Spider-Man the Musical: A Review

Last night I saw Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

I heard Julie Taymor and Bono are in town to change the ending. After that, they just have to fix the middle and beginning and they’ll have a good show.

It was that bad. And not bad like “not good.” Bad like “women with four extra legs are dangling from the ceiling while dancing to a rip-off of Britney Spears’s Toxic. And the song is about shoes. And the main woman singing is Arachne the eight-legged spider woman from Greek mythology. And she’s stuck in an astral plane. And she needs those shoes they’re singing about to escape the astral plane.”

Oh, by the way, SPOILER ALERTS for the second act. All that was established in the second act.

Well, that’s a bit of a lie. Peter Parker does a book report about Arachne in the first act, but at first we don’t know it’s a book report. At first it’s just an arty telling of the Arachne myth because this is Broadway and you have to be classy. Actually before that, there was a chorus of 4 punk rock/nerd/hipsters who decide to write an internet fan-fiction version of Spider-Man and they start with Arachne.

Make sense?

After that, the first act is pretty much just Spider-Man’s origin story, but with all the important emotional and character parts removed to make room for Bono songs. Uncle Ben’s character is never established. Aunt May comes off like a nag. Uncle Ben’s death is pretty much glossed over and it’s unclear if Peter realized his selfish behavior caused his uncles death. This makes Peter’s decision to become a hero confusing. More confusing still is that he gets the Spider-Man costume from Arachne who up until this point was just a pretentious narrative device.

Then we get scenes of Spider-Man fighting strange Dick-Tracy-esque grotesque muggers with more POWS, BAMS and BANGS than the 60′s Batman show. There are also multiple scenes of 50′s newspaper reporters telling J. Jonah Jameson all the amazing things Spider-Man and the Green Goblin did that couldn’t be depicting within the play’s meager 65 million dollar budget. Also, many times when you expect to see Spider-Man or the Green Goblin, they swing in a giant drawing instead. In one particularly dramatic moment a large drawing of a baby is saved by an even larger drawing of Spider-Man’s head and left arm.

There were also a lot of songs, but they all blended together and it was impossible to figure out what they were about.

The first act ends with Spider-Man killing the Green Goblin and saving Mary Jane. Yep, they got the entire Spider-Man origin story out of the way in one act. Leaving them plenty of time for…

A VILLAIN FASHION SHOW!

That’s right, the second act starts with the chorus realizing they need a new villain, so they have a fashion show with six of them. But the costumes are so bad I thought the chorus was brainstorming villain ideas (Radioactive-Nazi-Bee-Man is one of the better ones), and then throwing them all away because Radioactive-Nazi-Bee-Man is almost as stupid as Metallic-Sword-Lady.

So for the first half of the second act, it seems like the villain is Peter Parker’s life as he has problems balancing being Spider-Man, with going to school, with helping Aunt May, and with dating Mary Jane. Oh yeah, Peter and Mary are dating now. They don’t really establish this. You figure it out when Peter proposes to her and she says “Okay.”

Then half way through the second act, Arachne comes back strong. Now she’s a villain. She needs Spider-Man to break out of the astral plane she’s stuck in, and by the way she’s stuck in an astral plane. To accomplish this, she brings the Green Goblin back to life. She also brings back to life those six villains introduced at the beginning of act two, because apparently they were real and Spider-Man already killed them even though we never saw that happen. She also causes a world wide power outage so that a shoe store in New York City will get looted, so that she can somehow steal those shoes from the looters, so that she can use the doubly stolen shoes to walk out of the astral plane, so that she can get Spider-Man, so that she can be free. Why does she need Spider-Man to escape the astral plane when the stolen shoes seemed to do the trick? I don’t know. But her threatening of Peter Parker and the people he loves leads to the best two lines of dialogue ever written.

Peter Parker: You can’t be with me.

Mary Jane: But Peter, yesterday you asked me to marry you.

I won’t ruin the ending because I didn’t see it. They cut the play short when there were some wire mishaps with Peter Parker’s final triumphant swing.

Things I forgot to mention

• The first song ends with the line “Let’s go get those tacos.”
• The scientists who create the radioactive spider that bites Peter Parker dress like rejects from the 1970′s Battlestar Galactica.
• The spider that bites Peter Parker is the size of a pony.
• When Norman Osborn decides to experiment on himself, he says to his wife “We will be God and Mrs. God.”
• When Norman Osborn realizes his experiment killed his wife and turned him into the Green Goblin he gives a “YAAAARRRRRGGHHHH” that rivals Darth Vader’s “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO” at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
• The Green Goblin plays piano on top of the Chrysler building.
• To depict Spider-Man diving off the Chrysler building, they use an action figure and an upside-down scale model of the building
• There was a Rastafarian bucket drummer during the villain fashion show.
• When Spider-Man fights all the villains for a second time, it’s through a video montage that uses terrible 3d animation.
• I saw the show with Lauren Adams, Mike Scollins and Jason Saenz. We tweeted about it and got picked up by the Gothamist.
• I am really glad I saw Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

An Open Letter Regarding My Lack of Updates

Dearest readers,

I am very sorry for not updating my blog more often. I was busy and denied you a new post for almost a whole week, and for that I throw myself at your feet and beg for the mercy we both know I don’t deserve.

I can’t even imagine how disappointing it was for you to check my website hour after hour, day after day, desperately hoping for a new post, only to realize I had abandoned you. Here is an artist’s rendering of you after just one day.

Here is day three.

And day five.

All I can say is that I’m sorry. Really truly deeply sorry. I know that can’t take away the tears shed, clothes torn, hairs pulled, or the Gods forsaken, but please believe me when I say that hurting you also hurts me.

But it goes even deeper than that. It’s not just you, the reader, I hurt, but the entire Internet because if there is one thing the web needs, it’s more blog posts. There is a serious dearth of self-important, inane ramblings on the web, and for almost a week I was the problem instead of the solution. So Internet, please accept my apology.

Though now that I think about it, I also owe the world an apology. Thankfully, world somehow survived without new blog posts from me, but surviving is not the same thing as thriving. Isn’t it possible that if I posted just a few more times last week, Israel and Palestine would have established real, lasting peace; GM would have rolled out a successful line of fully electric cars, thus ending global warming; and Bono would have found a way to feed the world through self-righteous music? I very well could have blown a once in a lifetime opportunity to save the world, and for that I will be forever sorry.

There comes a time in every Internet reader’s life when they realize their blogger is not perfect, and I think for you that moment is now. I am not perfect. Sometimes I make mistakes. Other times I go to Ottawa for an animation festival. But even other times I stand here as a blogger, asking you, as a reader, to forgive me, because isn’t forgiveness (and sharing data) why scientists invented the Internet in the first place?

Sincerely,
Adam