Broadway review by David Cote
"Mutate or die!" is the Green Goblin's threat-cum--rallying cry at Foxwoods Theatre, a sentiment that has likely become a grim mantra backstage at Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. As most of the solar system knows, the legendarily woe-plagued show has had a long, costly and media-saturated journey from its disastrous first preview last November through agonizing weeks of injuries, technical snafus, cast departures and vicious gossip. The multipanel ka-pow! came in February as an avalanche of premature reviews from impatient critics declared the $60 million hybrid of rock, circus and comic-book visuals a zany mess at best and at worst—well, the worst musical in history. Something had to change.
Director and book cowriter Julie Taymor's departure in mid-March was followed by a month of reworking the story and action sequences—indications that the producers wanted to make Spider-Man more than a faulty, nonsensical tourist attraction. So here we are. Spider-Man has risen and fallen for 183 previews; its DNA has been diced and spliced; the ultimate mutation has occurred; and the monster is frozen in its final state. What can we say about this marvelously morphing musical?
It's a hell of a lot better. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is now a coherent and mostly enjoyable entertainment for children and adults, albeit one still saddled with Taymor's vestigial nuttiness and freshly dug plot holes all its own. On balance, playwright and comic-book writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and director Philip Wm. McKinley deserve kudos for sifting through the turgid welter of arty pretension and narrative confusion that Taymor left behind in the spring, and finding a genuine story.
It helps to have seen Spider-Man 1.0 to appreciate how vastly improved the material is. Aguirre-Sacasa and McKinley eliminated the Geek Chorus, the idiotic framing device that allowed Taymor to muddle the Spider-Man origin story with her tacky gloss on the myth of Arachne (still intensely rendered by T.V. Carpio). And they reduced Arachne's role, making her more of a spirit guide to Peter Parker (Carney) than a supervillain and mystic love interest. They took the two strongest action sequences, which Taymor had foolishly stuffed into the first act, and spaced them evenly throughout the evening.
It's the cuts and additions to the book that have the strongest effect, though they didn't cost millions of dollars—or broken bones—to create. We finally care about these characters, their pain, their hopes. They are recognizably human, a condition that the previous Spider-Man palpably disdained.
Taymor's vision was perversely lacking in humor, romance and any love for humanity (specifically, New Yorkers), qualities that the first two Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies had in abundance. Taymor seemed almost contemptuous of shy but plucky science nerd Parker and the girl next door for whom he pines, Mary Jane Watson (Damiano). Taymor had so little interest in the Green Goblin, she killed him off in the overlong first act, and then made the second act all about her avatar, misunderstood artist Arachne—who inexplicably possessed godlike powers over technology and perception.
Junking all that indulgent, it-was-all-just-a-dream hogwash, Aguirre-Sacasa smartly places Parker front and center at the beginning, so we establish an instant rapport with him. Elsewhere, the new book allows the characters to breathe through believable, more nuanced dialogue. Parker and Mary Jane have a spark of sexual chemistry. There's affection between reckless geneticist Osborn (Page) and his wife, Emily (Laura Beth Wells). All these deft rewrites give the characters a dimensionality that was depressingly absent in Taymor's joyless, pseudo-mythic attempt to give a comic-book adventure the heft of Greek tragedy.
But while you won't find yourself bored and bewildered at this Spider-Man, flaws stick out. At the end of the first act, as Parker is romancing Mary Jane with the jaunty tune "Picture This," Osborn is in the midst of a dangerously rushed experiment on himself. The sequence builds to an explosion that kills Emily and transforms Osborn into the Green Goblin. Parker sees the explosion from across the river (forced, I know) and leaves Mary Jane to investigate. The first act ends with Spidey swinging into the lab where, presumably, he will encounter the Goblin after intermission. But when the second act begins, Parker makes no mention of the explosion or what he thinks may have happened to Osborn (who, don't forget, is Parker's idol). The plot thread dangles.
Such narrative knots are less bothersome, however, than the score by Bono and the Edge, of which only half the songs are engaging on a musical or lyrical level. Several numbers could easily have been cut to reduce the 160-minute running time and allow for more narrative connective tissue. The best songs—"Rise Above," "If the World Should End" and "Boy Falls from the Sky"—are outnumbered by generic rockers with sloppy, vague lyrics.
So the final mutation of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is not a multidisciplinary breakthrough, as Taymor hoped; it's just a musical. Likewise, Peter Parker may have superpowers that let him fly around New York on spiderwebs, but at the end of the day, he's just a kid.
Foxwoods Theatre. Music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge. Book by Julie Taymor, Glen Berger and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Dirs. Taymor and Philip Wm. McKinley. With Reeve Carney, Jennifer Damiano, Patrick Page. 2hrs 40mins. One intermission. Complete venue and ticket information
****
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark preview review by David Cote [February 11, 2011]:
Julie Taymor's rock-comix creation goes splat.
