Theater News

Spidey on Broadway

With a record 66 preview performances, the hype surrounding this expensive production has somewhat ruined it before it officially opens.  The show was suppose to open on the 7th, instead it has been pushed back to March, but that did not stop the critics.  They had nothing nice to say today and it has taken over the blogisphere.   It has been called by some to be the worst musical of all time proclaiming the music, by Bono and Edge from U2, forgettable. Acclaimed director Julie Taymor and the U2 crew are defending the project by saying changes are still in the works and any critic is invalid.

Here are the reviews, if you don't have time to read them all click here to watch quick video of highlights

New York Times: “The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from “How can $65 million look so cheap?” to “How long before I’m out of here?”

New York Post: “A snowballing budget, broken bones, a concussion, multiple delays, rewrites — and what do we get? An inconsistent, maddening show that’s equal parts exciting and atrocious.”

New York Daily News: “Except for the anthem ‘Rise Above,’ songs by Broadway rookies Bono and the Edge of U2 lack hooks to make them stand out. As if written in invisible ink, tunes are there and then slip from your mind.”

Newsday (subscription required): “When I saw the show in December, the story was scattered, the music shockingly mediocre. But Taymor’s stage pictures were amazing, and the flying was fun in a dumb, circus-y way. With the composers due back from their tour and safety issues more or less solved, it seemed likely that the show could be pulled together into an unusual, if not important, entertainment hybrid Taymor calls a ‘rock and roll circus drama.’ Yet, the show I saw Saturday night was the same bloated, muddled, often beautiful mess it was before all this supposed ‘work.’”

New York magazine: “It’s by turns hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar. But never, ever boring.”

Bloomberg: “After all this expenditure of talent and money, ‘Spider-Man’ is probably unfixable because too much has gone into making humans fly, which is not what they are good at. It imitates poorly what the ‘Spider-Man’ movies do brilliantly with computer graphics — and without putting live actors in jeopardy.”

Chicago Tribune: “The much-told woes of ‘Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark’ boil down to a problem that has similarly ensnared far humbler new musicals: an incoherent story. For without a book with consistent rules that a mainstream audience can follow and track, without characters in whom one can invest emotionally, without a sense of the empowering optimism that should come from time spent in the presence of a good, kind man who can walk up buildings and save our lousy world from evil, it is all just clatter and chatter.”

Hollywood Reporter: “There’s one thrillingly beautiful image about ten minutes in — during a song appropriately titled ‘Behold and Wonder’ — as aerialists suspended from saffron-colored sashes weave an undulating fabric wall that fills the stage. And the impressive speed and agility of the flying sequences is a major leap forward in action terms from the slow glide of ‘Mary Poppins.’ But mostly, Spider-Man is chaotic, dull and a little silly. And there’s nothing here half as catchy as the 1967 ABC cartoon theme tune.”

Los Angeles Times: “To revise a handy little political catch phrase, ‘It’s the storytelling, stupid.’ And on that front, the failure rests squarely on Taymor’s run-amok direction.”

Variety (subscription required): “The performers are somewhat smothered by effects. Jennifer Damiano, late of ‘Next to Normal,’ stands out as the embattled heroine; Matthew James Thomas, on as standby to leading man Reeve Carney, was perfectly likable. Otherwise, only Michael Mulheren manages to break through the material.”

Washington Post: “What’s apparent after 170 spirit-snuffing minutes in theFoxwoods Theater — interrupted by the occasional burst of aerial distraction — is that director Julie Taymor, of ‘The Lion King’ fame, left a few essential items off her lavish shopping list:

1. Coherent plot
2. Tolerable music
3. Workable sets

To be sure, Taymor has found a way to send her superhero soaring above the audience. And yet, the creature that most often spreads its wings in the Foxwoods is a turkey.”