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
Thursday, February 10, 2011
'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.
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
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
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