Midnight Buffet

By Becky Ferreira and Kyle McCoy

K:  It’s hard not to be excited before seeing it.  You’re sitting in the theatre, the giant image of Spider-Man and Green Goblin battling it out in the sky glows red in front of you.  Several times now, a booming voice has announced that this is an “action-packed show featuring high-flying stunts” and you can only marvel at the web of wires and cables that frame the stage.    Then the lights go down and the audience cheers.  The music ignites the scene as the bridge rises from the ground, Spider-Man on top in a single spotlight.  Then we see Mary Jane, dangling from her wrists, and she calls for help.  Spider-Man runs toward her (and us!) in slow-motion when SNAP her line is cut and she plummets.  Spidey screams out her name and the stage goes black.  Cold opening in a musical?  Awesome.

Then the lights come back up we get a trio of talkative teenage boys who are obsessed with Spider-Man and are joined by a girl in what appears to be an attempt to either retell the most amazing Spider-Man tales or come up with the best one ever.  Then the girl says, “Hey, Spider-Man wasn’t the first human spider!  Have you ever heard of Arachne?”  She then goes into this epic retelling of this Greek fable wherein Athena was beaten in a weaving contest and turned Arachne into the first spider.  And all you’re thinking is when do we get to Spider-Man?  All four teenagers are confusing in general.  At first, I thought they were just uber spider-fans, but as the scenes go on (continuously through the show) it appears they are actually creating the characters and affecting the story as they pop up with ideas of things to throw in (suits, villains, a green piano, ugh) and these things appear in the scenes. 

B: Yeah, I think “green piano” should now be a euphemism for “way over the top.” I was definitely also bubbling over with anticipation at the beginning, impressed by the cold open, and then summarily confused by the sudden and awkward switch to the kids telling (or inventing?) the Spider-Man origin story. Here’s the thing: Arachne is a great idea for a Spidey supervillain! I was stoked when I heard Taymor was diving into the mythological side, because the echoes between Greek mythology and American superheroes are endlessly fascinating to me. The Greeks used their gods to explain what science and moral philosophy couldn’t at the time (I still think the Greeks’ answer to the age old question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is the most advanced: basically they were like “shit happens randomly, and most of us aren’t purely good or bad anyway”).

Meanwhile American superheroes are born from the country’s extreme polarization – racially, politically, philosophically – which naturally lends itself to stories about people divided between benevolent hero and innocuous alter-ego.

Point being, I had a total boner for Arachne, and I thought it could bring up an awesome collision between Greek and American ideas of hubris. The Greeks were obsessed with hubris – not only Arachne, but also Icarus, Niobe, Agamemnon and countless other poor bastards are skewered by exhibiting godly confidence. And though America is famously an arrogant nation, the dominant credo among superheroes is that, to quote our Spidey, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Which is exactly what the Greeks were getting at with stories about idiotically challenging the gods to weaving contests. Exciting parallels, right?

Boy, was I expecting too much! What was frustrating was that all the pieces were in place to make this story happen. We had not only Arachne but Norman Osborn, rushed by some weird dancing military people (this scene was aggressively nonsensical), taking a huge risk by trying an experiment before it’s ready. It all goes wrong and he becomes the mangled, cartoonish Green Goblin – how much more “ancient Greek hubris story” can you get than that? But then Julie Taymor decided maybe she needed to have the kids running around making up new supervillains, and also she needed a frankly awkward scene in which Peter’s uncle is run over by a car, and also she needed for Arachne to fall in love with Spider-Man and rape (I think?) Peter in his sleep, and she also needed to have 80% of the lyrics be inaudible, and then also she needed it to all be an illusion at the end…pardon my Greek, but what the f*ck? The ending was a permutation of the played out “it was all a dream” copout. But before I go into my whole “Julie Taymor somehow played a $65 million joke on herself” theory, I want to pass it back to Kyle (who I suspect is the real Spider-Man – he’s slender, nerdy and lives in Forest Hills…suspicious, right?) for his Spidey-sense of the situation.

