Critics have taken things into their own hands and attended (unofficially) what was to have been the opening night of Spider-man: Turn off the Dark instead of the currently announced 15 March opening. The 7 February date was in itself a postponement from an earlier opening night. After all the ungenerous Twitter and blog buzz, the professional critics have been no kinder. Here's what the first-off-the-mark critics have to say:
The Worst …
Ben Brantley, New York Times
I'm not kidding. The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from “How can $65 million look so cheap?” to “How long before I'm out of here?”
Charles Spencer, The Telegraph
There's a leaden lack of humour about most of the script, and though the flying sequences are exciting when they work (and even more fun when they don't) there is nothing here to match the thrills, skills and sheer imagination of Cirque du Soleil at its best.
But perhaps the biggest bummer of all is the score, written by Bono and The Edge from U2, and containing not a single memorable song in the course of the show's punishing two-and-three-quarter hours.
David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
But an underwhelming score is the least of the show's worries. What really sinks it is the borderline incoherence of its storytelling.
Jeremy Gerard, Bloomberg
After all this expenditure of talent and money, “Spider- Man” is probably unfixable because too much has gone into making humans fly, which is not what they are good at. It imitates poorly what the “Spider-Man” movies do brilliantly with computer graphics — and without putting live actors in jeopardy.
Peter Marks, The Washington Post
Story-wise, “Spider-Man” is a shrill, insipid mess, a musical aimed squarely at a Cub Scout demographic. Looking at the sad results, you're compelled to wonder: Where did all those tens of millions go?
Charles McNulty, The LA Times
So much emphasis has been placed on the technological hurdles, the notion that “Spider-Man” is trying things that have never been attempted before in a Broadway house. What sinks the show, however, has nothing to do with glitches in the special effects. To revise a handy little political catch phrase, “It's the storytelling, stupid.” And on that front, the failure rests squarely on Taymor's run-amok direction.
Scott Brown, New York Magazine
I saw the show on Saturday night, and found it predictably unfinished, but unpredictably entertaining, perhaps on account of this very quality of Death Star–under–construction inchoateness. Conceptually speaking, it's closer to a theme-park stunt spectacular than “circus art,” closer to a comic than a musical, closer to The Cremaster Cycle than a rock concert. But “closer” implies proximity to some fixed point, and Spider-man is faaaar out, man. It's by turns hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar.
Mark Shenton, The Stage
And the sound of laughter, which is in short supply in the show itself, is otherwise being provided by the show's multiple mishaps: at the Saturday matinee I saw, the bank robbers goofed and ad-libbed when the show stopped just as they were making their appearance, to ripples of amusement (and some bemusement) around me; as the person sat next to me said, “It felt like the only authentic, organic moment in the show.
Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News
What I saw is a big production going in too many directions and in need of a lot of work to make it entertaining, satisfying and understandable.
Chris Jones, The Chicago Tribune
The much-told woes of “Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark” boil down to a problem that has similarly ensnared far humbler new musicals: an incoherent story. For without a book with consistent rules that a mainstream audience can follow and track, without characters in whom one can invest emotionally, without a sense of the empowering optimism that should come from time spent in the presence of a good, kind man who can walk up buildings and save our lousy world from evil, it is all just clatter and chatter. Delayed openings, physical changes, fresh flying sequences, the toil of dedicated performers and even new musical numbers from U2's Bono and The Edge, no less, cannot fix what should have been solved long before any human performer left the safety of the ground.
… and the Best
Charles Spencer, The Telegraph
The designs are impressive, conjuring up a dystopian vision of New York, and the cast perform as if they really believe in the dire material they are lumbered with. Reeve Carney has a winning charm and moments of real anguish as Peter Parker, the reluctant super-hero; Jennifer Damiano makes a sexy, spirited heroine as his girlfriend Mary Jane Watson and Page proves a splendidly camp over-the-top villain as the mad scientist Norman Osborn who is transformed into the even nastier Green Goblin.
David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
There's one thrillingly beautiful image about ten minutes in — during a song appropriately titled “Behold and Wonder” — as aerialists suspended from saffron-colored sashes weave an undulating fabric wall that fills the stage. And the impressive speed and agility of the flying sequences is a major leap forward in action terms from the slow glide of Mary Poppins.
Jeremy Gerard, Bloomberg
The best thing about “Spider-Man” remains George Tsypin's sets, a giddy-making color-saturated mash-up of bold comic-strip tableaux and ingenious, perspective-altering views of the Chrysler building, a teeny subway train, a threatening city schoolyard.
Charles McNulty, The LA Times
The biggest shame in all of this is that the leads — Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker/Spider-Man, and Jennifer Damiano, who plays Peter's love interest, Mary Jane — are utterly captivating. Their appealing sensitivity, however, is no match for the machine they're trapped in. Forget about the snarling threats of the Green Goblin (Patrick Page decked in a verdant, plasticky getup that would seem obvious even for a Halloween parade) — the real villainy is Taymor's overreaching desire to top herself.
Scott Brown, New York Magazine
Yet even in the depths of Spider-man's certifiably insane second act, I was riveted. Riveted, yes, by what was visible onstage: the inverted Fritz Lang cityscapes, the rag doll fly-assisted choreography, the acid-Skittle color scheme and Ditko-era comic-art backdrops. But often I was equally transfixed by the palpable offstage imagination willing it all into existence. See, Spider-man isn't really about Spider-man. It's about an artist locked in a death grapple with her subject, a tumultuous relationship between a talented, tormented older woman and a callow young stud. Strip out the $70 million in robotic guywires, Vari-lites, and latex mummery, and you're basically looking at a Tennessee Williams play.
Chris Jones, The Chicago Tribune
There is, no question, some engaging aerial work, albeit as devoid of emotional connection as everything else. Some will enjoy the Green Goblin and Spidey wrestling above one's head. There are hardworking performers. And although George Tsypin's set overall is a massively disappointing confusion of styles and shapes, there is one undeniably majestic and revealing moment when our perspective is thrillingly thrown and we see the city, racing down from the top of a skyscraper.
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.
