Lights up on Spiderman (the Taymor Version): A Scathing Review
of the Scathing Reviews
By Laura Strausfeld
Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark
Music and lyrics by Bono & The Edge
Book by Julie Taymor & Glen Berger
Foxwoods Theater
213 W. 42nd St.
Tickets: (800) 745-3000
To quote one of Bono's convoluted lyrics,
"Open your irises."
Something's afoot. I paid (half) the price
of admission to enjoy a good afternoon of schadenfreude with my
kids on their spring break in March. I'm an (off-off Broadway)
theater director and admit to admiring Julie Taymor enormously.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't have been happy to see evidence of
her Icarus moment. (No one's yet offered me a $70 million-dollar
directing budget.)
But what I saw--in scene after scene--was
Taymor's genius and the glaring injustice of the reviews I'd read
(most notably Ben Brantley's) and of Taymor being fired by the
shows' producers. On that point, the show was packed and the audience
appeared to love it. Were they blaming Taymor for the boatloads
of money they were making before the show closed for retooling?
If you're reading for a now moot recommendation,
you have it. Spiderman was a phenomenal theater experience--despite
the unconscionably horrible music and lyrics. My ten-year-old
son had his fingers in his ears for the entire second half. The
songs, without exception, weren't just unsingable and unmemorable;
they were unlistenable. That only elevates Taymor further in my
estimation, not only as an artist, but as a human being--or perhaps
as a businesswoman. If I'd been in her web, I would've brought
Bono down with me. But as far as I know, she hasn't publicly stated
the truth of her directorial dilemma: she was given music that
bites.
Every character who crooned in the show
became Bono, which means he or she was obtuse and megalomaniacal.
The main anthem--"Rise Above," sung by Spidey near the end (it
opened with the typically pretentious lyric: "When the ones who
run the firehouse / Are the ones who start the fire…")--made it
explicit: Bono is Spiderman. It wasn't a surprise, then,
that Spidey sang this to the character with whom Taymor was most
identified. That would be the mythological Arachne. One of her
very unfortunate James Cameronesque lines was, "I'm the greatest
artist living today." Arachne, like Taymor, did rise above the
fray in the end--by killing herself off to spare Spidey. It was
all too rich. When the female ensemble members reacted to the
Daily Bugle editor's persistent refrain that Spiderman
wasn't any good, they were practically beseeching the audience
to take note: "How can the Times' say this sucks when
we're sitting here having such a good time?"
From what I understand, Taymor took on
the hubristic task of reinventing the modern musical. Who among
us, with a budget of $70 million, would do otherwise? I can't
say she succeeded wholesale, but she did create the most visually
imaginative show I've ever seen on Broadway. The opening image--of
six swinging women weaving a tapestry that spans the entire stage
from top to bottom--was itself worth the price of admission. From
the foreshortened desks in the next scene, to the endless play
of scale and perspective throughout, the show wasn't just visually
captivating; it was enlightening. Like great art, it made us see
how we see. (The second act, I will concede, was video-heavy and
less interesting than the first, and I did wonder if that was
because 1) Taymor ran out of steam, or time, or 2) Bono's second-act
music was so much more wretched than the first that Taymor just
gave up.)
Which all leads to the question of what's
afoot--or rather, afoul? I saw Das Rheingold at the Met
last fall, mainly for Robert Lepage's beastly set, which reputedly
cost $16 million. No one's tallied the cost of the Met's entire
production, which might be at least twice that for a much shorter
run than Spiderman has already had. Nor has anyone broken
down Spiderman's budget to see, for instance, how much
of it was really Taymor's to play with. I don't mean to denigrate
Lepage. I do mean to wonder, however, if he would have been canned
had Spiderman been his baby.
I confess to not knowing much about Bono
before seeing Spiderman. I've respected his social activism
but found him embarrassingly humorless next to Springsteen at
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert on TV last year. Aware
now that he perceives himself a superhero, I would want to ask
him to "rise above" himself and resuscitate his Spiderman
collaborator publicly. I would applaud a new ending to this debacle:
Arachne, aka Taymor, doesn't die in the end. . . . And maybe a
few new and decent musical numbers.
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