visit www.ticketmaster.com or call 877-250-2929.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020704088_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2011020704113
Gorgeous, Dumb `Spider-Man' Remains Inert After 65 Previews: Jeremy Gerard
By Jeremy Gerard - Feb 8, 2011 8:59 AM ET
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.
Dangling Conversation
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.
Spider-Woman?
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.
At the Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St. Information: +1- 877-250-2929; http://spidermanonbroadway.marvel.com. Rating: **
What the Stars Mean:
**** Excellent
*** Very Good
** Average
* Not So Good
(No stars) Avoid
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-07/gorgeous-dumb-spider-man-remains-inert-after-65-previews-jeremy-gerard.html
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.
Dangling Conversation
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.
Spider-Woman?
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.
At the Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St. Information: +1- 877-250-2929; http://spidermanonbroadway.marvel.com. Rating: **
What the Stars Mean:
**** Excellent
*** Very Good
** Average
* Not So Good
(No stars) Avoid
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-07/gorgeous-dumb-spider-man-remains-inert-after-65-previews-jeremy-gerard.html
'Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark' on Broadway: Spidey is stuck in a tangled web
February 07, 2011
“Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” plays on Broadway at the Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St., New York. (Tickets at 877-850-2929 or www.ticketmaster.com)
BROADWAY REVIEW
NEW YORK — After the $65 million spent, the endless delays, the injuries, the cast changes, the incessant spinning of stories on the Web, Julie Taymor's “Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” now has to be willing to stand in the light. Deck chairs can be rearranged forever.
This show has delayed its opening so many times that it has become the butt of jokes on talk shows and magazine covers. This review, based on the Jan. 30 performance, appears one day after a previously scheduled opening, and after the last delay that felt even remotely reasonable, given that full-price “previews” have been taking place since Nov. 28. Furthermore, in practical terms, the show has already made what major changes it will be possible to make before the official March opening. Both ticket buyers and the generally curious deserve a review now.
The much-told woes of “Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” boil down to a problem that has similarly ensnared far humbler new musicals: an incoherent story.
For without a book with consistent rules that a mainstream audience can follow and track, without characters in whom one can invest emotionally, without a sense of the empowering optimism that should come from time spent in the presence of a good, kind man who can walk up buildings and save our lousy world from evil, it is all just clatter and chatter. Delayed openings, physical changes, fresh flying sequences, the toil of dedicated performers and even new musical numbers from U2's Bono and The Edge, no less, cannot fix what should have been solved long before any human performer left the safety of the ground.
In an attempt to connect comic books to grander narratives (and forgetting that comic books already are connected to grander narratives), Taymor and Glen Berger, who share book writing credit, have purloined a character named Arachne from Greco-Roman mythology. Arachne, (in mythology, a mortal weaver who gets turned into a spider) is centrally positioned as both demon and siren of desire for Peter Parker. Too centrally positioned. A smarter producer in the classic David Merrick mold would, in some early meeting, have angrily marched everyone onto 42nd Street and pointed out the name “Spider-Man” blazing on the marquee outside Broadway's Foxwoods Theatre. Not “Arachne.”
But from the rise of the curtain on Arachne, the show disappears inside this mythic creature (severely played by T.V. Carpio), an alienating and charmless aerial stranger to us. Thereafter, neither Patrick Page's cackling Green Goblin (who should be the main diabolic force in the show but here hardly comes into a much more reluctant focus until intermission) nor Jennifer Damiano's Mary Jane, nor the Spider-Man/Peter Parker we came to see, can pull out the narrative thread.
In the first act, that thread wants to tell the familiar tale of Peter (Reeve Carney), adolescent nerd, secretly turning into a superhero, fighting evil by night and swooning over MJ by day. In the midsection, the Green Goblin villain revs up some nastiness and battles Spidey. That continues some into Act 2. But in the second half, Peter/Spidey seems mostly to fight his own duality.