K:  Becky, around you, my Spider-sense is always tingling.  Unfortunately, Julie Taymor didn’t have the Spidey-sense to know what kind of show this was or who she was making it for.  This is the most expensive Broadway show in history and when Peter Parker dawns his home-made threads to hit the wrestling ring, his opponent, Bonesaw, is literally a blow-up doll.  This could be a comical bit and would actually play brilliantly in some no-budget basement production of a Spider-Man musical, but not on a huge stage when people have paid $200 a seat.  Then it comes off as embarrassing.  Especially when sandwiched between two beautifully staged rock ballads that reveal where the all money went.  This juxtaposition makes for very uneven pacing and never lets the audience get comfortable in Spidey’s world.  We go from giant tapestry threads being woven over the audience to Norman Osborn screaming “Let there be light!  You know who said that? Edison!” The Peter-obsessed Arachne hovers above his bed while he sleeps and sings “confide of me, inside of me” as confused and/or bored 10 year-olds squirm in their seats.  Mentions of the Internet and iPhones are stuck in the old-fashioned newsroom feel of the Daily Bugle, where even fan-favorite Jonah Jameson can’t be entertaining enough to make it through a libretto of exposition from his staff of reporters.

B: The trope of fast-talking reporters is so overplayed that it’s plain lazy to use it without a new take on the cliché. Jennifer Jason Lee’s hilarious performance in The Hudsucker Proxy should be the standard to which all comic representations of reporters should aspire, though Raimi’s take on Jameson was no slump either. But Taymor’s newsroom is, as you mention, anachronistic and confused. Taymor obviously wanted to highlight the “world wide web” pun, but doesn’t actually take it anywhere specific. Then there is this (babelicious) woman reporter running around in something out of Carmen San Diego’s closet, just one of many costumes that yelled “1950s!!!!” at the audience while their actual dialog was yelling “21st Century!!!”

This sense of chrono-displacement is pervasive throughout the musical. Parker dresses like the early Stan Lee version, a nerdy teenager in mid-20th Century America. But the bullies who torment him look like Griff Tannen’s retrofuturist entourage from Back to the Future II. Mary Jane looks like she just walked out of a Wes Anderson movie, the narrating kids look like early 90s grunge fans, and the Sinister Six resemble the much reviled villains of Schumacher’s Batman attempts. I’m all for pastiche and references (if that isn’t already obvious), but it has to work together to build something bigger. Taymor is uninterested in the bigger picture of her own story, and instead almost desperately throws up random themes, artistic styles, characters, plotlines and “jokes,” without ever hashing out what they are supposed to signify contextually. It comes off as her blatantly boasting about how rich and varied her own artistic toolbox is to us, her audience, and we just want to watch Spider-Man fly around, dammit!

Nowhere is her myopia more obvious than with the villains, the most essential ingredient in any superhero plot. You want to attempt to explain the free-range villainy in this musical, Kyle? I don’t know if I have it in me.

K: …The main villains in the show consist of Green Goblin (who takes up all of act one) and Arachne, who turns on Peter after he rejects her brand of eight-legged love.  Act two features Electro, The Lizard, Kraven, Carnage, Swarm (nazi-bees!) and Swiss Miss (Taymor’s own creation).  None of the act two villains have any lines or plot arcs and feel more like cardboard cut-outs than any actual threat.  They are actually introduced in what is declared to be an “ugly pageant” (instead of beauty pageant, GET IT?) where they walk down a runway platform and strike a pose.  Each is featured for only a few minutes and exists solely as something for Spider-Man to punch.  And when he has his final battle, Arachne boasts “Is it me, or are we having fun?” and the best Peter can come up with is “Hmm… let me think.  It’s you!”  THIS is the material they saved for the finale.

