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Ouch! Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark 2.0 reviews NOT coming up roses for Spidey

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Aloysius J. Gleek:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/spider-man-opening-delayed-yet-again/?hp




November 4, 2010, 8:36 am
‘Spider-Man’ Opening
Delayed Yet Again
By PATRICK HEALY


A building-size banner covered the front of the Foxwoods Theater in
New York, where preparations are under way for the opening of the
“Spider-Man” musical.


The $60 million musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the most expensive and technically elaborate Broadway show in history, will delay the start of performances this month by two weeks and open in January instead of Dec. 21 because more work is needed on it, two theater executives with knowledge of the plan said Thursday.

The executives, as well as people working on or plugged into the production, described a tremendous amount of creative commotion behind the scenes in interviews this week. Flying sequences were still being developed and the music, special effects and scenes of plot and dialogue were still largely in separate pieces even though performances were originally set to begin on Nov. 14.

The director, Julie Taymor, a Tony Award winner for “The Lion King,” has spent chunks of the 11-week rehearsal period experimenting over and over with the flying stunts and other special effects rather than preoccupying herself with deadlines, those involved with the production said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they had either signed nondisclosure agreements or feared being fired if their names were published.

 The poster for the “Spider-Man” Broadway musical.The show, which has music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge of U2 (both in their Broadway debut), will now begin previews in late November and open in the first half of January. The lead producer, Michael Cohl, will set the exact dates on Thursday, the two executives said. Mr. Cohl, the other producers and the creative team are partly banking on the delay’s stirring interest in the big-budget special effects among the news media and especially theatergoers, who thus far have shown modest interest in buying tickets, according to the two executives and others involved in the production.

The show’s advance ticket sales so far total about $8 million in hard cash with an additional $2 million to $3 million in unpaid group orders – amounts that would be healthy for the standard $10 million Broadway musical, but low against the $60 million capitalization and the likelihood that the show will cost upwards of $1 million to run each week.

On Wednesday the producers and creative team were unable to present all of the two dozen flying and aerial maneuvers for safety inspectors from the New York State Department of Labor, requiring the inspectors to return before performances can begin. A department spokesman, Leo Rosales, said that the production had prepared only several of the maneuvers to demonstrate for the inspectors. The state agency must sign off on all of the sequences as safe before performances can begin.

It has opened a separate investigation, as has Actors’ Equity, into one flying maneuver in which actors are launched from the back of the stage like a slingshot. Two actors were injured performing that sequence this fall, with one breaking both wrists when he landed on the lip of the stage.

“Spider-Man” was originally supposed to have begun performances back in February, but the production shut down for months in 2009 after the original producers could not raise the money to capitalize the show, which at the time was estimated to cost around $40 million. Mr. Cohl, a prominent rock-concert promoter for U2 and other bands, came on board as lead producer a year ago and has since raised the money.

Aloysius J. Gleek:

Aloysius J. Gleek:




http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/theater/24spider.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all


'Spider-Man’ Starts to Emerge
From Web of Secrecy
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: November 23, 2010


The opening moment of the musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark."


At left, from left, the show’s creators: the composers the Edge and Bono, the director Julie Taymor
and Glen Berger, who wrote the book with Ms. Taymor.



Nine years in the making, the moment came on Saturday to try running through the first act of the new musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” without stopping. As the band struck up an ominous tune that wailed like an ambulance siren, the enormous stage curtain rose to reveal a young woman dangling under a mock-up of the Brooklyn Bridge. Above her appeared a masked man, clad in skin-hugging tights, red and blue and all-American.

We know him, but we may not know him, at least according to the musical’s creators. In their eyes, Peter Parker (and his alter ego, Spider-Man) is a character on a spiritual quest to reconcile human frailty with the possibility of greatness. It’s an idea that so enraptured the director, Julie Taymor, and the composers, Bono and the Edge, of U2, that they have built a $65 million (and counting) show around him, replete with perspective-skewing scenery and flying sequences that are unprecedented for Broadway.

“Peter Parker is the one,” in Ms. Taymor’s words, “who shows us how to soar above our petty selves.”

If he can soar, that is. Four minutes into the Act I rehearsal, a “Spider-Man” crew member announced on his mic, “We’re gonna hold.” It was the first of several pauses to deal with technical glitches, mostly in transitions between scenes. By the dinner break, only 15 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour show had unfolded. And the first scheduled performance (this Sunday at 6:30 p.m.) was just eight days away.

In the last week, the nervous creators of the show, the most expensive in Broadway history, have begun to see the hand-drawn sketches, the digitally animated videos, the comic-book-inspired costumes come to life — to see “Spider-Man” “Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning,” said Bono, leaning forward in Row A on the aisle, as Reeve Carney, playing Spidey, rehearsed onstage. “This feels like it.”

Yet time is running out.

At the creators’ last dinner on Friday night before Bono and the Edge left for a U2 tour in Australia, Bono said bluntly that the show “won’t get out of the gate” and have a chance to catch on with audiences if technical problems persist, as they have in rehearsals.

Still, he and the others did not dwell on mundane matters like flying harnesses. They are all artists who dream big, who compare the show’s themes to great literature and philosophy.

“We’re wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, ‘Wings of Desire,’ Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones — the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you’re separate from others,” Bono continued. “If the only wows you get from ‘Spider-Man’ are visual, special-effect, spectacular-type wows, and not wows from the soul or the heart, we will all think that we’ve failed.”