Even that story is buried yet deeper by an outer frame of adolescent comic book fans, or “citizens,” who show up near the top of the show talking about Spider-Man, pop up as narrators throughout, and generally seem to control the inner story we are watching. But it's never clear: Are they watching it? Creating it? Reacting to it? Can they change it? Where are they? When are they? There is no clarity of frame. In fact, even the lines themselves don't track from one to the other in any kind of satisfying way.
In essence, Taymor and Berger tie themselves in knots trying to shove the inherently dualistic nature of melodrama into a psychological hexahedron of their own creation. Great conceptual artists like Taymor are rarely comfortable with melodrama, which has struggled for respect throughout history. Fine. Stay away. But be wary of putting a comic book on the stage.
Time and again, the show runs away from what I suspect the creators feared would be too predictable or cheap, but that we miss. There is no direct Peter-to-Spidey transformation scene. There are no shooting webs (not substantively, anyway). There is no rush of romance. There is no truth. Every time old Spidey gets someone to fight, beyond the eight-legged critter, the villain is immediately defanged by absurdly cartoonish behavior, nixing any of the stakes. His other main foes, The Lizard, Swarm et al., are reduced to a rushed and belated cinematic montage that looks more like a garish version of an outre presentation during Fashion Week. And yet, in other moments, the show is as terrified of its genre as a 1960s mother worried about the eyesight of kids devouring comics under the sheets. Rules change faster than any kid could turn a page.
That's because there is a fundamental discomfort, and thus disconnect, between the material, the artists engaged in its interpretation and the form of the Broadway musical.
Overall, Carney's brooding Peter is so busy dealing with faux-Freudian trauma over his Arachnidan dreams (the two legs of Mary Jane aren't as interesting as eight), that his performance becomes so brooding and internalized he seems to forget how to soar. At the show I saw, Damiano was replaced for reasons unannounced by her much, much warmer understudy Kristen Martin, before the end. But I saw more than enough to see that Damiano is struggling to find her center as Mary Jane. Carney is similarly off-track. It's also not his fault. Peter has normal adolescent problems, for sure, but it doesn't work for him to have so many bad dreams that he gets no pleasure from catching bad guys.
The score is a disappointment. There are two memorable songs, both in the second act: “The Boy Falls From the Sky,” a formatively compelling and melodic ode that Carney sings, and sings very well, and a sweet, wise, suddenly rooted ballad for MJ titled “If The World Should End.” “Bouncing Off the Walls” is fun. Elsewhere, we get what mostly feels like fragments, riffs and mood treatments from masterful musicians who no doubt were as confused as to the aesthetic world here as everyone else. Most disappointing of all is the failure of the score to articulate empowerment.
There is, no question, some engaging aerial work, albeit as devoid of emotional connection as everything else. Some will enjoy the Green Goblin and Spidey wrestling above one's head. There are hardworking performers. And although George Tsypin's set overall is a massively disappointing confusion of styles and shapes, there is one undeniably majestic and revealing moment when our perspective is thrillingly thrown and we see the city, racing down from the top of a skyscraper.
Because the new ending sequence — with Spidey flying around the theater — is the only moment when the show starts to capture some of the spirit of flight, I suspect there is some growing understanding of the cause of all these problems. But those few moments can't compensate for a night wherein overwritten nonsense takes us away from Spider-Man's world, our world, our fantasies, and out, out into some fractured mythic fantasy that needed to get caught in a good old-fashioned net. When it was still a child.
http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2011/02/review-spider-man-turn-off-dark-broadway-chicago-tribune.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+chicagotribune/thetheaterloop+%28Chicago+Tribune+-+The+Theater+Loop%29
“Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” plays on Broadway at the Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St., New York. (Tickets at 877-850-2929 or www.ticketmaster.com)
BROADWAY REVIEW
NEW YORK — After the $65 million spent, the endless delays, the injuries, the cast changes, the incessant spinning of stories on the Web, Julie Taymor's “Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” now has to be willing to stand in the light. Deck chairs can be rearranged forever.
