While in New York last week, I felt it was my pop culture duty to check out the most expensive stage production in history.
I suspect that every writer carries around in his head a small bag of maxims he has faith in most of the time. One such nugget in my bag comes from Stanley Kubrick: “A story that works is a miracle.” What I take the late director to mean is that telling a good, compelling, emotionally satisfying story is beyond difficult.
Even if there were universal secrets of great storytelling chiseled on a stone tablet, and even if you obeyed each of those commandments, you’d still be as likely to fail as not. Why the terrible odds? Because, sadly, an essential ingredient in a good story is magic dust, the kind that drifts down onto our desks through grace, not our pleas. (Though this macro-observation doesn’t help our storytelling, it at least helps keep hubris in check.) This narrative elixir isn’t essential only for that no-budget two-hander staged in a black box, it’s also required when you’re playing on Broadway after spending $65 million in development.
Alas, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark needs more than this fairy dust. You see, for that dust to animate a story a halfway coherent narrative must be present. And coherent narrative is nowhere to be seen in Spidy’s neighborhood.
These were some of my thoughts as I recently endured – and ducked – Spider-Man. I don’t personally know any of the artists involved, and I’m sure they are talented and hard-working. Nevertheless this musical is a dog’s breakfast. Ben Brantley, the New York Times number one drama critic, is certainly capable of brutality, and when I read his February 8 review I thought he was pushing his “B” button pretty hard, but now I think he was exercising restraint.
It’s the story, stupid! Story, the foundation of any successful play or musical, is what’s rotten here. At least the creative team now seems to recognize that. In recent weeks Patrick Healy has been reporting in the Times on frantic efforts to fix things: convening focus groups; bringing in a new writer, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa; bringing in a consulting director, Philip William McKinley; Bono writing more music. Healy reported yesterday that the producers are now considering postponing the opening for a sixth time. Overhauling the book at this point is like Boeing building a brand new airplane and then discovering, oh shit, the wings are in the wrong place.
As a veteran marketer, I have to admire the commitment to improve the product. As a playwright, I have to shudder. Can conditions be any worse for fixing a script: $65 million on the table, rock stars involved, daily missiles landing from a media blitzkrieg? Short of the creative team coming down with swine flu en masse, I really don’t see how.
I’d try to summarize the plot if I had any confidence that I understood it. Classical allusions abound – Ovid, Metamorphoses, Athena; even Nietzsche shows up – but to what purpose I couldn’t figure out. Among too many other things, the plot hits you with an apocalypse due to global warming, a mad scientist, and a bunch of bad guys in crazy costumes who look lost from their World Wrestling ring. I could at least tell what was happening when the spider goddess Arachne had sex with Peter Parker – all those legs! What this production feels like is a not very good Cirque du Soleil show.
All that flying over the audience in a Broadway house is kind of scary, and I don’t mean scary-good. Near the end of act one my show was stopped when Spider-Man’s cables got twisted, leaving a really pissed off Green Goblin suspended somewhere above the center orchestra and ad-libbing curses to the patrons below. They weren’t in rows O and K. At intermission an usher whispered to me that roughly one show a week is being stopped for technical problems, then he flashed a conspiratorial smile suggesting that witnessing today’s mishap was my good fortune. Similar smiles may have been seen in the Roman Coliseum.
In the ending I saw, which I understand is multiple iterations removed from the first preview many months back, Arachne finds redemption by freeing Mary Jane from her silk cocoon prison, enabling her and Peter Parker to unite in love, accompanied by Bono’s lyric, “And you can rise above yourself.” That ending has probably been banished to a garbage-web by now.
In the interest of balanced reporting, I must say that the woman sitting next to me, who had come in on the train that day just to see the show, liked it. A LOT. She also said she was able to follow the story. (Had I more time I would have asked her to please explain it to me.) Glenn Beck loves the play too. So what do I know?
I wish Julie Taymor, the play’s director as well as co-writer of the book, and all her team best wishes for this ambitious show. At this point I’m afraid a miracle may be required.
