Broadway's Spider-Man Spins Stage Magic

Daily Telegraph

HERE'S my advice: If you trek to New York and shell out for a ticket to "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," grab a seat in the dress circle.

Sometimes that's called the mezzanine and sometimes the first balcony. For this show it's called the Flying Circle for the simple reason that it offers the best view of the truly spectacular flying effects, including the climactic airborne battle between Spidey and the Green Goblin.

The final confrontation was impressive enough for a near-capacity audience to roar its approval last week at the Foxwoods Theatre. But then this crowd roared its approval for a lot of what went on in this already legendary show.

To put it mildly, I've never seen anything like it, in a Broadway house or anywhere else. The show, whose troubled history has been exhaustively documented by the New York press, is a strange hybrid that combines elements of conventional Broadway musicals, theme-park rides and Cirque du Soleil razzle-dazzle.

Creators pursue serious artistic ambitions while dishing up spectacle designed to get the same sort of response as if you woke up one morning and saw a mastodon grazing in your backyard. At first glance you wouldn't believe your eyes, but you couldn't wait to tell your friends about it.

The show doesn't officially open until June 14, so this is not a review. The producers wouldn't like that. This is just a series of impressions, a gut reaction, an accounting of what I saw and heard at the 134th preview (a record, as of last week) of the biggest, fattest and most expensive Broadway musical of all time.

We don't really need to go over the show's troubled history - the cast injuries, technical problems and the departure of director Julie Taymor, who helped write the book and developed the piece from its inception. What matters now is what the show is and what it's likely to be when it officially opens.

What it is, much to my amazement, is entertaining. Vastly entertaining. Yes, it's an example of bloated excess and insists on seeking meaning in the fantasy adventures of a character created almost 50 years ago for comic books printed on cheap pulp. But the show in performance answers a question that I've heard repeatedly: How on earth could you spend $65 million on a Broadway musical?

The answer is simple: By doing things in a theater that nobody in his or her right mind has ever attempted.

Like all the flying. Like having maybe a half-dozen performers play the title character at different times. Like George Tsypin's brilliant, forced-perspective scenic design that emulates the art of Marvel comic books. And Eiko Ishioka's mind-blowing costumes that seem to bring the Sinister Six - Carnage, Electro, Swiss Miss, et al - to life in three dimensions. This is a show with a thousand moving parts.

All of which might suggest that this is a show swallowed up by special effects. But strangely enough, it also happens to be an actor's show.

Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man) is a charming performer with a terrific rock voice. But the real star of the show is Patrick Page, who seems to be having the time of his life as scientist Norman Osborn, who becomes the Green Goblin.

Page is an accomplished stage actor - he appeared at what was then Missouri Repertory Theatre twice in the 1990s, in "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Deputy" - who chews this show's formidable scenery with gusto and finesse. It's tough for any actor to relax into a show as laden with special effects as this one, but Page looks like he belongs there.

He has some of the show's funniest lines, including an aside about the production's gargantuan cost, and he makes the most of a bit in which the Goblin tries by telephone to get through to the editor of the Daily Bugle, only to be frustrated at every turn by a labyrinthine menu.

The show also has fun at the expense of the Fourth Estate. Michael Mulheren registers a nice comic performance as Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson, who at every turn is just wrong, wrong, wrong in his assumptions about the biggest story in his life - a superhero defending his city against a host of supervillains.

At one point he even utters the words so often spoken by real newspaper journalists in the age of the internet and the 24/7 news cycle: "We're dinosaurs!"

Philip Wm. McKinley was chosen to take over the show after Taymor's departure. She now receives credit for the "original direction," and McKinley is identified as a "creative consultant."

Based on reports and unauthorized reviews by frustrated critics who got tired of waiting for the show to open, it's my guess that the new "Spider-Man" is a lighter, less pretentious affair than it may have been early on. The producers brought in playwright/screenwriter/comic-book writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa to punch up the original book by Taymor and Glen Berger, and McKinley has always demonstrated a shrewd instinct for giving the public what it wants.

The original version included Arachne, a mythological character dreamed up by Taymor to become a competitor with sweet little Mary Jane Watson (Jennifer Damiano) for the attentions of Peter Parker. But Arachne (played by T.V. Carpio) has been transformed into a benevolent figure, a sort of guardian spirit who watches over Peter - and whose presence seems largely irrelevant to the narrative.

And then there's the music. The songs by Bono and the Edge took their knocks from some of the critics who reviewed the show early, but I have to say this score includes some of the most effective songs I've encountered in a rock musical. There are times when Carney is in full voice that you can close your eyes and easily imagine Bono singing these tunes.

There's a whole of team of arrangers, orchestrators and music supervisors, and now and then the arrangements threaten to swallow up the songs. And listening to the cast recording, when it eventually becomes available, might not convey just how well the songs work amid all the humor and visual spectacle. But we'll see.

I can say this: All the music, projections, lighting effects, aerial stunts, trap doors and elevators conspired to create images in this writer's memory that won't fade away anytime soon.

If You Go:

"Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" resumed previews on May 12 and took in almost $810,000 in the first five performances. That's in line with weekly grosses of between $1.3 million and $1.5 million before the show was rewritten. And that means that even with its problems, "Spider-Man" was a hot ticket and apparently will remain so. Tickets are $76.50 to $314 at Ticketmaster.com, 800-745-3000. The show will officially open June 14 at the Foxwoods Theatre in New York.

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