This show has delayed its opening so many times that it has become the butt of jokes on talk shows and magazine covers. This review, based on the Jan. 30 performance, appears one day after a previously scheduled opening, and after the last delay that felt even remotely reasonable, given that full-price “previews” have been taking place since Nov. 28. Furthermore, in practical terms, the show has already made what major changes it will be possible to make before the official March opening. Both ticket buyers and the generally curious deserve a review now.
The much-told woes of “Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” boil down to a problem that has similarly ensnared far humbler new musicals: an incoherent story.
For without a book with consistent rules that a mainstream audience can follow and track, without characters in whom one can invest emotionally, without a sense of the empowering optimism that should come from time spent in the presence of a good, kind man who can walk up buildings and save our lousy world from evil, it is all just clatter and chatter. Delayed openings, physical changes, fresh flying sequences, the toil of dedicated performers and even new musical numbers from U2's Bono and The Edge, no less, cannot fix what should have been solved long before any human performer left the safety of the ground.
In an attempt to connect comic books to grander narratives (and forgetting that comic books already are connected to grander narratives), Taymor and Glen Berger, who share book writing credit, have purloined a character named Arachne from Greco-Roman mythology. Arachne, (in mythology, a mortal weaver who gets turned into a spider) is centrally positioned as both demon and siren of desire for Peter Parker. Too centrally positioned. A smarter producer in the classic David Merrick mold would, in some early meeting, have angrily marched everyone onto 42nd Street and pointed out the name “Spider-Man” blazing on the marquee outside Broadway's Foxwoods Theatre. Not “Arachne.”
But from the rise of the curtain on Arachne, the show disappears inside this mythic creature (severely played by T.V. Carpio), an alienating and charmless aerial stranger to us. Thereafter, neither Patrick Page's cackling Green Goblin (who should be the main diabolic force in the show but here hardly comes into a much more reluctant focus until intermission) nor Jennifer Damiano's Mary Jane, nor the Spider-Man/Peter Parker we came to see, can pull out the narrative thread.
In the first act, that thread wants to tell the familiar tale of Peter (Reeve Carney), adolescent nerd, secretly turning into a superhero, fighting evil by night and swooning over MJ by day. In the midsection, the Green Goblin villain revs up some nastiness and battles Spidey. That continues some into Act 2. But in the second half, Peter/Spidey seems mostly to fight his own duality.
Even that story is buried yet deeper by an outer frame of adolescent comic book fans, or “citizens,” who show up near the top of the show talking about Spider-Man, pop up as narrators throughout, and generally seem to control the inner story we are watching. But it's never clear: Are they watching it? Creating it? Reacting to it? Can they change it? Where are they? When are they? There is no clarity of frame. In fact, even the lines themselves don't track from one to the other in any kind of satisfying way.
In essence, Taymor and Berger tie themselves in knots trying to shove the inherently dualistic nature of melodrama into a psychological hexahedron of their own creation. Great conceptual artists like Taymor are rarely comfortable with melodrama, which has struggled for respect throughout history. Fine. Stay away. But be wary of putting a comic book on the stage.
Time and again, the show runs away from what I suspect the creators feared would be too predictable or cheap, but that we miss. There is no direct Peter-to-Spidey transformation scene. There are no shooting webs (not substantively, anyway). There is no rush of romance. There is no truth. Every time old Spidey gets someone to fight, beyond the eight-legged critter, the villain is immediately defanged by absurdly cartoonish behavior, nixing any of the stakes. His other main foes, The Lizard, Swarm et al., are reduced to a rushed and belated cinematic montage that looks more like a garish version of an outre presentation during Fashion Week. And yet, in other moments, the show is as terrified of its genre as a 1960s mother worried about the eyesight of kids devouring comics under the sheets. Rules change faster than any kid could turn a page.
That's because there is a fundamental discomfort, and thus disconnect, between the material, the artists engaged in its interpretation and the form of the Broadway musical.
