This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Blog reader Steve Johnson wrote a guest blog post about the new "Spider-Man" musical on Broadway, and here is his post. I appreciate it, and encourage others to do the same, because I can't be everywhere, and I love to hear about other people's experiences with and reviews of music.
Remember Spider-Man? He's coming back. And he's dancing. In the summer of 2007, a branch of physics known as "demoleculization" was introduced to the world. Demoleculization scientists have such a mastery over their experiments and their NASA-grade facilities, that any sort of visual monitoring would be overkill. This field of study was discovered by the rest of us when a felon fell into their sand pit and was demolecularized into Sandman, the super villain. That, of course, happened in Spider-Man 3. Spoiler alert: Sandman got away. After going to the trouble of building a demoleculizer, I would have demolecularized a piñata, or maybe a rack of lamb, anything besides sand. I would have also insisted on a camcorder, walls, and a roof. Clearly I do not possess the stone-cold composure required of a demoleculologist. What I'm saying is that "Spider-Man 3" was awful. The characters were flat. When the Green Goblin floats up to Mary Jane Watson on his hoverboard and reveals himself to be her ex-billionaire-boyfriend, she is so jaded by her big, big life that she reacts not with shock, but kinda like, you know, with annoyance and stuff. The rules were inconsistent. Despite Peter Parker's spidey sense allowing him to cheat death with lightning quickness, he doesn't pick up on a meteorite as it crashes a few yards behind him. Mary Jane's potent feminine charms must have been at work. The plot was contrived. They used the two laziest plot devices in the pantheon of bad storytelling: amnesia and coincidence. Now we can accept that the boy bitten by the magic spider lives in the same neighborhood with the highest-per-capita concentration of mad scientists. But by the end of part 3, the coincidentals are piled up higher than a Dagwood sandwich: Sandman just happens to be the guy who really killed Ben Parker. Peter Parker just happens to be lab partners with the same young lady who happens to be the daughter of the police captain on the scene when she falls from a collapsing building. She also happens to be dating Parker's shutterbug nemesis who prays for Peter Parker's death in the same church where Parker happens to be peeling off his emotion-amplifying symbiot suit up in the belfry. Sheesh. Equally implausible is that a franchise that ended as badly as "Spider-Man 3" would be resurrected as a $60 million musical; the most expensive ever. Yet next February, "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" will open on Broadway. The producers are hoping you have amnesia too. There's definitely a nationwide buzz around this production, but it's the kind of curiosity that builds in a traffic jam inching toward a five-car pileup. The show promises to be a rock opera with dozens of flying sequences, including mid-air fight scenes above the audience. It'll definitely be neat, but will it be enough? Will it be worth seeing? I'll risk $8 and two hours on a movie that I'm pretty sure will stink, but $100? At first, I couldn't figure out who this show was for. It would seem that the circles of theater-goers and comic book enthusiasts create a Venn diagram with a thin, unprofitable overlap. The producers of Turn Off the Dark are betting theater fans will gush over a comic book come to life with acrobats, comic book fans will accept a version of their stoic hero as he sings out his emotional narrative supported by a dancing chorus, movie fans will pay Broadway prices for a story they've already seen three times (and a reboot arriving in 2012,) and U2 fans will come to a U2 concert without U2. "What? U2?" That's what I said when I read that Bono and The Edge were behind the show's music. Also, Julie Taymor, the Broadway veteran behind "The Lion King," is directing. "The Lion King," (which reminded us that carnivores rule, so there!) is the 10th highest grossing Broadway musical and climbing. Meanwhile U2 has three of the top-15 grossing concert tours of all time. In other words, this crew knows how to fill a venue. Don't bet against them. They might just know what they're doing. After all, audiences of extravagant musical productions tend to not notice when story complexity and character development take a back seat to the music and spectacle. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was forgotten for 30 years except by cult fans. Nonetheless "Spamalot" proved that a meandering plot with little faith to the original story can be wildly entertaining to people who never knew they cared about Monty Python. The same may be true for Spider-Man. After all, he lives in a science fiction fantasy world where any substance will combine with human tissue with either ghastly or heroic results, beautiful women dump deadly handsome billionaires for penniless goofballs, and extraterrestrial life forms can tolerate interplanetary travel but not church-bells. Given these endless possibilities just maybe "Turn off the Dark" will make it into the black.
&n