One Squashed Spidey

There is a moment towards the end of Act 1 of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark where it all comes together.  You forget the costumes are plastic, don’t mind the insipid lyrics, and willingly suspend belief as The Green Hornet and Spiderman do battle 100 feet above you at The Foxwoods Theater.  These are some of the best aerial gymnastics this side of Circque de Soleil.  You and the five year old next to you are equally dazzled. 

Unfortunately it is only a moment and you are quickly snapped back to the reality of this over produced, over-the-top, over-hyped, vacuous musical. 

What little story there is revolves around a group of teenagers creating a Spiderman comic book.  They seemed chosen for the target audience, one of each: The nerd, the cool kid, the every kid and the smarter Asian-American girl who wants to play with the boys.  Spider-Man comes to life through their imaginations.  A school trip to a gene-splicing lab features an environment- crazed scientist, and, you guessed it – a spider bite.   Peter Parker, the kid everyone loves to pick on (and the inspiration for a particularly ridiculous musical number "Bullying By Numbers") is transformed into Spider-Man!  For the rest of Act I Spiderman fights the scientist who is transformed into the Green Goblin, and a confusing Act II sees him splitting his attention between fighting bad guys and choosing between his two loves – a human and a spider.  I am not kidding. 

Bono and the Edge from the rock group U2 did the music and lyrics.

Rock musicals have a hit or miss history on Broadway.  They sell seats and bring a non-traditional audience to live theater, but too often the music and story don’t match.   That is forgivable when the musical itself is celebrating and exploring the body of work of an artist in a new and different way – Billy Joel and Moving Out, for example, or Green Day and American Idiot. 

But Spiderman: Turn off the Dark has much bigger aspirations which fail miserably. Original unmemorable music, coupled with ridiculous lyrics (“You can change your mind, but you can’t change your heart”) neither move the story along nor live on after the curtain descends. 

The performances are across the board excellent and you feel for them as they forced to sing and dance in ultra-confining costumes and flying apparatus.  Rock performer Reeve Carney in his Broadway debut as Spiderman has the right look and voice.  I particularly enjoyed watching theater veteran Patrick Page as The Green Hornet – this is a once-in-a-lifetime part and he looked like he was having tons of fun. 

The musical reportedly is the most expensive ever mounted on Broadway, costing approximately $60 million.  What does that buy you these days?  Lots of electronics and paper mache.  In the Lion King director Julie Taymor used elaborate sets and costumes to create effects that transcended the effects themselves.  Live theater only becomes magic when all the parts are working together to create something greater than its individual parts.  Here, we have dazzling effects, but without the heart and soul coming from story and performance that make you care. 

And that is the real problem with Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.  It has no soul and for all the money spent, very little magic.  So instead of caring about the characters, you focus on the eight different sets of shoes each of the chorus of dancing arachnoids are wearing.  You wonder mystically at what era the action is supposed to be taking place, and why while the sets are cartoon cutouts, Peter Parker’s jacket, featuring, yes, an embroidered spider, is ultra-2011 hip.

With all these miss matching elements, this is one lofty spider that deserves to be the on the receiving end of a rolled up newspaper.

NOTE: There has been a lot of controversy over the extended preview period and a group of prominent critics decided to violate theater convention and print their reviews before opening night.  Given the complexity of the staging and the expense an out of town preview period would have entailed, I understand the producers decision to keep delaying the opening.   The effects in the performance I saw were flawlessly executed, and I disagree with the decision of the New York Times, et. al. However, it did allow for this really funny video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPH7vZ3Rev8