Overall, Carney's brooding Peter is so busy dealing with faux-Freudian trauma over his Arachnidan dreams (the two legs of Mary Jane aren't as interesting as eight), that his performance becomes so brooding and internalized he seems to forget how to soar. At the show I saw, Damiano was replaced for reasons unannounced by her much, much warmer understudy Kristen Martin, before the end. But I saw more than enough to see that Damiano is struggling to find her center as Mary Jane. Carney is similarly off-track. It's also not his fault. Peter has normal adolescent problems, for sure, but it doesn't work for him to have so many bad dreams that he gets no pleasure from catching bad guys.
The score is a disappointment. There are two memorable songs, both in the second act: “The Boy Falls From the Sky,” a formatively compelling and melodic ode that Carney sings, and sings very well, and a sweet, wise, suddenly rooted ballad for MJ titled “If The World Should End.” “Bouncing Off the Walls” is fun. Elsewhere, we get what mostly feels like fragments, riffs and mood treatments from masterful musicians who no doubt were as confused as to the aesthetic world here as everyone else. Most disappointing of all is the failure of the score to articulate empowerment.
There is, no question, some engaging aerial work, albeit as devoid of emotional connection as everything else. Some will enjoy the Green Goblin and Spidey wrestling above one's head. There are hardworking performers. And although George Tsypin's set overall is a massively disappointing confusion of styles and shapes, there is one undeniably majestic and revealing moment when our perspective is thrillingly thrown and we see the city, racing down from the top of a skyscraper.
Because the new ending sequence — with Spidey flying around the theater — is the only moment when the show starts to capture some of the spirit of flight, I suspect there is some growing understanding of the cause of all these problems. But those few moments can't compensate for a night wherein overwritten nonsense takes us away from Spider-Man's world, our world, our fantasies, and out, out into some fractured mythic fantasy that needed to get caught in a good old-fashioned net. When it was still a child.
http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2011/02/review-spider-man-turn-off-dark-broadway-chicago-tribune.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+chicagotribune/thetheaterloop+%28Chicago+Tribune+-+The+Theater+Loop%29
Theater review: 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' at Foxwoods Theatre
February 7, 2011 | 3:54 pm
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 health care 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.
The book, by Taymor and Glen Berger, is an absolute farrago, setting up layers and subplots before the main narrative line has been established. A female spider figure from Classical mythology named Arachne (T.V. Carpio) has been introduced, mucking up the traditional Marvel tale. There’s even a chorus, a group of comic-book-addicted kids, who at first appear to be joshing fans of the “Spider-Man” saga but later seem to be actually inventing the tedious version unfolding before us. Apparently, they’re the creative team’s surrogates. Not that it matters much in the end. The conceit is dispensed with as the second act transforms into a video game, interrupted by high-flying shenanigans that had many in the audience nervously bowing their heads as human cartoons swooshed above them.
The biggest shame in all of this is that the leads — Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker/Spider-Man, and Jennifer Damiano, who plays Peter’s love interest, Mary Jane — are utterly captivating. Their appealing sensitivity, however, is no match for the machine they’re trapped in. Forget about the snarling threats of the Green Goblin (Patrick Page decked in a verdant, plasticky getup that would seem obvious even for a Halloween parade) — the real villainy is Taymor’s overreaching desire to top herself.
The music is hit or miss, with three screechers for every rousing cri de coeur rock ballad. But the show is most alive when the sound that Bono and The Edge made famous connects to the emotional predicament of Peter Parker, who’s torn between the demands of crime-fighting and the dictates of his own homebody heart. The best numbers, “No More,” “Bouncing Off the Walls” (thrillingly staged as the title suggests) and “If the World Should End,” emerge from the protagonist’s or Mary Jane's inner state of being. Too much else, unfortunately, is a cacophonous brew.
The visual world of the production is more confusing than mesmerizing. Taymor, working with a fleet of designers, seems unable to settle on a style, bounding between comic-book cut-outs and expensive sci-fi gadgetry, between ingenious thrift and galumphing glitz. It would be pointless to sort out the hodgepodge of historical eras, but, among other jarring incongruities, there's a reference to the Internet at a newsroom so comically old school it would seem to predate Clark Kent.
