superhero. Indeed, unlike Superman and Batman, who are both adored by the press, to say nothing of the civil authorities, Spider-Man instantly becomes the object of the scornful wrath of the powerful newspaper editor for whom Peter works as a photographer, and who tries to expose Spider-Man as a villain. The emphasis on Spidey’s ordinary humanness explains why this series, as opposed to a number of other superhero comics, is laden with what Kupperberg calls “heavy doses of soap-opera and elements of melodrama.”
One melodramatic element is the striking leitmotif of Peter’s guilty conscience. He feels responsible for the death of Uncle Ben; later,anguishingly, it turns out that one of his archenemies, the Green Goblin, is in fact the father of his best friend, Harry Osborn. (The elder Osborn is an industrialist tycoon who turns mad and bad when a lab experiment goes awry.) In a plotline from the early 1970s, Spider-Man is again responsible for the death of a loved one: a girlfriend dies from the “whiplash effect” that results when his webbing suddenly stops her fall from a building. He eventually goes back to an on-again, off-again love interest, Mary Jane Watson, whom he marries in the late 1980s.
This superhero’s humdrum background and tormented (but not
too
tormented) psyche are at the heart of a curiously Everyman appeal that has managed to persist through nearly five decades. Not two weeks after the September 11 attacks, Marvel Comics announced that the disaster would be treated in an upcoming
Spider-Man
series, since the angst-ridden hero from the outer boroughs was, in the words of a writer then working on the strip, “best suited” to grappling with the real-life New York crisis (many of whose victims were, as it happens, from the same socioeconomic background). It’s noteworthy, in light of this, that the producers of the recent series of Hollywood adaptations chose the actor Tobey Maguire—elf-faced, funky, a bit unprepossessing—to play Peter, rather than some square-jawed hunk.
In
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
(the title, like pretty much everything else about the show, leaves you scratching your head—turn off the
dark?
), Taymor retained most of these familiar, ordinary elements. There’s the Queens row-house existence (very cleverly evoked in Act I by means of a succession of panels, painted comic-book style, that open to show the exteriors in ever-closer perspective as the actors walk near them, as if they’re getting closer, and which finally open to reveal the interiors); the humble aunt and uncle; the accidentat the science fair and Mr. Osborn’s botched experiment, both scenes rendered with a vulgar indulgence in gadgety details. There are the battles with the amusingly Day-Glo Green Goblin (staged, as we all know by now, in midair, thanks to immensely costly flying technology) and the tentative romance with the redheaded Mary Jane—here, the victim of abuse at the hands of a hard-drinking father (an added element of gritty “ordinariness”). There’s the bullying and the self-doubt and the guilt. Even the comic-book aesthetic has been retained, often ingeniously: in a couple of crucial fight scenes, little cutouts representing dialogue balloons—“KRAAAAK!” “BLAM!”—are waved around on sticks.
So to some extent, the new musical draws on both the comic book and the popular movies. The question is what appeal this material could have had for Taymor, an artist who has admitted to having no feel for what an interviewer called “American popular arts.” Her own adolescence was both privileged—she grew up in a Boston suburb, the daughter of a gynecologist—and anything but all-American: she was working in the theater already as a teenager, went to Paris at sixteen to study mime with Jacques Lecoq, stopped in the Netherlands to observe Henk Boerwinkel’s puppet theater, and spent four years in East Asia studying local theatrical and ritual traditions and creating her
One melodramatic element is the striking leitmotif of Peter’s guilty conscience. He feels responsible for the death of Uncle Ben; later,anguishingly, it turns out that one of his archenemies, the Green Goblin, is in fact the father of his best friend, Harry Osborn. (The elder Osborn is an industrialist tycoon who turns mad and bad when a lab experiment goes awry.) In a plotline from the early 1970s, Spider-Man is again responsible for the death of a loved one: a girlfriend dies from the “whiplash effect” that results when his webbing suddenly stops her fall from a building. He eventually goes back to an on-again, off-again love interest, Mary Jane Watson, whom he marries in the late 1980s.
This superhero’s humdrum background and tormented (but not
too
tormented) psyche are at the heart of a curiously Everyman appeal that has managed to persist through nearly five decades. Not two weeks after the September 11 attacks, Marvel Comics announced that the disaster would be treated in an upcoming
Spider-Man
series, since the angst-ridden hero from the outer boroughs was, in the words of a writer then working on the strip, “best suited” to grappling with the real-life New York crisis (many of whose victims were, as it happens, from the same socioeconomic background). It’s noteworthy, in light of this, that the producers of the recent series of Hollywood adaptations chose the actor Tobey Maguire—elf-faced, funky, a bit unprepossessing—to play Peter, rather than some square-jawed hunk.
In
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
(the title, like pretty much everything else about the show, leaves you scratching your head—turn off the
dark?
), Taymor retained most of these familiar, ordinary elements. There’s the Queens row-house existence (very cleverly evoked in Act I by means of a succession of panels, painted comic-book style, that open to show the exteriors in ever-closer perspective as the actors walk near them, as if they’re getting closer, and which finally open to reveal the interiors); the humble aunt and uncle; the accidentat the science fair and Mr. Osborn’s botched experiment, both scenes rendered with a vulgar indulgence in gadgety details. There are the battles with the amusingly Day-Glo Green Goblin (staged, as we all know by now, in midair, thanks to immensely costly flying technology) and the tentative romance with the redheaded Mary Jane—here, the victim of abuse at the hands of a hard-drinking father (an added element of gritty “ordinariness”). There’s the bullying and the self-doubt and the guilt. Even the comic-book aesthetic has been retained, often ingeniously: in a couple of crucial fight scenes, little cutouts representing dialogue balloons—“KRAAAAK!” “BLAM!”—are waved around on sticks.
So to some extent, the new musical draws on both the comic book and the popular movies. The question is what appeal this material could have had for Taymor, an artist who has admitted to having no feel for what an interviewer called “American popular arts.” Her own adolescence was both privileged—she grew up in a Boston suburb, the daughter of a gynecologist—and anything but all-American: she was working in the theater already as a teenager, went to Paris at sixteen to study mime with Jacques Lecoq, stopped in the Netherlands to observe Henk Boerwinkel’s puppet theater, and spent four years in East Asia studying local theatrical and ritual traditions and creating her
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