jethrien

So we got cheap tickets and went to see Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark last night.

It was awful. Enormous spectacle, dripping with money, flat out awful. I was delighted. I'd been afraid it was just going to be mediocre and therefore boring, but no. They have managed to producea truly magnificent failure. We had such a good time.

I barely even know where to start.

Ok, so for those who haven't been following along, a month or two ago, they shut the entire show down for a couple weeks, fired Julie Taymor, and reworked the book. Originally, the Green Goblin gets killed off in the first act and the better part of the second act focuses on this original, director-insert character Arachne, involves a massive confusing dream sequence, and made little to no sense (while having nothing to do with canon).

I'll hand this to them--the plot does actually make sense now. They cut out all but two and a half Arachne songs, made Green Goblin the actual Big Bad for the entire show, and essentially cut and pasted all the songs into a different order.

Unfortunately, the new book kind of sucks. Actually, no, it really sucks. It's coherent, it's just utterly lacking in heart. They managed to cut out any reason for anyone to care. Uncle Ben doesn't get his "great power/great responsibility" line. The guy who kills Uncle Ben is a completely random carjacker who's never seen again. (In the movie, remember, it was the guy who Peter didn't bother to stop from robbing the asshole wrestling manager. Apparently in the original musical book, it was a carjacker who stole the school bully's care while Peter failed to help him. In this version, Peter beats his breast and blames himself--only he didn't actually see anything. There wasn't anything he could have actually done.) Most of the first act is a soulless progression of set pieces--Peter gets beaten up, Peter and Mary Jane whine, Peter gets bitten, etc. There's not much in the way of useful connecting dialogue and the music is mostly whiny indistiguishable rock songs, so you really don't care. We saw the understudy, who was regrettably not up to the task. He was obviously chosen for his ability to do the wire work, because his acting was incredibly wooden.

If the songs were awesome, it would have helped. Actually, it would have made most things forgivable. It's a musical. Song is how you further character and plot development. But just about every single one sounds like it's going to turn into "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". (Bono and The Edge of U2 did the music. You can tell. You can really tell. You can tell they ran out of ideas ten years ago.) The lyrics are incredibly trite and the music is incredibly predictable.

Unfortunately, the two most musically interesting songs are Arachne's. And they make no sense. Other than the fact that the music, costumes, sets, and actress are already paid for, there is no reason left for them to be in this musical. (Oh, and the fact that "Turn Off the Dark" comes from the title of one of her songs. No, it doesn't make any more sense in context.) The musical begins with Peter giving a book report on Arachne, basically spending the very first ten minutes of the musical on mystical mumbo-jumbo that has no bearing on Spiderman or the plot and serves mostly to establish that Peter thinks spiders are neat. Later, she sings an angsty song about him taking responsibility. Which has absolutely no effect on his actions whatsoever. It's written as a big revelation, except that he doesn't actually take responsibility then and comes to an entirely different epiphany twenty minutes later.

One of the biggest problems is that the creative team all think they're working in entirely different genres. The music is a boring angsty rock opera. The book is an incredibly angsty, pseudo-mystical piece of hogwash. The choreography and the costumes, on the other hand, think we're in a comedy.

The choreo was a mess. There was never any particularly unifying style, and the dancers clearly hadn't had enough rehearsal time because all the big group numbers were incredibly ragged. A lot of it was really hammy, in a way that had little to do with the angst in the plotline. And every once in awhile, we were suddenly in a Lady Gaga video for no good reason.

Also not helpful? The choreo is too demanding for the amount of singing being done. You can hear that the chorus doesn't have enough breath. They take breaths in the middle of phrases-words even, and their support is non-existent. Spidey and the actress playing Green Goblin's wife both had pitch issues on their own, so a pitchy, unsupported chorus added in means every group number is unpleasantly sliding around in the key.

The costumes were...impressive. But totally, completely random. We start off at the school with bullies bullying Peter in a song that made no sense. Worse, everyone is wearing the most aggressively 80s style costumes outside of Awesome 80s Prom. Seriously, the black guy has a flat top haircut. All in yellow and black, for no good reason. MJ is wearing clothes out of this season's H&M, though. That's ok, because a few scenes later, J. Jonah Jamison is yelling about how the Daily Bugle is losing out to bloggers...to the secretary pool. That's right, we have half a dozen women in cats-eye glasses and knock-off How to Succeed 60s era costumes, daintily sitting in front of miniature typewriters. While the reporters (only one of whom is female) are all dressed like they stepped out of His Girl Friday. Did I mention that the evil corporation who doesn't really have much to do with the plot wears fedoras for no particular reason?

The Sinister Six (who aren't the Sinister Six at all--they have Carnage, Kraven, Swarm, The Lizard, Electro, and a new made-up villian called Swiss Miss) have cheesily fantastic costumes. They're awesome, as long as you don't want to take them seriously. The play isn't sure whether we're taking them seriously or not. Also not to be taken seriously is a series of bank robbers and victims in hilarious paper-mache heads.

The wire work is ok. Cirque du Soleil's more impressive. The fight choreography is so gun-shy that it has people taking punches in which the fist is nearly a foot away from their face. It's like watching martial artists running something at quarter speed and deliberately not connecting.

The one thing that is truly impressive is the set design, which is breathtaking. The climax arranges the stage so you're looking down from above the Chrysler building, which projects out into the audience. At the back of the stage, tiny little taxi cabs drive back and forth on the ground far below. It's one of the coolest sets I've ever seen. The entire show is comic-booky forced-perspective genius. If they ever officially open, I hope the designer gets a small heap of awards, because it's amazing work.

So. Basically a completely schizophrenic, underrehearsed disaster from beginning to end. With oh so much shiny to distract you. It's sad when the line that got the biggest laugh of the night was when a minor character tells MJ of Peter "He's not that cute" and an audience member (clearly a teenage girl) piped up unexpectedly "Oh, yes he is!"

Maybe they should hire her as a plant.