<<<SPOILER ALERT!>>>

Last night I went to see Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway, (from the second row, no less).  Significant controversy surrounds the show, which has provided much comedic material to the likes of Saturday Night Live and Conan O’Brian.  One reason may be the cost, coming in at over $65 million (or so, depending on who you’re listening to).  Primarily it seems to be the injuries.  Several actors and actresses have been injured during the previews, including one of the leads, Natalie Mendoza, who is out with a concussion.

But before getting to the real problems with the show, I should highlight the good parts.  (I was taught during my music degree to always note three positive things about a performance before constructively pointing out the weaknesses).  First, the engineering that went into the stage design and the aerial stunts is really quite fantastic.  Certainly, Cirque du Soleil has done more and better, but to see it all in a Broadway show is definitely out of the ordinary, and it all went off without a hitch last night, at least in comparison with previous nights.  Second, if your goal is to put a comic book on stage and still have it feel like a comic book, the show does a good job.  This was accomplished primarily through costume design, masks, and set design.  To be honest, the fancy engineering did not contribute much to the comic book feel that the cheap stuff was not accomplishing all on its own.  (I know, that’s only two, but it’s all I can come up with.  Sorry).

There is one central problem to the whole show: the storyline is incoherent.  And there is nothing that fancy tricks can do to overcome that fundamental fault.  The first half of the show sticks fairly closely to the standard tale of geeky Peter Parker getting bit by a radioactive spider and thereby receiving his super powers.  That said, right from the beginning of the show there is a character introduced who is entirely original to this production: Arachne.  Arachne is not the Marvel comic hero, but the Greek mythic figure who was once a beautiful woman with exceptional skill for weaving, but who was also prideful and so was challenged to a weaving duel by Athena, the goddess of weaving.  When Athena lost she destroyed Arachne’s tapestry, who then committed suicide in despair.  Athena took pity on her and transformed her into the first spider, doomed to weave forever in the shadows alone, inspiring not praise but fear.  (At least, this is how the show tells the tale; see Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the traditional telling).

Now here is a great idea gone terribly wrong, probably mostly lost in the details of the feats of engineering, big popular music sensations as musical songwriters, and spending as much money as humanly possible seemingly for the sheer ability to claim to have spent more than anyone else.  Why don’t we start with what should have happened, and then we can see why what actually happened is so tragic?

What are comic books and super heroes if not modern-day myths?  The purpose of the ancient myths was for moral instruction and existential self-understanding, and indeed, the modern superheroes of comic books and graphic novels seek to teach us much about who we really are and how we should live.  They are very much caricatures of us, not in the sense of missing the reality of us by highlighting superficial physical features, but in the sense of exaggerating the deepest realities of human existence.  Their hopes and fears are our hopes and fears writ large on the great cosmic canvas of the battle between good and evil.  Spiderman as a character epitomizes this interpretation of comic book superheroes as the death of his uncle Ben teaches him that with great power comes great responsibility and as he struggles to live that in the complexities of a life full of many, varied and conflicting obligations.

It should, then, be an absolutely mesmerizing move to actually conflate the stories of an ancient Greek mythic figure with a comic book superhero.  The way to do it, which the musical attempts but fails to achieve, is for the Greek mythic figure to function as an objectivation, (in the sense Peter Berger intends the term in The Sacred Canopy), of the internal existential and moral anxiety of the superhero.  This is to say that Arachne and her story of struggling to responsibly employ her weaving abilities parallels Spiderman’s story of struggling to responsibly employ his web weaving abilities.  Telling the stories and interweaving them, as the musical attempts, could really engage an audience in some serious soul searching.  For example, Peter Parker dreams of Arachne and has a dream-state love affair with her in the musical.  This causes him no small bit of anxiety in his relationship with Mary Jane Watson.  The dream-state love affair makes sense because the anxiety in his relationship with Mary Jane lies in the lies he has to tell to conceal his identity, which he feels he has to do for fear that knowing the truth would be too much for Mary Jane to handle.  He need not conceal his identity from Arachne, who shares his spider sensibility and so can handle the truth.  Loving Arachne is the easy way out, especially since she is a dream anyway.