Incoherence isn’t much fun to sit through. The two friends who attended Friday night's performance with me, a fashion executive and a filmmaker, both regular New York theatergoers, were muttering to each other before the first act was done. My fashion industry friend, who bought the tickets, spent the second act savoring a martini at the bar at Sardi’s. The filmmaker stuck it out with me, hoping against hope that Taymor’s vision would somehow pull itself together. The poor guy left Foxwoods feeling as though he had been lured inside someone's psychotic hallucination.
The aerial antics were impressive to an acrophobic like me. I feared for the actors’ safety, though, stupidly or not, I managed to convince myself that every safety measure was being employed. But there’s a kiddie show aspect to these soaring stunts that seems at odds with a spectacle that many will find too complicated, brooding and weirdly suggestive for young children.
Who exactly is “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” for anyway? The only answer I can come up with is an audience of Julie Taymor types who care only about panoramic sensibility— a bit of slow-mo choreography here, a smattering of diabolical mask work there. Much as I enjoyed the clever shifts in perspective during the skyscraper scenes, it was hard for me to picture adults or young people yearning for a second visit, never mind critics who may feel obliged to check back in with the production when (or should I say if?) it officially opens. Nothing cures the curiosity about "Spider-Man" quite like seeing it.
Perhaps this is why the show’s long-term prospects seem to me nearly as grim as the fate of Bette Davis' character in another work with 'dark' in the title — “Dark Victory.” Not since that 1939 weeper have the words "prognosis negative" seemed so apt.
Related:
Critic's Notebook: 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' needs some light shed on it by critics, and soon
--Charles McNulty
twitter.com\charlesmcnulty
charles.mcnulty@latimes.com
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/02/theater-review-spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-at-foxwoods-theatre.html
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 health care 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.
The book, by Taymor and Glen Berger, is an absolute farrago, setting up layers and subplots before the main narrative line has been established. A female spider figure from Classical mythology named Arachne (T.V. Carpio) has been introduced, mucking up the traditional Marvel tale. There’s even a chorus, a group of comic-book-addicted kids, who at first appear to be joshing fans of the “Spider-Man” saga but later seem to be actually inventing the tedious version unfolding before us. Apparently, they’re the creative team’s surrogates. Not that it matters much in the end. The conceit is dispensed with as the second act transforms into a video game, interrupted by high-flying shenanigans that had many in the audience nervously bowing their heads as human cartoons swooshed above them.
The biggest shame in all of this is that the leads — Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker/Spider-Man, and Jennifer Damiano, who plays Peter’s love interest, Mary Jane — are utterly captivating. Their appealing sensitivity, however, is no match for the machine they’re trapped in. Forget about the snarling threats of the Green Goblin (Patrick Page decked in a verdant, plasticky getup that would seem obvious even for a Halloween parade) — the real villainy is Taymor’s overreaching desire to top herself.
The music is hit or miss, with three screechers for every rousing cri de coeur rock ballad. But the show is most alive when the sound that Bono and The Edge made famous connects to the emotional predicament of Peter Parker, who’s torn between the demands of crime-fighting and the dictates of his own homebody heart. The best numbers, “No More,” “Bouncing Off the Walls” (thrillingly staged as the title suggests) and “If the World Should End,” emerge from the protagonist’s or Mary Jane's inner state of being. Too much else, unfortunately, is a cacophonous brew.
The visual world of the production is more confusing than mesmerizing. Taymor, working with a fleet of designers, seems unable to settle on a style, bounding between comic-book cut-outs and expensive sci-fi gadgetry, between ingenious thrift and galumphing glitz. It would be pointless to sort out the hodgepodge of historical eras, but, among other jarring incongruities, there's a reference to the Internet at a newsroom so comically old school it would seem to predate Clark Kent.
