After a long preview, Bono and the Edge's musical is finally on stage, writes PETER MARKSin New York
WHEN LAST we left Spidey, boy, oh, boy was he in a pickle. Rampaging super-villains are one thing – they come with the territory. But those reviews! Holy clock-cleaning!
So Spider-Man’s big Broadway -support team hunkered down to figure out how to wrestle with this new cosmic kind of archenemy: Call him Mr Expecting-the- Semblance-of-a-Comprehensible -Musical.
In the aftermath, scenes were tossed, numbers rearranged, people jettisoned. (That's you, Gen Taymor!) And now, after a six-month "preview" period replete with saturation news coverage, high-wire accidents, pre-emptive critic attacks, legal sabre-rattling and major rewrites, the $70 million (or maybe even $75 million) Spider-Man: Turn Off the Darkhas executed the one daring step that some predicted it would never take.
It opened.
What swings from the rafters, springs from the wings and bursts from the stage floor of the Foxwoods Theatre is a definite upgrade from the flailing behemoth on view in February, when I and a bunch of other reviewers, tired of the delays, took a gander at what director Julie Taymor had wrought.
Still, in the story set to rock music by Bono and the Edge – of meek Peter Parker’s acquisition of spidery agility and subsequent battle royal with the dastardly Green Goblin – this effects-driven musical is still situated a wide canyon’s distance from good.
For all its reliance on mechanistic marvels, the show still lacks what used to be worked out for a musical with a pencil and some paper: a persuasive argument for what Spider-Man has to sing about. Fly around the theatre as he might (along with several stuntmen in Spidey costumes), the character is emotionally static. And so even in its incrementally surer form, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Darkcan't shed the sensation that it would find a more suitable base of operations somewhere like Coney Island.
The improvements that have been made are to the evening's logical progress. You can't go so far as to declare that Spider-Manhas found its voice, but at least now you can understand what it's saying.
Banished are the protracted distractions created by secondary bad guys, the irritating asides by the so-called “Geek chorus”, the jaw-dropping excesses of pretension, such as the gaggle of multi-legged spider-ladies dancing in high heels stolen from New York shoe stores.
Bono and the Edge’s score doesn’t reverberate this time around with any more theatrical joy or wit.
On the plus side, however, the whole enterprise is now about 20 minutes shorter.
Getting less, in this case, feels like a bonus. – ( Washington Post service)