BROADWAY REVIEW 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' Plays on Broadway at the Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St. Call 877-250-2929 or visit ticketmaster.com.
NEW YORK -- "Spidey 2.0," as the once-pretentious, hitherto-arty, forever-costly musical called "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" is now colloquially known, is quite startlingly different from the disastrous original incarnation of the comic-book musical that humbled Bono and The Edge and ate Julie Taymor alive.
Given the limited amount of fix-'er-up time, and the depths of incoherence from which this show had to rise, 2.0 is a remarkable achievement for those who have toiled for coherence and a measure of absolution in this dangerously tangled web. For all the abiding limitations, clashing sensibilities and thudding holes, it should, for the record, be noted as such. And if you were the one writing those big checks and hoping against hope that something Vegas-popular, London-duplicable, family-friendly and appealing to Gotham tourists who don't speak a lick of English would emerge from the biggest heap of theatrical mishegoss since the Astor Place Riot in 1849, you would be breathing a sigh of relief as that opening-night curtain rang down Tuesday.
So let's summarize the changes since I (and several other critics) last saw this show in February and since a new writer, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, and a new "creative consultant," Philip William McKinley, joined the grim party. (Bono and The Edge did not have to suffer the indignities of score doctors, although that would not have been a bad idea, and Taymor retains credit as director and writer, with Glen Berger also keeping his name on the truly catastrophic book he originally wrote with Taymor.)
You can now track the story with ease, which for a musical about a comic-book hero, as distinct, say, from a Chekhovian malcontent, is a good thing. Gone are the endless series of meta-theatrical frames.
They're on the same ignominious slag heap as the nerd chorus who once served most to confuse.
Instead, you now get to know a moody science geek named Peter Parker (Reeve Carney), witness the way he gets bullied by other kids, see him fall for a pretty girl named Mary Jane (Jennifer Damiano), understand how he gets special powers from an escaped mutant spider after he visits Dr. Osborn's lab, appreciate that he wants to use his status for good, watch him fight the Green Goblin (Patrick Page) and the self-aggrandizing proprietor of the Daily Bugle (Michael Mulheren), negotiate the pull of Mary Jane versus the pull of saving the world, and eventually decide that Spider-Man is well-positioned, unlike the rest of us nerds, to have it all. It ain't rocket science or the Metropolitan Opera, but at least it's clear.
Arachne, the spider that once dominated this show as Patti LuPone dominated "Gypsy," has been relegated to a little charming mythic underpinning, a smidgen of goddesslike inspiration and parental encouragement. She's now a bit like Mufassa in "The Lion King." And she no longer sings about her shoes. Because, as Taymor and Berger so spectacularly failed to appreciate, we didn't care about her shoes. Or her.
Taking a cue from those pesky early reviews, Aguirre-Sacasa and McKinley focus relentlessly on the simple love story that we might actually care about, dialing back most digressions and replacing them with a variety of audience-pleasing amusements.
You could have seen 1.0 and completely missed any and all webs. Now the sticky stuff comes to you in your seat. The more dangerous stunts have been axed but the motion amped up, the crowd-pleasing flying comes off without an obvious hitch (at Friday's press show at least), and "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" generally takes its place as a mainstream, high-tech, megabudget entertainment. There were promgoers not far behind me Friday, lapping it up like a new downloadable app.
But it's not entirely accurate or fair to say that Aguirre-Sacasa and McKinley merely went for the lowest common denominator. It's only partly accurate. Page's Green Goblin and Mulheren's editor Jameson are actually less cartoonish now -- they're more likable villains (another good thing), and Page looks to be having a little fun. He deserves it.
The score, of course, remains unsatisfying. Especially its ballads. In fact, its theatrical limitations are even more glaring now that the rest of the show has been retooled. Aside from the songs "Rise Above" and "A Freak Like Me" (which starts the second act off with some wit and unity), the melancholy, repetitive, climax-free music mostly feels out of sync with the zippier material -- which has now shrewdly taken on much self-aware humor, further pushing it away from the score. The Green Goblin now announces himself as a kind of "Green Goblin 2.0," the result of a multimillion-dollar redo, and wryly pokes fun at millions spent and the scores of newspaper gossips kept in full foam by flailing stuntmen.
That's inevitable, I suppose. Taymor tried to turn "Spider-Man" into an art piece in a bubble inside her own head -- a high-end meditation that probed the mythic roots of our cultural heroes and that wanted to offer nothing that was easy. It did not work because (among many other well-documented issues) there simply was no center to the hubristic and relativistic onion built by Taymor and Berger (who was the wrong kind of partner for Taymor, taking her only further to the edge, and I don't mean The Edge). No Broadway show thrives without an honest, accessible core that can be affixed to a marquee.
The original vision is gone now. Almost all Taymor's signature scenes are either cut back or rejiggered as little visual diversions from the story, as distinct from the story itself. There are a couple of exceptions: Her idea for multiple Spider-men still works quite terrifically, and there are fleeting moments of beauty and genuine progressive invention. Still, I don't think "Spidey 2" will win the belated love of Broadway's chattering classes, but then they don't love comics as a rule.
For those who do -- or those for whom flying around to impress a girl and save the world sounds like a Saturday night of all Saturday nights -- Broadway now has an efficient, very expensive, very new comic-book musical with cool effects, some amusements, a brooding hero in Carney, a somewhat shellshocked but spunky heroine in Damiano, and, I predict, a line out the door for a good long while. And, of course, pending clones.
Bono and The Edge are stuck back in the prior show. Taymor will peer out from the seats and see shards of her vision. But that's all ancient history. Just ask Arachne.