No Strings Attached

Posted By Kathleen David on December 19, 2010

Peter and I went to see the Spiderman musical last night having scored tickets through the Marvel House seats lottery. I am a big fan of Julie Taymor going further back than most people. I found her work during my time at the Center for Puppetry Arts and was amazed and impressed by it. I am a fan of U2 since my brother Sean introduced me to them right before they hit it big in the USA. I am a Spiderman fan as well. So we have three things that I really like combined into one show.

And it is both amazing and spectacular. The casting is solid. The costumes and sets are great fun and harkens back to comics with all the weird angles that Ditko so seemed to love. The flying will take your breath away. The two things that bothered me were the book and the libretto, which are kind of big things when you go see a musical.

Julie Taymor out did herself with the visuals to the piece. Yeah, I know that there has been a lot of grousing about the look of the Green Goblin and what is up with Swiss Miss but that is seeing static pictures of costumes that when they move bring a whole new dimension to the piece. The set was another player in the drama. I loved the angles and creating spaces that have been seen in comics for years but never realized in 3 dimensions. I especially like what I am currently called the Chrysler Building effect.

The Goblin looks great and is played to the hilt by Patrick Page. I have no idea why Osborne is talking with a Texas twang but it worked for me. I think he was my favorite of the cast although Michael Mulheren did a kicking job as J. Johan Jameson. Jennifer Damiano did very well as Mary Jane and Reeve Carney did fine as Parker/Spiderman. They had some good dynamics going and looked the part. At times they were a little flat but then we are talking comic book characters.

And puppets. There were lots and lots of puppets, some blatant and others rather subtle. As a puppeteer, I was mightily impressed by both the puppets and the operators. I had never though of using a wall as a puppet but it works.

The first act has it together. The piece flows and the visuals serve the narration. The problem is in the 2nd act where they can’t decide which way they want this to go. It is neither fish nor fowl and suffers from it. The end is a bit of a morass and had Peter and I discussing what we thought the ending was on our trip home. It is the second act that they are still working on including the ending which has pushed back the opening again to almost a year after it was suppose to open. But there are flashes of brilliance in the mishmash. Arachne and Peter have a dream sequence that is going to haunt me for the rest of my life. The image is so strong.

And then there is the music. I really like U2 and there were a number of songs in there I liked but there were even more that I had slight problems with including (and this is not the song writers fault) hearing the vocals over the band. There seem to be some real trouble hitting that magical balance between the level of the music and the vocals so you can hear what is being sung. And they do test the singers by putting them in positions that I don’t think have ever been sung from. The two songs that I really liked were “Bouncing off the Walls” and the signature song of the show “The Boy Falls from the Sky”. “DIY Word” was fun and silly in a sinister way. And ‘Behold and Wonder’ was pretty amazing visually but I lost parts of the song to the music being louder than the singers. Mary Jane has some good songs but in the end they seem pretty much the same and don’t quite fit in, for me, to some of the other songs. They need to decide what the musical theme is going to be. They are trying for too many styles in too little time. Once I think I have a grasp on it, they shove a song in that is rather discordant with what I had heard before.

Overall I am glad that I saw it even in previews. You can see the money on the stage and in the effects. I am hoping they can sort out the 2nd act to bring it up to the level of the first act. It is worth it? Depends. For me it was.

I am grateful that I did see Spiderman: Turn off the Dark.

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