Spiderman: the myth, the mashup, the musical

OK first I need to thank my friend The Actor for getting us discount tix to a preview performance last night.  He is the kind of person to whom I send an idle text asking “do you know anybody who’s seen this?” and 15 minutes later he calls  back with a bunch of available dates for great seats at a 40% discount. He does stuff like that all the time – talk about your superpowers!   We sat in the Flying Circle (the first balcony) only a few feet away from BONO AND JULIE TAYMORE last night!!!!!!  If you go I highly recommend these seats, as they provide the best view of all the dazzling Cirque-du-Soleil-style aerial action sequences.

Next, just in case I get some random lurkers from outside the usual MJB family, I want to stress that this was a PREVIEW performance of a play that is still a work in progress. I am not pretending to review the show before it opens, like certain sleazy people I could mention, most notably that guy at the New York Post  who appears to be getting a chubby from attending early, early preview performances and dogging everything out of context. Any writer who likes to do that sort of thing, I dare you to make available for public consideration, every early draft of everything you have ever written, and to let the reading public discuss your literary talents based thereon.  A lot of the really bad press this production has gotten has come from this guy and his ilk, so  consider the source. There are some real flaws in this show, but also some really interesting ideas, and wouldn’t you rather consider the REAL flaws instead of the ones made up to sell papers and puff up smallminded, pissy little critics who like to find fault with people who are literally sticking their necks out and achieving things the critics couldn’t pull off in their wildest dreams?

Now that being said, Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark is, I repeat, a work in progress, and a very expensive one, at that. Here’s what’s good about it:

Reeve  Carney, who plays Peter Parker and the primary Spiderman (there are about 11 other stunt Spidermen, played by the fittest assortment of young men you’re ever likely to see in tights – I’m told they are mostly athletes, a lot of martial artists among them.  It’s not as strange as it sounds – or maybe it is, but in a good way,) deserves to be a big star. He plays the hell out of both parts without overplaying them, which is not easy because one of the problems with the show is that it can’t decide whether Peter/Spidey is a romantic leading man, a rocker in Broadway clothing, a cartoon character, or some kind of mythic operatic hero. Reeve (the grandson of Art Carney, who played Ed Norton on The Honeymooners, btw) somehow manages to synthesize elements of all these creatures – his Petey is every smart, sweetnatured dork you ever wanted to reward with a good haircut, a decent pair of glasses and a big hug, and when he discovers his superpowers, remember, there are no CGI effects to make his muscles bigger and his complexion more glowing – yet he somehow manages to project the aura of a guy who realizes “hey I am different – but not necessarily better, unless I find a context for all these amazing new abilities.” It’s not quite confidence that he radiates, but rather a mature understanding of a greater potential – and that is pretty intense because there’s not a whole lot of that written into the play – he just sort of seems to have figured it out, as an intelligent performer will. I also have it on good authority that he is a really nice guy without a diva bone in his cute skinny little body.

Jennifer Damiano, who plays MaryJane (isn’t that a swell name for a romantic heroine?!) is just wonderful, but don’t take my word for it, look at the facts: girlfriend was nominated for a Tony (for Next to Normal) when she was just 17 years old, and prior to that was in the original cast of Spring Awakening. A nice little resume for someone barely out of her teens, doncha think? Her MJ is an ingenue with a backbone and a heart – at once old-skool and completely contemporary. She’s lovely.

T.V. Carpio, who just took over the role of Arachne, is so compelling to watch that she really deserves her own show.  In fact, that’s another major problem: S: Toff tD is kind of a mashup of 2 or 3 different kind of stories: the myth of Arachne, the first spider, “who was cursed to immortality in the shadows … doomed to live and weave alone,” the good old-fashioned fanboy action-adventure story of Spiderman – which is the basis for all the truly amazing gymnastics and gravity- (and safety-) defying stagecraft, and a superloud, only partially successful rock musical (rock and roll is great means by which to tell a story, but the story needs to hang together better than this one does.) To complicate things further, before Arachne drops out of the astral plane to stop by J.  Jonah Jameson’s office and menace him, she appears to Peter in a sexy dream sequence that appears to have been influenced by Angels in America, after which she  and her Furies (a bunch of hot-looking spiderwomen villainesses-in-training) do a big production number in which each of them prances around wearing eight brightly colored stolen shoes on various real and prosthetic feet.  I mean, it is visually very arresting, but WTF? 

Arachne’s story is interesting, and “Behold and Wonder,” the number that introduces her, is quite something, but  the play is almost over before it’s clear what she has to do with Pete & MaryJane & Spidey & Green Goblin. Until then, there’s a conflicting attempt at another  narrative framework: these four kids called “The Geek Chorus” – a bunch of young fanboys (and one fangirl) who appear to be spinning their own fan fiction as a means of moving the plot along (barely) and creating some marginally necessary bad guys, who are weighed down in ridiculous looking, overdone costumes that really do look as though they were designed by an overenthused high school kid with a huge budget. The costumes make it impossible for the performers inside to do any actual acting, and they are too gaudy, in a cross between Vegas and a late-twentieth-century-action-film- turned-video game sort of way, to convey any real sense of threat or menace, even though they are called the “Sinister Six.”   The gaudy Six are in addition to some comic book thugs dressed in Dick- Tracy-meets-Comedia-del-Arte-looking puppet-heads, and some mean high school bullies – fairly naturalistically presented –  whom Peter vanquishes in slow motion, accompanied by big colorful cartoon-bubble-style placards saying “POW!” “BAM!” and the like, which was cool when the Batman TV show did it back in the 1960′s. 

 The conflicting visual styles and time frames didn’t work for me: the high school kids are sort of early 21st century although influenced by the Krush-Groove style break-dancing choreography of the mid-1980′s, while the Daily Bugle office can’t decide if it exists in the 1940′s, with all those cute colorfully dressed secretary-typists scooting around on rolling office chairs and reporters running in and out wearing zoot suits and fedoras, or in the current day, with repeated references to the World Wide Web (get the double meaning: Web?!?!?! Don’t worry, they’ll hit you over the head with it until you do.)Too many important plot points are underexplained, kind of relying on the fact that you’re familiar with the earlier source material: unless you’ve seen the first movie, it’s not really clear how Uncle Ben dies, or why Peter feels responsible, and Uncle Ben and Aunt May have so little to do that there’s really no point in including them at all. Mary Jane learning that Pete is actually her celebrity crush Spiderman  – an important little dramatic point in every prior version of the tale – is just sort of assumed here: there’s no dialogue, no song, nothing to really clarify when or how she finds out, although a source close to the production tells me that they are adding a scene soon that includes the famous Upside-Down Kiss, which might clear things up a little. 

I’m not sure if this show will capture the popular imagination and run forever, or go down in history as an ambitious casualty, but I admire everyone involved for having the nerve to give it a go. Overall, a good time was had by all, and I really did feel that I got my money’s worth – at the discount price, in any event. I guess I would tell everyone that it is worth seeing in order to decide for yourself. If you do, please weigh in and tell us what you thought!