Incoherence isn’t much fun to sit through. The two friends who attended Friday night's performance with me, a fashion executive and a filmmaker, both regular New York theatergoers, were muttering to each other before the first act was done. My fashion industry friend, who bought the tickets, spent the second act savoring a martini at the bar at Sardi’s. The filmmaker stuck it out with me, hoping against hope that Taymor’s vision would somehow pull itself together. The poor guy left Foxwoods feeling as though he had been lured inside someone's psychotic hallucination.
The aerial antics were impressive to an acrophobic like me. I feared for the actors’ safety, though, stupidly or not, I managed to convince myself that every safety measure was being employed. But there’s a kiddie show aspect to these soaring stunts that seems at odds with a spectacle that many will find too complicated, brooding and weirdly suggestive for young children.
Who exactly is “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” for anyway? The only answer I can come up with is an audience of Julie Taymor types who care only about panoramic sensibility— a bit of slow-mo choreography here, a smattering of diabolical mask work there. Much as I enjoyed the clever shifts in perspective during the skyscraper scenes, it was hard for me to picture adults or young people yearning for a second visit, never mind critics who may feel obliged to check back in with the production when (or should I say if?) it officially opens. Nothing cures the curiosity about "Spider-Man" quite like seeing it.
Perhaps this is why the show’s long-term prospects seem to me nearly as grim as the fate of Bette Davis' character in another work with 'dark' in the title — “Dark Victory.” Not since that 1939 weeper have the words "prognosis negative" seemed so apt.
Related:
Critic's Notebook: 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' needs some light shed on it by critics, and soon
--Charles McNulty
twitter.com\charlesmcnulty
charles.mcnulty@latimes.com
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/02/theater-review-spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-at-foxwoods-theatre.html
'Spider-Man' Musical Review: 'Chaotic, Dull and a Little Silly'
8:19 PM 2/7/2011 by David Rooney
The big shock when sitting down finally to assess this $65 million web-slinging folly, is what a monumental anti-climax it turns out to be.
NEW YORK – 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 Feb. 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 anti-climax 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.
Music and lyrics: Bono, The Edge
Book: Julie Taymor, Glen Berger
Director: Julie Taymor
Choreography/aerial choreography: Daniel Ezralow
Set designer: George Tsypin
Costume designer: Eiko Ishioka
Lighting designer: Donald Holder
Sound designer: Jonathan Deans
Projection designer: Kyle Cooper
Aerial design: Scott Rogers
Arrangements/orchestrations: David Campbell
Presented by Michael Cohl & Jeremiah J. Harris, Land Line Productions, Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle/Tony Adams, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norton Herrick and Herrick Entertainment, Billy Rovzar & Fernando Rovzar, Jeffrey B. Hecktman, Omneity Entertainment/Richard G. Weinberg, James L. Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, S2BN Entertainment, Jam Theatricals, The Mayerson/Gould/Hauser/Tysoe Group, Patricia Lambrecht, Paul McGuinness, by arrangement with Marvel Entertainment.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/spider-man-musical-review-chaotic-97241
The big shock when sitting down finally to assess this $65 million web-slinging folly, is what a monumental anti-climax it turns out to be.
NEW YORK – 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 Feb. 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 anti-climax 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.
Music and lyrics: Bono, The Edge
Book: Julie Taymor, Glen Berger
Director: Julie Taymor
Choreography/aerial choreography: Daniel Ezralow
Set designer: George Tsypin
Costume designer: Eiko Ishioka
Lighting designer: Donald Holder
Sound designer: Jonathan Deans
Projection designer: Kyle Cooper
Aerial design: Scott Rogers
Arrangements/orchestrations: David Campbell
Presented by Michael Cohl & Jeremiah J. Harris, Land Line Productions, Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle/Tony Adams, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norton Herrick and Herrick Entertainment, Billy Rovzar & Fernando Rovzar, Jeffrey B. Hecktman, Omneity Entertainment/Richard G. Weinberg, James L. Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, S2BN Entertainment, Jam Theatricals, The Mayerson/Gould/Hauser/Tysoe Group, Patricia Lambrecht, Paul McGuinness, by arrangement with Marvel Entertainment.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/spider-man-musical-review-chaotic-97241
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
(Foxwoods; $140 top/$275 premium)
By Steven Suskin
A Michael Cohl & Jeremiah J. Harris (et al) presentation of a musical in two acts with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge, book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger. Directed by Taymor, choreography and aerial choreography by Daniel Ezralow. Music direction by Kimberly Grigsby.
