Spiderman

Okay, let's see. Contusions, sub-concussive head injuries, broken wrists, broken ribs, and internal bleeding--I guess they're having some technical difficulties over at The Foxwoods Theater.

Let's just say that Spiderman is having far bigger than technical problems. The whole thing is so jaw-droppingly bad it is mystifying. The book goes so wrong it's hard to even know what to say (why did they change it at all?). And the score just doesn't fit the show it was written for. The whole thing is a hot mess. When the curtain came down for intermission my daughter turned to me, her face seemed to have gone numb, "They gotta get somebody in here" she said.

But who are they going to get? Nobody is going to come fix a Julie Taymor production. As they say--not gonna happen. You get a huge talent like that, and you take the good with the bad. They bring us new ways to see. New ways to feel. But they are not typically open to a whole lot of "constructive criticism.".

Hey, I am a huge Julie Taymor fan. I remember hearing she had been given the job directing The Lion King, and thinking what a stroke of genius had hit Disney. And it was. The magic of her daring artistry transformed what would likely have been a bland or crass commercial production into something else, indeed: an immensely enjoyable and accessible work of art.

The opening scene of The Lion King can still bring about that joyful breeze up my spine in the remembering. The residents of the jungle arriving down the aisle to Elton John's soaring score heralded the arrival of a genuinely new experience. And the puppets. Oh my god, the puppets. Had you ever seen anything like them before? I certainly hadn't.

So when I heard she was doing Spiderman, with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge, I simply couldn't wait. What magic this time? What new realm of the imagination would she explore for us this go-round? I held my breath and waited. Alan Cumming signed on. Evan Rachel Wood would be MaryJane. All kinds of happy speculation about who would be Spidey.

Then we heard things were going wrong. First was the production cost: scheduled originally at $20 million (already the most expensive Broadway production in history) it headed skyward: $30Million, no $40Million--could it actually become a $50Million Broadway musical? Um, no. It became a $65Million Broadway musical, a sort of money-devouring juggernaut. Well, ok. So they would need to sell out The Foxwoods for three years, every night at full price, to recoup the investment. Not unheard of. Certainly Julie had done that with The Lion King; Wicked makes it look like child's play. But no one in their right mind had ever even come close to spending on a stage production, the phenomenal amounts spent on movies with worldwide reach.

But it was worse than that--we heard it wasn't very good. It wasn't taking shape. And the bloodlust filled the air. Oh, the schadenfaude. Michael Reidel in the Post could not contain himself--his column was giddy with predictions of doom. But I don't know--it's Julie Taymor for god's sake. It must be better than they say.

It isn't. Oh, the sets are sorta great. Really. The lighting is superb. And the flying is pretty damned cool. There's a scene with giant puppet heads and giant comic-style sets that is completely thrilling. In fact, I would say that the mise en scene is one of the best I've ever seen. In the service of nearly nothing.

Just a few notes about things. There is a sort of Greek chorus of comics-loving teens that set the scenes. It doesn't work. Peter Parker is played as a complete nebish rather than the stifled, repressed font of possibility he is. It doesn't work. The goddess Arachne hovers over the proceedings in completely unintelligible ways. When I saw it, in the third week of previews, the whole thing worked so little that the lead producer came out before the opening to tell us they were trying a new ending tonight. What? Three weeks into previews of the most expensive production ever, they were trying out a new ending!?! It didn't work.

Oh, well. Life upon the wicked stage.