“May I trouble you to Turn Off the Dark, please?”
The conversation between live and filmed theater, which began at least as early as 1896 with May Irwin and John Rice performing their liplock from The Widow Jones for Edison’s cameras, should be a source of continuing fascination for any but the most medium-chauvinistic film lovers. This dailogue is discussed in The Classical’s recent appraisal of Eugene O’Neill/ John Frankenheimer’s The Iceman Cometh, while, upon re-viewing the corpus of Roman Polanski—who once starred in the Paris run of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus— this critic had to contemplate anew the debt the Polish director’s “Apartment Trilogy” owed to the Theatre of the Absurd generally, and Ionesco’s The New Tenant specifically.
Though a rigorous schedule of covering the ever-evolving Seventh Art keeps me from basking in the footlight glow as much as I might like to, I head theaterwards whenever the opportunity arises—though an ingrained prejudice towards film art tends to influence my ticket purchases. I not-so-long-ago watched Olympia Dukakis’s cleavage wobble its way through The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, a product of the despised 60s run of that most Hollywood-friendly of playwrights, Tennessee Williams (Milk Train was memorably filmed in 1968 by Joseph Losey as Boom!, with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Noel Coward as the Witch of Capri, making a terrific entrance). Prior to that, my last outing had been to a stage rendition of stage-cinema double-dipper R.W. Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, performed at BAM by Münchner Kammerspiele (This production suffered from much the same slackening of dramatic interest in the second half as the great Fassbinder’s rather overestimated film.)
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that I would eventually find myself waiting for the curtain to rise on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, as I found myself doing on a wet Wednesday afternoon in Row W of the Foxwoods Theatre on the Great White Way. I had a free ticket, thanks to the kindness of Zachariah Durr, a comedian, general-purpose entertainer, and occasional movie blogger whom I have in the past +1’d on Marmaduke press screenings and suchlike, and who therefore obviously owes me big time.
Spider-Man was, of course, a comic book before it became the 2002 film whose tremendous popularity assured that every Marvel property this side of Fin Fang Foom would eventually be brought to life on the silver screen, so to pay off Stan Lee’s bribes to the Grim Reaper. Prior to the 21st century Spider-Man, there had been attempts to bring Peter Parker over to live-action drama, but the results were ultimately too earthbound, unmistakably some actor hanging around in pajamas. As the conventional wisdom goes, the technology for Spider-Man hadn’t come together until Sam Raimi’s film, with its web-slinger tumbling through an intricately-mapped CGI reproduction of the canyons and peaks of Manhattan, showing all the tangled acrobatics of the Todd McFarlane-illustrated years. The same hurdle has been faced in bringing Spider-Man to Broadway: waiting for stagecraft technology to meet the challenge issued by Raimi’s spectacles, works which, comic book partisans notwithstanding, are the definitive Spider-Man texts in most eyes. That moment of technological parity was a long time coming. In point of fact, it has not come yet—hence the squalid and injury-laden history of Turn Off the Dark. None of which will, of course, turn off the marquee before the investment is recouped.
That said, as a long-standing viewer of both NFL football and boxing, two genuinely evil bloodsports that no-one with a conscience should ever stoop to watching, feigning sham moral disapproval of the recklessness behind Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is probably the wrong tack. It is a bad show, essentially, because it is a bad show.
It’s easy to see how the messianic subtext of the Spider-Man origin myth (“With great power comes great responsibility”) would appeal to songwriter Bono (seen here performing in The Nutcracker) who responded to the material by issuing a couple dozen uniformly terrible songs. I suppose my favorite was “A Freak Like Me (Needs Company)”, because it effectively marries two gay American traditions, one outgoing and proud (the musical-theater outcast anthem), one mostly furtive and repressed (superhero comics), and also because it sounded a bit like a bowdlerized Helloween song. A fellow behind me, wearing a Spider-Man hoodie, enthused that fill-in leading man Matt Caplan delivered “The best ‘Bouncing Off the Walls’” that he’d ever seen, for whatever that’s worth. The overarching “aesthetic,” supervised at one point by Julie Taymore, was a hotchpotch of Greek myth, German Expressionism, ZooTV Tour, and purposelessly grotesque costumes faintly recalling the baby-masked interrogators in Brazil, with no attempt to integrate the disparate elements towards a single effect. I sunk into a deep depression sometime in the Act II, and mostly fixated on the Piet Mondrain nail polish on the girl two seats over.
The performance perked up, however, in the climactic tussle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. The highlight was not the fight itself, which no thinking person could possibly view as anything but a reckless menace to life and limb, but rather when the Goblin’s flyline got snagged on the Chrysler Building. An announcer came over the P.A. to explain the delay. He sounded very rehearsed, almost as though this sort of thing came up several times weekly. Two stagehands with implements that looked like 40-foot long versions of those grabbers they use to get paper towels from off the top the freezer at the bodega came out to wiggle him loose. After about 10 minutes of jimmying, the freed Goblin was cautiously lowered onto the stage, at which point the P.A. piped up again: “Well, as you can imagine, the Goblin keeps chasing Spider-Man around… and then they fall in the orchestra pit… and that’s where we’re going to pick up.”
Had I, like much of the room, paid several hundred dollars for the privilege of watching actors gyroscoped around the theater, I suppose I would’ve been bitterly disappointed. As it is, I got every penny worth.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.