Scorned at previews, the Spider-Man musical got a 'creative overhaul'. Now it's opened on Broadway, what exactly is different? And will it be enough to save it?
After it was prematurely reviewed in February by a voracious swarm of critics maddened by serial delays, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark looked to be a goner. Yes, the production was pulling in more than $1m a week, but surely the show couldn't keep running after such venomous reviews? Pundits crunched the numbers and estimated that the wildly expensive production would need to run four years at maximum capacity to make back its $65m investment. Brand recognition is one thing, but word-of-mouth still makes or breaks shows on Broadway. And critics showed universal contempt for the superhero musical, with tunes by Bono and the Edge and a phantasmagoric mise-en-sc�ne by Julie Taymor. So, in March, as everyone knows, the producers shut down Spider-Man for three weeks to overhaul the book and direction. Did they save the day?
Time will tell, but critics begrudgingly trooped back into the Foxwoods theatre and filed their reviews on Spider-Man 2.0 this week. The consensus is that it's better, but still not very good. The critics almost unanimously deplore Bono and the Edge's rock score as bland and witless, and that while the story is now coherent, it remains irritatingly juvenile. At the review aggregator StageGrade, Spider-Man has leapt from the initial F+ to a C+. In other words, a grudging pass. So what did they change? Here's a quick breakdown:
1. Nixing the geek chorus
One of the elements that Taymor and her fellow book writer Glen Berger introduced into the Spider-Man mythos was a quartet of deeply annoying teens who appeared to have taken unsafe amounts of Ritalin, and proceeded to free-associate the story of Spider-Man. This wildly contrived framing device allowed Taymor to play fast and loose with our hero's origin story, which she intertwined with the Greek myth of Arachne. In mid-March, perhaps inevitably, the poor actors in the geek chorus were sacked.
2. Reducing the role of Arachne
Apparently, creating a bright, playful, action-packed musical about a beloved comic-book character was not enough of a task for Taymor. She felt compelled to tart up the tale with a powerful female artist who angered the gods (any allegory going on there, Julie?), but it was all Greek to us. Arachne got moved far into the background.
3. Padding out the action sequences
Two of the show's best aerial battles ? Spider-Man fighting assorted crooks, and then going head-to-head with the Green Goblin ? were originally stuffed into the overlong first act. The second act was one long, anticlimactic letdown. In the new show, there's one major fight per act, and a fair amount of character development in between.
4. Killing the worst number
Critics have rightly poured scorn on the rather lazy and boring second-rate rock score by Bono and the Edge. But nothing angered them more than Deeply Furious, a song in which Arachne and her eight-legged female minions parade around in stolen designer shoes, vowing revenge on ? oh, never mind. Just be glad the wretched thing was cut.
5. Giving us a story
If nothing else, the long, wasteful and humiliating epic of Spider-Man reinforces a truth universally known among playwrights and, well, anyone with a degree of common sense: story matters. Taymor's humbling was a testament to the centrality and power of the written word, the well-drawn character, the artfully constructed plot. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a gifted playwright (and actual comic-book writer) was able to take a handful of ineptly sketched characters and breathe a bit more life and humanity into them. He took a plot that was self-indulgently doodled to the point of absurdity and smoothed it out. In the new show, we care about these characters. For fleeting seconds at least.
The future of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is anyone's guess. Hardly any of the notices were what industry folks call a money review. "Somewhat improved" and "Now merely mediocre!" won't look so great splashed on the marquee above 42nd Street. But for a show that has withstood so many slings and arrows, that has taken on every villain imaginable and survived, it's hard to imagine that Spidey will go down without a long, public (and costly) fight.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/jun/16/spider-man-turn-off-dark-changed
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