With a daughter studying theater in NYC, and as someone who reads papers and blogs, hearing/reading news about the artistically-challenged but nevertheless selling out Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is unavoidable. We (my daughter and I) have been talking about popping for tickets just to see how bad it is.
Now there’s a way to market! Schadenfreude. Is this the Florence Foster Jenkins of musicals?
On the other hand, an old friend who is a big-time voice coach and has seen Spidey twice, back towards the beginning of its endless-preview run and again more recently, said she loves it in its current iteration and doesn’t think it needs fixing. It’s fun. Give it a break!
One of my daughter’s classmates has published a detailed and articulate opposite view.
It was possibly the worst play I have ever seen. Certainly, the worst musical. Now, I had low expectations. But it was worse than I imagined. It was laughably bad. The dialogue was stale. The music was forgettable. The lyrics were an absolute mess. The story was cliché. And most of the story wasn’t even seen. It was told.
Reading his piece, I realized that (other) people just love Spider-Man. They care about Spider-Man. So this is not just some for-profit show; this is an important cultural event for comic fans, superhero fans, and spectacle-type musical fans–and the huge common set between them. (Darren’s post also reminded me how brilliant, insightful, and passionate some college students are, and that, thank god and good parents and teachers, there are still undergraduates who write well.)
This cartoon about it all in the Village Voice is hilarious. As is this Huffington Post pie chart about why Julie Taymor was fired.
Eric Edberg 