Achieving all those wows demands a profound double duty for Ms. Taymor, because many moments of pathos come in scenes where special effects are also in play. Slowly and only recently, she has been unveiling aspects of the show — both the story line and the effects — partly to counteract the negative press that has come with an oft-delayed and stratospherically costly production.

“Take the ending of the show,” Ms. Taymor explained. “We’re going for what will be an intimate moment, but also one that will reflect some of the technical spectacle, and we will need to figure out how to stage that.”

Bono murmured, “Figure out how to stage that?” He barked out a series of coughs for comic effect: “Nine days!” He coughed. “First preview!” Cough. “Nine days!”

Ms. Taymor said: “Oh, nice of you to say, Bono, you’re out of here in Australia, and we’ll be here strapped with this thing. I’m just gonna drink my martini, man.”

Bono observed: “The scope of this thing is just hard to grasp sometimes. It just doesn’t fit into the normal —— “

“Broadway mishegoss,” Ms. Taymor said.

“Right,” Bono said. “And trying to blend comic books — which is a very American contribution to the world of mythology — and rock music and Broadway into this thing of art that we don’t even have a word for.”

For Ms. Taymor, delaying preview performances further — they were supposed to begin on Nov. 14 — is not an option. “Delaying just costs too much money, too much money, too much money,” she said. The show is scheduled to open on Jan. 11.

Every week’s delay eats up to $2 million in lost revenue and, especially, higher expenses for technical rehearsals that require additional crew members. But Ms. Taymor said she hoped that those who bought tickets to preview performances, many of which have been offered at reduced prices, will “get to enjoy the art of making theater, as well as the magic of it.”

Ms. Taymor has shielded that magic, as well as most other details of the show, from public view for years now. In recent weeks most attention for the show has dealt with the flying sequences, which New York State safety inspectors have been evaluating (as required by law). That inspection is expected to conclude shortly.

Like the first “Spider-Man” movie, the show begins as an origin story, though Ms. Taymor has reached for Greek mythology in creating a brand-new villainess named Arachne, based on the woman who was turned into a spider by the goddess Athena and doomed to spin webs in the shadows for eternity. The introduction of Arachne (Natalie Mendoza) features some of the first breathtaking images, as a giant loom of interwoven silks takes form on the stage, and Arachne descends over the audience on a platform.

As with the human-controlled puppets in her hit musical “The Lion King” and the dreamlike sequences in her movies “Across the Universe” and the forthcoming “Tempest,” Ms. Taymor’s artistic imagination hatches to life in Arachne.

“What I really wanted to do, and what the ‘Spider-Man’ movies and comics haven’t done, is go to this absolutely fantastical, mythic place that is out of time, somewhere between reality and the dream world,” she said.

And where the fits and the starts have occurred. At the Act I run-through, as Ms. Mendoza’s Arachne began descending, her spider-legged costume came undone because of a malfunction. Ms. Mendoza was hoisted back aloft; about 20 minutes later, the scene unfolded without incident.

Such moments are the price of striving for a new sort of Broadway production, which was the high bar that the creators set for themselves at their first meeting in the winter of 2002. “We all agreed that there was no point in doing this unless it was new, groundbreaking, something that made it worthwhile for someone to see Spider-Man onstage instead of just getting the DVD for the first film,” said the Edge, U2’s lead guitarist.

At meetings at their various homes in New York, Los Angeles, Ireland, and France, the four creators began improvising dialogue, lyrics and whole scenes.

Bono, for instance, suggested that they base the character of Norman Osborn, an environmental scientist who becomes the villainous Green Goblin, on Ted Turner, the billionaire entrepreneur whose eccentricities had stayed with Bono after meeting at Mr. Turner’s rustic getaway in Georgia. “Bono described this fast-talking, always-thinking, brilliant and strange Southerner, and you’re always looking for vivid characters who will pop on the stage,” said Glen Berger, who wrote the show’s book with Ms. Taymor.

The musical’s Osborn/Goblin (Patrick Page) has the gray hair and Southern accent of Mr. Turner and shares his concerns about the environment (hence, here, the “green” angle). “I hope Ted will like it,” Bono said.

The Marvel comics became more than a source of storytelling inspiration: they contributed to clever moments in the pop-up design of the production, as when Peter Parker’s classroom at a Queens high school unfolds into view. In another sequence, in the side-by-side homes of Peter and his love interest, Mary Jane, the characters in one household freeze like two-dimensional figures in a comic book, while those in the other house interact in a three-dimensional conversation.

“Part of the balance we’ve been trying to strike is how ‘comic book’ to go and how ‘human’ to go,” Ms. Taymor said toward the end of dinner. “What helps is that of all the superheroes, Spider-Man is the Everyman. His spiritual and psychological sides give us so much to explore.”

After kissing Bono and Edge goodbye as they prepared to depart for Australia, leaving the first performances in her hands, Ms. Taymor looked at the open door that would lead back to the theater.

“Every day,” she said, “I just wish there was more time to go even deeper on the story, the acting, the ideas at the heart of the spectacle.”

Meryl:
This sounds really cool.  I don't go to musicals much, but this one sounds worth checking out!  8)

Aloysius J. Gleek:




--- Quote from: Meryl on November 23, 2010, 10:44:38 pm ---This sounds really cool.  I don't go to musicals much, but this one sounds worth checking out!  8)

--- End quote ---


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