wow... Charles Spencer from The Telegraph has written a pretty scathing one-star review... Patrick Page's improvisation made me chuckle i have to say... plus i find the comment about the lack of humour throughout the show very worrying too...
Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark - the not-so-super hero of Broadway
After the official press night of a troubled musical based on the classic Marvel comic book is postponed - yet again - The Daily Telegraph's theatre critic loses patience and buys a ticket to find out whether the show is as bad as they say. The answer: Yes, it is.
Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark
Foxwoods Theatre, New York
Never mind turning off the dark. I spent much of this dreadful new musical muttering Please, Lord, make it stop.
And sometimes, miraculously, it did. Though the show has been previewing since last November, and audiences are being charged almost $300 for a top price ticket, the performance I saw on Saturday night twice ground to a halt in the first half. "Sorry folks, just a moment and we'll be back with you," a harassed voice announced over the public address system as the chief villain of the piece, the Green Goblin, dangled helplessly over the audience for several minutes, stuck on the wire on which he was supposed to be flying.
Just a few minutes earlier he and Spidey had to improvise to fill another hiatus as something else went wrong and the show was stopped. Spider-Man poured himself a glass of stage champagne only to receive a stern warning from the goblin. "Careful," said the actor Patrick Page. "You've got to fly over the heads of the audience and I hear they dropped a few," he joked in a reference to the accidents that have bedevilled this production, landing several actors in hospital with serious injuries. It was, by some distance, the most entertaining moment of the entire show.
After numerous postponements, Spider-Man still doesn't officially open until next month, but theatre critics are now breaking the embargo, deciding it is ridiculous not to review a show that has already been running for more than two months, and is doing huge business at the box office.
Technical hitches aside, there is no time to make major improvements now, and the musical strikes me as being beyond salvation.
The director Julie Taymor, who was responsible for the hugely enjoyable stage version of Disney's The Lion King, has come up with a dire script in collaboration with Glen Berger. Not only does she drag the ancient Greek myth of Arachne into the storyline, a brilliant weaver who was turned into a spider by the goddess Athena, she has also added a Geek Chorus (geddit?) of nerdy comic-book fans who are supposed to be making up the narrative as the show progresses. As a result the production often seems both baffling and pretentious. We are a long way here from the guilty pleasures of the Marvel comic-books and the terrific Spider-Man movies.
There's a leaden lack of humour about most of the script, and though the flying sequences are exciting when they work (and even more fun when they don't) there is nothing here to match the thrills, skills and sheer imagination of Cirque du Soleil at its best.
But perhaps the biggest bummer of all is the score, written by Bono and The Edge from U2, and containing not a single memorable song in the course of the show's punishing two-and-three-quarter hours. Simultaneously grandiose and banal, the music never really rocks and sounds like a series of rejected demos for an album that never got made. Sure, it creates a moody film-noir atmosphere at times, but where are the big take-home tunes?
The designs are impressive, conjuring up a dystopian vision of New York, and the cast perform as if they really believe in the dire material they are lumbered with. Reeve Carney has a winning charm and moments of real anguish as Peter Parker, the reluctant super-hero; Jennifer Damiano makes a sexy, spirited heroine as his girlfriend Mary Jane Watson and Page proves a splendidly camp over-the-top villain as the mad scientist Norman Osborn who is transformed into the even nastier Green Goblin.
Unfortunately none of their game efforts are enough to save this 65-million-dollar sinking ship, which goes down with all hands.
* One star
Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark - the not-so-super hero of Broadway - Telegraph
… And of course those guys who aren’t able to give a better analysis of a piece of art would like us to believe that they are qualified to know what should be changed or have been done in the first place? Well I couldn’t say why I disagree with him about the music because there is nothing to comment about a so vague and superficial "review".
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You gotta love how laid back they are there, Oprah sneaking her arm around Edge & all.
:Okay, so this is Your Blue Room, the subforum devoted to band discussion. There's a board for the new album - that'd be Where The Album Has No Name, natch - Everything You Know Is Wrong, which is a more general board, and here's U2 360 Tour Cen-
) along with my girlfriend, a friend and his 9 year old son. The verdict: the adults thought the show was good (my GF described it as cool)...the child said it was awesome.
). Along with the star f###ing by Oprah and Leslie Stahl, it comes with the territory with something this big (and with the involvement of Bono, Edge and Julie T).
