This year, I decided to celebrate my birthday Broadway-style. Literally.
My plan was simple: Go up to New York, suit up, grab a great dinner, see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and then grab a drink at McGee's, the bar that inspired MacLaren's on How I Met Your Mother. My friends Jill and Dee signed on for the adventure and, Friday at stupid o'clock in the morning, we headed out to New York City. And we flawlessly executed the whole thing. Well, our navigation may have been off finding a store or two on Saturday before we headed home, but the important part, the birthday part: flawless.
The odds were stacked in favor of awesomeness, too. I was with two of my best friends in one of the best cities in the world. And I love Broadway. Even bad Broadway. (Not only did I see Dance of the Vampires, but I found demo tracks of the songs online. Yeah, I'm that big a Broadway guy.) That said, I had a great time.
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is an interesting beast, and if I'm going to talk about it, there will be spoilers ahead. You have been warned.
The show has been heavily revised since its initial, accident-filled previews. And the revised version I saw is still technically in previews, so there are things I'm sure they're going to improve, like the dancing in the big military super-soldier number. In that scene, the evil Viper Corporation (no doubt a front for Hydra) is trying to buy Osborne's research to create super-soldiers. This is presented as a bad thing, which is kind of interesting since in the Marvel Universe, we know those kind of projects actually work out pretty well. Regardless, the dancing could have been crisper.
Overall, though, it reminds me a lot of one of those production shows you see at an amusement park. Like the Beauty and the Beast show at Disney World/Hollywood Studios, or, more on point, the Spider-Man musical that was at Universal Studios for a while. Now, it was a well-staged theme park musical and one I enjoyed immensely, but it still had that feel.
The more I think about it, the more I think that's unavoidable. Musicals rarely achive that continuity of tight storytelling. Scenes and songs serve to illuminate plot points, often creating an overview of a story less that a complete story. Add to that the disadvantage of knowing the source material the way I and comic book fans do. When Uncle Ben is killed in a carjacking, gone is Peter's failure to stop the carjacker earlier. It's like a precis version of the scene. It also serves to save us a Spidey-tracks-down-Ben's-killer-scene. Peter still blames himself for not being there and not saving Ben, though, so we get to the same "With great power comes great responsibility" moment.
But, if I had read Wicked before seeing the musical… okay, that may be a bad example because if I'd read the book I might never have seen the musical. Man was that thing weird. But, my point is not knowing the source material made it possible to enjoy it more, because I wasn't judging what it should have been and instead judged what it was.
The singing and acting is pretty uniformly enjoyable. I'm not sure all the songs work as well anymore as they're in different places. Much of the Arachne stuff has been cut back, wisely so, but for production reasons they can't jettison it entirely. So her scenes still kind of slow the production. Besides, I don't see why anyone would think an ancient godlike being would bother to mess around in the life of Spider-Man. That's just silly. I think. I don't remember.
The sets and staging are wonderful. They've got a comic book flavor without getting too cartoony, and at one point even invoke page-flipping without beating you over the head with it. The sets are all at wonky comic book angles, but I think it works. And some of the city stuff, especially the scene near the end that takes place looking down at a New York City street, is spectacular. (Yeah, I went there. Deal with it. I might say "amazing", too.)
The musical performances are very good, although none of the songs really stuck in my head, except for that one guitar riff which sounds like the theme to Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker more than anything else.
The real star is all the wire work showing Spider-Man swinging through the city. It's a guy wearing a wire harness, but I'll be darned if I didn't sit there watching those with a stupid grin on my face just enjoying the whole thing. And, through clever use of multiple Spider-Man actors, he pops from place to place, even appearing in the mezannine and the balcony. The showcase piece is Spider-Man on one harness track fighting a flying Green Goblin on a second, and even landing on him. Just to not tangle up all those wires is pretty awesome.
There was one misfire where Spidey didn't land cleanly. The result being a pause in the show as the chorus actors had to vamp while Spider-Man reset. In some ways, that made it a perfect night. We got to see a decent show and still had a technical difficulty.
The effects caused a kind of congnitive dissonance with me, though. I was so glad to see the recent Spider-Man movies and have his trademark moves really look great. We'd come a long way since the days of Nicholas Hammond. But, to do this show, the effects have to regress to that level, with spider webbing being replaced with streamers that burst out of a cartridge like those bottle poppers at New Year's Eve.So, you're kind of left going "That's cheesy, the movie did it better… oh, wait."
I have to call out the performance of the Green Goblin, too. He was really great.The role swings from manic scientist to crazy Joker-like levels of insanity. He's got to be silly and menacing and funny, and he really does it. I'm not sure that's how I would have written the role (which is the curse of the comic fan at a production of a comic) but he executed everything he was asked to do wonderfully.
Will it succeed? I've got a feeling it'll be like Cats. Critics will dislike it, and people will flock to it. I don't know if it'll turn a profit, or even break even, but it'll be fun to see it try.