With: Reeve Carney, Jennifer Damiano, T.V. Carpio, Patrick Page and a cast of 39.
After 10 playing weeks and some $12,500,000-worth of tickets, the attractions of "Spider-Man" are still in the spectacular physical production, and if the audience at Saturday's matinee preview was not standing and cheering, they still could be described as warmly appreciative. It's a work in progress, and creator Julie Taymor has been making changes through the preview period, and is reportedly planning to continue to rework the musical numbers (within the framework of the existing music and lyrics). Weaknesses lie with the book, music and lyrics, a kiss of death for most musicals; Taymor and her producers seem to think this a minor flaw, and initial box office returns suggest they might be right.
The Spider-people have compared their situation to a traditional pre-Broadway tryout, with months of changes prior to the Broadway opening; but in most other cases, the major activity is the time-consuming job of removing songs that don't work and writing replacements that will. With the exception of the opening number (which seems derived from music used elsewhere in the show), the current song-list is identical to preview #1; songwriters Bono and The Edge, who are off on a U2 tour, have indicated that they have not and will not write new songs.
At preview No. 64, the first major aerial sequence of the show, 42 minutes in, was halted by some tech glitches. Once airborne, though, the sequence is impressive, and the second is an amazing aerial fight waged over the heads of the patrons in prime orchestra seats. The second act flights are considerably less exciting, except for one with the resident spider woman and five other flying gals. This one is a visual feast, heightened by a combination of lights, projections, and colored webs.
Story, which follows four nerdy teenagers as they devise the adventures of a teenaged superhero from Queens, is sketchy and ill-formed. Some of the dialogue, by Taymor and Glen Berger, seems ad-libbed on the spot and there are a couple of big holes in the story. (A major plot development centers on photos taken of Spider-Man by Peter Parker, but how does he take close-ups of himself while he is fighting?)
The performers are somewhat smothered by effects. Jennifer Damiano, late of "Next to Normal," stands out as the embattled heroine; Matthew James Thomas, on as standby to leading man Reeve Carney, was perfectly likable. Otherwise, only Michael Mulheren manages to break through the material.
The music and lyrics are less of a score than an endless and repetitive soundtrack; it is something of a surprise when the second act suddenly provides two effective songs ("Turn Off the Dark," "If the World Should End"). Two lead guitarists stand on the stage-right apron throughout the performance, often looking bored. Presumably the changes will include intensive surgery on "Deeply Furious," the spiders-in-high-heels number which is fast developing into musical-theater legend.
Sidebar: Broadway Tryout
Variety has a longstanding practice of reviewing stage shows in out-of-town tryouts. This review is consistent with that, except that "out of town" in this case is in the center of Manhattan.
"Spider-Man" began previews Nov. 28, targeting a Dec. 21 bow. The opening was pushed to Jan. 11, then Feb. 7, and currently March 15. Facing hints that critics were planning to observe the Feb. 7 date, the producers last week protested that the show "will be ready for review when the artists who are creating this show deem it ready." Variety will run a complete review when the show officially opens.
For the record, despite a recent run-in with the New York City Dept. of Consumer Affairs, there was no visible signage at the Foxwoods (formerly Ford/Hilton) indicating that this was a preview performance and that refunds/exchanges were available.
Set, George Tsypin; costumes, Eiko Ishioka; lighting, Donald Holder; sound, Jonathan Deans; projections, Kyle Cooper; masks, Taymor; orchestrations, David Campbell; production stage managers, C. Randall White and Kathleen E. Purvis. Reviewed Feb. 5, 2011. Running time: 2 HOURS, 35 MIN (plus stoppage time).