Which highlights another big problem: Taymor shoots off her web too early.  She shows you all of her cards as quickly as she can, leaving no surprises.  Spider-Man swings over the audience when we first meet him but never does anything more impressive than that.  Electro pops up with some sparks shooting from his hands, but that’s his one trick so the rest of his time is spent running around, waving his arms.  When Peter first wakes up with spider powers, we have the song “Bouncing Off the Walls” where he jumps from wall-to-wall-to-floor-to-ceiling of his bedroom, which looks really cool…for the first minute.  Then he just does it again.  And again.  All while instruments blare at you in an attempt to make a song and actors attempt to scream lyrics that can’t be heard.  Speaking of music, any thoughts on the tunes, Bex?

B: We have joked that it would have been a better use of U2’s time to just use songs they had already written: Parker singing to his Spidey-costume, “I can’t liiiive/ with or without you,” etc. Apart from one repeating bar that I thought was neat about people falling from the sky, I can’t remember anything from the musical. I had a song stuck in my head as we went into the theatre, and it was still stuck in my head as we exited. I mean, if you wrote a musical – as in show tunes; as in purposefully catchy songs? – you don’t want your audience to leave the theatre with fluff from four hours ago still in their brains. So I’d say Bono should continue to consider his philanthropic efforts as his proudest achievement because it certainly wasn’t this score.

As to your villain comments, I want to launch into my $65 million joke-Taymor-played-on-herself theory. Considering we are in agreement about the whole crazy, every-trope-thrown-in, Taymor-is-artistically-jizzing-all-over-our-faces quality, it’s safe to label the entire music as an epic act of arrogance on Taymor’s part. As many other reviewers have noted, she is obviously more interested in her retelling of Arachne than she is in her take on Spider-Man. It’s not hard to see that she identifies with her little Spider-Woman, and we are especially tipped off to that preference when Arachne claims, “I am the most original artist working today.”

But hold on, world! Isn’t the whole running theme of the show hubris? Both villains become dizzy with pride in their own creation – scientific in Goblin’s case and artistic in Arachne’s – and it leads to their dual downfall. 

Point being, did Taymor, riding on massive critical success from her past film and theatre work – not to mention the ego-exploding MacArthur “genius” grant –put too much stock in her own judgment at last? Has she grown fat on her patrons’ praise, as Norman Osborn and Arachne did? Did she then somehow manage to make the same mistake of arrogance even as she was detailing that mistake in her own work? And now she is paying the same price as her villains, as review after review reveals this production to be an outsized monstrosity. She mimicked the tragic flaw of her own creation. It’s so poetically just, it could almost be intentional!

If only. An artist with Taymor’s ego never tries to fail, but I think it’s amazing that the musical is a reflection of the blind spot to which her own villains fall victim. It took $65 million and a lot of green paint for Taymor to play this meta-joke on herself, a joke that she is probably not even aware she is the butt of. That’s so Taymor.

K:  Finally, plot-wise, I barely know what to say, because apparently I barely knew what was happening.  Act one is more or less the origin story, ending with Goblin throwing MJ off the bridge.  In act two, it appears Peter and MJ are now dating, without explanation, and when Peter can’t be there for her, he has a “Spider-Man: No More” injection, complete with throwing his costume into the trash.  Then, when she is kidnapped (again) Peter has to find a way to get his powers back (he lost them?).  All the while, the Sinister Six have the world under attack (but not really, it turns out to be all be illusion!).  …And I’m writing this after I’ve had a week to piece together what I think I saw. 

B: You sound like a mortified child being asked to point to where he was touched on a doll.

K: For something so loud, colorful and random, the show is actually just really boring.  Most of the time you’re waiting for scenes to end in the hope that the next one will be better.  There’s no favorite character that the audience is waiting to see again, because there’s no real “character” to any of them.  This is easily the least-inspired interpretation of Spider-Man ever created.  Not a single joke, not one melody, nor a single lyric stands out as new, memorable or enjoyable.  It’s like someone wanted to make a bowl of Spider-Man cereal, but decided to include marshmallows, frosting, honey clusters, sugar bombs, unicorn horn, rainbow shavings and glitter. 

B: Mmm…rainbow shavings.

K:  If you're hungry for a Spidey fix, pop in the DVDs.

B: Or read the comics.

K: There are comics?