So where does the musical go wrong?  Well, it starts when it brings Arachne out of the dream world and incarnates her in the real world.  In order for her to function effectively as an objectivation of Peter’s inner turmoil, she must remain in the dream state.  Loving her in the dream is then Peter loving that part of himself that he feels he can neither share nor fully embrace or understand.  In the real world Peter loving Arachne is just bizarre!  The other thing that needs to happen is much more time needs to be dedicated to showing the experiences out of which Peter’s deep anxiety about his existence and role as Spiderman arise, namely the death of his uncle Ben, which is partly his responsibility, and out of a real, deep and abiding love of Mary Jane.  Instead, the only interaction the musical portrays between Peter and his uncle is a fight between them, in which Peter says that Ben is not his father and never will be.  This does not evoke the deep and abiding love and friendship between Peter and Ben that makes Ben’s death such a tragedy for Peter and gives rise to the loss having such life changing and lifelong effects on him.  The relationship between Peter and Mary Jane is also portrayed as a high-school age, anxiety-ridden drama-fest, not as a real loving relationship in which Peter loves Mary Jane so much that he is afraid that the truth will hurt her and drive her away, which he could not bear.

Sadly, the musical spends much more time on the flashy technical stuff than on the less flashy but more moving aspects of the Spiderman story, the aspects that Broadway audiences go to see.  Attempting to do a movie-style summer action blockbuster in the middle of what should be a truly gripping story and an original contribution to the Spiderman genre leads to the story being entirely lost and incoherent.  Theatergoers today are not really that different than theatergoers in ancient Greece, who sought to have their existential, moral and emotional lives formed by finding themselves in the drama that was playing out before them.  Spiderman would benefit greatly from realizing this basic fact.  Less engineering; more psychology.

The ultimate inconsistency in the storyline is that at the end, when the incarnate Arachne has taken Mary Jane captive and demands that Peter return to being Spiderman in exchange for her life, Arachne suddenly recognizes in Peter’s self-sacrifice on Mary Jane’s behalf that she has violated the true love between Peter and MJ (such as it is in the musical, which is to say not much).  This recognition and Peter’s forgiveness of her are somehow supposed to free her from the punishment of immortality as a spider that Athena had meted out.  Unfortunately, they forgot to mention that this was one of Arachne’s goals at the start, so her sudden escape from her immortal existence as a spider, and then her immediate disappearance, make no sense as they have no context and do not follow from the myth as it was told.  Then Peter is supposed to return to being Spiderman, with the encouragement of Mary Jane, who apparently can handle the truth, to “go get ‘em, Tiger.”  He does a really pathetic version of a Spiderman move, and if there was any time for using all of the technics to make him take off, this would be it, but instead the stage just goes dark.  The audience is left wondering what just happened, and so it is no wonder that there is only half-hearted handclapping (at most).

All of the time they need to tell the story properly is readily available by simply cutting all of the back-story to the rise of the Green Goblin.  All we need to know, for the purposes of this interpretation of Spiderman, is that the Green Goblin is a bad guy.  Cut it all and build in some depth to the relationships among characters.  This will also provide an opportunity to rewrite much of the score, which is in desperate need of major revisions.  As much as I love Bono and U2, Broadway musical songwriters they are clearly not.  Oh, and while we’re at it, something should be done to make sure that Arachne is not constantly having to dodge her own legs as she flies around the stage and the theater.

So, if what you really want is to go see what a comic book might look like on stage, this is a great show for you.  (But wear a helmet).  If you are an actual Spiderman aficionado, an avid theatergoer, a lover of musicals, a lover of Greek drama, or merely a curious visitor to New York City who has seen all the hype and wonders what it is all about, I would highly recommend avoiding it.  Unless, of course, they manage to completely rework the show before its official opening in January, in which case it might be worth a look.  Hope springs eternal!