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944526
By Steven Suskin
A Michael Cohl & Jeremiah J. Harris (et al) presentation of a musical in two acts with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge, book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger. Directed by Taymor, choreography and aerial choreography by Daniel Ezralow. Music direction by Kimberly Grigsby.
With: Reeve Carney, Jennifer Damiano, T.V. Carpio, Patrick Page and a cast of 39.
After 10 playing weeks and some $12,500,000-worth of tickets, the attractions of "Spider-Man" are still in the spectacular physical production, and if the audience at Saturday's matinee preview was not standing and cheering, they still could be described as warmly appreciative. It's a work in progress, and creator Julie Taymor has been making changes through the preview period, and is reportedly planning to continue to rework the musical numbers (within the framework of the existing music and lyrics). Weaknesses lie with the book, music and lyrics, a kiss of death for most musicals; Taymor and her producers seem to think this a minor flaw, and initial box office returns suggest they might be right.
The Spider-people have compared their situation to a traditional pre-Broadway tryout, with months of changes prior to the Broadway opening; but in most other cases, the major activity is the time-consuming job of removing songs that don't work and writing replacements that will. With the exception of the opening number (which seems derived from music used elsewhere in the show), the current song-list is identical to preview #1; songwriters Bono and The Edge, who are off on a U2 tour, have indicated that they have not and will not write new songs.
At preview No. 64, the first major aerial sequence of the show, 42 minutes in, was halted by some tech glitches. Once airborne, though, the sequence is impressive, and the second is an amazing aerial fight waged over the heads of the patrons in prime orchestra seats. The second act flights are considerably less exciting, except for one with the resident spider woman and five other flying gals. This one is a visual feast, heightened by a combination of lights, projections, and colored webs.
Story, which follows four nerdy teenagers as they devise the adventures of a teenaged superhero from Queens, is sketchy and ill-formed. Some of the dialogue, by Taymor and Glen Berger, seems ad-libbed on the spot and there are a couple of big holes in the story. (A major plot development centers on photos taken of Spider-Man by Peter Parker, but how does he take close-ups of himself while he is fighting?)
The performers are somewhat smothered by effects. Jennifer Damiano, late of "Next to Normal," stands out as the embattled heroine; Matthew James Thomas, on as standby to leading man Reeve Carney, was perfectly likable. Otherwise, only Michael Mulheren manages to break through the material.
The music and lyrics are less of a score than an endless and repetitive soundtrack; it is something of a surprise when the second act suddenly provides two effective songs ("Turn Off the Dark," "If the World Should End"). Two lead guitarists stand on the stage-right apron throughout the performance, often looking bored. Presumably the changes will include intensive surgery on "Deeply Furious," the spiders-in-high-heels number which is fast developing into musical-theater legend.
Sidebar: Broadway Tryout
Variety has a longstanding practice of reviewing stage shows in out-of-town tryouts. This review is consistent with that, except that "out of town" in this case is in the center of Manhattan.
"Spider-Man" began previews Nov. 28, targeting a Dec. 21 bow. The opening was pushed to Jan. 11, then Feb. 7, and currently March 15. Facing hints that critics were planning to observe the Feb. 7 date, the producers last week protested that the show "will be ready for review when the artists who are creating this show deem it ready." Variety will run a complete review when the show officially opens.
For the record, despite a recent run-in with the New York City Dept. of Consumer Affairs, there was no visible signage at the Foxwoods (formerly Ford/Hilton) indicating that this was a preview performance and that refunds/exchanges were available.
Set, George Tsypin; costumes, Eiko Ishioka; lighting, Donald Holder; sound, Jonathan Deans; projections, Kyle Cooper; masks, Taymor; orchestrations, David Campbell; production stage managers, C. Randall White and Kathleen E. Purvis. Reviewed Feb. 5, 2011. Running time: 2 HOURS, 35 MIN (plus stoppage time).
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944526
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