One star
By now, everything that could be said about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark seems to have been said: in magazines, tweets, blog posts and Facebook threads; in lobbies during intermission; around the water cooler; in late-night-TV monologues and radio reports; and between folks who have seen it and those who have not (but act like they have). Then there are the "premature" reviews that hit five weeks before the production's latest postponed opening date. Several critics filed disgusted, hooting notices, eager to stomp all over Julie Taymor, Bono and the Edge's $65 million work-in-regress. So the final word has been uttered, right? Spider-Man is colossally excremental. Worst show in Broadway history. Unfixable. Unwatchable. Obscene waste of money and sad squandering of talent. But here's the thing that hasn't been said: What if...?
Yes, the naive, elliptical interrogative that keeps hope alive in the breast of comix fans and theater folk alike. What if Julie Taymor, the woman responsible for this sorry mess, reads the reviews, makes some cuts and rewrites, trims the show to 90 minutes and, on March 15, opens a much-improved product that critics (should they return) might almost like?
I know: You might as well expect Doctor Octopus to open a nail salon. If Taymor were receptive to serious creative input, Spider-Man would not have become the overbudget vanity project it is. Having seen the show twice—once with Reeve Carney playing Peter Parker/Spider-Man and once with his understudy (Matthew James Thomas), and both times sitting through technical malfunctions—I have concluded that although Spider-Man is ready to be reviewed, it's not worth reviewing.
That's because the majority of theater critics—myself included—have no interest in a show like this. It's not aimed at us. It's built for families or tourists, people with money to burn who don't care about narrative coherence, innovative music or thematic complexity. In effect, Spider-Man is a crummy, pandering kids' musical pretending to be a new form of entertainment—a "circus rock drama," as Taymor claims with Barnum-level swagger. Why invite the press at all?
Other critics have already enumerated the work's various inanities and shortcomings, but let's recap: The U2-flavored music is banal and repetitive; the book is lame, clunky and frequently incoherent; the flying sequences are underwhelming; and the attitude toward the source material is weirdly sloppy and tone-deaf.
Taymor's biggest misstep is the conceit that permits her to deconstruct and mock the original Marvel mythos: She frames the story as a Ritalin-addled free-association by a group of teens called the "Geek Chorus" (yes, that is the level of wit here). One geek-girl interrupts her male buddies' chatter with the Greek myth of Arachne (T.V. Carpio) and splices it into the Marvel story. Arachne has an implicit connection to the genetically modified (not radioactive) spider that bites Peter Parker (Carney); Arachne gives Peter his iconic red-and-blue tights; and, naturally, she falls for her creation. In other words, Taymor turns the story of a dorky teen who becomes the city's most beloved masked crime fighter into a parable about a misunderstood female artist who must sacrifice her love for the sake of society. Or something. This cornball-feminist spin essentially makes Spider-Man a wildly expensive piece of slash fiction. (True, it worked for Wicked.)
Playing around with continuity is fine; Marvel's writers, artists and screenwriters do it all the time. What's remarkable is the hostility you feel toward comix and fanboys—not to mention the girls who love fanboys. Peter is a personality-free nerd who becomes a superpowered cipher and Mary Jane Watson (Jennifer Damiano) is just a weak, passive girl who wants to be a musical-theater actor.
One of the saddest things about Spider-Man, in fact, is how dehumanized and humorless the whole affair feels. One thinks of the goofy but cheerful insults that the web-slinger usually lobs at his enemies in the middle of huge fights; there's an attempt to inject one-liners here and there, but they don't land or prompt a giggle. Villains are usually good for campy fun, but none of Patrick Page's strenuous mugging and vocal contortions as Norman Osborn (later the Green Goblin) yield any relief from the nonsensical, tin-eared book.
Taymor's visual palette is postmodern in the most showy, outdated way, with images echoing Bread & Puppet, Dick Tracy, her own Balinese borrowings, and an unending series of cartoony, forced-perspective sets that blend two- and three-dimensional illustrative views. While these visual (and flying) effects can appear briefly grand from center orchestra, they're much less impressive (if not downright confusing) from house left or right. Taymor seems to have directed the whole thing from the center, never realizing that a lateral view of the action registers much more poorly. Spider-Man may be worth $75 from the front, but not much from the side.
So the production is a deeply confused, ugly, ultimately boring example of artistic hubris enabled by financial excess. If Taymor takes the savage but honest reviews to heart, she could save the damsel in distress. But right now, Spider-Man is a theme-park ride that lost its theme.
Foxwoods Theater (see Broadway). Music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge. Book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger. Dir. Taymor. With Reeve Carney, Jennifer Damiano, T.V. Carpio, Patrick Page. 2hrs 45mins. One intermission (barring technical glitches).