Spiderman

Tuesday night, we went to see a Broadway show – Spiderman. A group of us went, catching dinner first at the Café Edison at the Edison Hotel. At dinner, we were talking about this show, and how it hadn’t gotten spectacular reviews. I turned to Steve, who was sitting next to me and works for the New York Daily News, and we talked about how much easier it is to write a sniping, nasty review of something rather than a good one and how unfortunate it was that people didn’t avoid that.

Turns out, I have to eat my words. Sometimes a play ends up with bad reviews because it really deserves them.  Fortunately, reviewing plays isn't my job.  I only offer opinions as someone who's paid the price of admission to a play and knows what I enjoy and what I don't.

We were supposed to go see this play when we were here before Thanksgiving, but the show had problems. Lots of them. OSHA kept shutting them down, as did the NY Department of Labor.

That can’t never be good.

Any Broadway play is expensive, but this one has exceeded all other plays and is just having a hard time getting off the ground. Because of the aerial stunts involved, they’ve had to remodel the theater substantially.

And they keep dropping the stunt men.

Not just little drops, or slips off the stage like you see on Funniest Home Videos that make people gasp and then laugh. I mean big splats from 30 feet in the air that send people to the hospital and break bones and which come with the announcement, "Please stay in your seats to allow the EMS workers clear access."

This is of substantial concern given that many of these stunts have Spiderman (there are a dozen or so of them in the show, in addition to the main character) and several other main characters swinging out over the audience. It’s not just the front rows that are in peril, either. The entire orchestra section (the lowest level of seats) are at risk.

Jokes about hard hats and sitting under overhangs were pretty prevelant. A lady behind us heard our conversation and said, “Oh, great – and I’ve put my kids out there so they could see better.” Our largely childless group pointed out that children heal quickly, but that didn’t seem to make her feel any better.

I had wondered how they were going to make an entire musical out of a comic book story. Turns out, it’s harder than you’d think. They had to cram a scant 2 hours worth of content into a 3 ½ hour performance, a feat made possible by re-using dozens of gags, props and actions from lots of other plays.

These weren’t just polite nods to prior plays, like you used to get on black and white television, a kind of tongue-in-cheek homage to classic gags and plays from the past. It was a wholesale rip-off of recycled props, lines and stunts that seemed quite obviously there to simply fill up time and space.

I will give them credit, there were lots of special effects, and some of them were pretty good even if they were recycled. Most of them functioned as expected, with the play being stopped only one time when a prop failed to work properly. At the end, a net that’s supposed to come up like a spider web got caught on something and wouldn’t function. The play was stopped for a few minutes while they worked around that.

The play isn’t officially “open” yet, so that in itself isn’t necessarily a huge issue. But it was certainly indicative of the problems they’ve had all along.

In a musical usually you come away with at least one “toe tapper”, a song that sticks with you and kind of carries you out the door. Not so with this one. It was more of a rock opera, so lots of times it was difficult to understand the words and melodies in the key of “R-flat” seemed to dominate.

The other thing was that the whole play read like more of a “Saturday Night Live” skit than a continuous story line. Lots of vignettes strung together, but without a whole lot more in common than, say, their annual Christmas show.

Oh, and IT WAS LOUD

DID I MENTION IT WAS LOUD?

REALLY, REALLY LOUD.

I like theater. I’ll sit through a train wreck and find something enjoyable about it most of the time, but I have to admit it was hard to find much redeeming about this show. The props were pretty nice – they had unique ways to get the perspective of being high above the city down although you sometimes felt like you were being stood on your head, and the effects weren’t bad, but otherwise, it just wasn’t there.

Had it been on television, I’d have changed the channel. As it was, we just sat through it thinking about how much it really did resemble a train wreck, and we just couldn’t look away.

Still, it was an experience to talk about. I can’t say that I’d recommend the show to anyone. If it were on video, I would wait until it hit the $1 bin before I bought it, and even then I might feel that I’d wasted a buck.

The company was great, though, and it created the camaraderie that comes only from enduring a common tribulation.

I’m sure we’ll be talking about it for years.