Turn Off the Plot--I'd rather be watching Cirque du Soleil

mithras03 and I went to see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark last night. Here is my one word review: Boring.

The aerial stuff with the (nine!) acrobats in Spider-Man costumes was awesome. But there was maybe twenty minutes of that in a two hour and forty minute show. And the rest of the show was just blah. The music was blah. The plot was the Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man story you already know if you've seen or read ANY Spider-Man anything. Followed slavishly. With no surprises. Such that I frequently had the Sam Raimi film playing in my head, by way of comparison. And Turn Off the Dark is the lesser of the two--where the two differ in storyline, Turn Off the Dark chooses to solve story problems in the less interesting way. Peter is not culpable in any way for Uncle Ben's death. I mean, he wasn't there, but he didn't cause it. Uncle Ben also doesn't say, "With great power comes great responsibility," so when Peter says it later, it's a one-off. Peter misses Mary Jane's debut not because he was off being Spider-Man, but because he was ASLEEP. (Having dream sex with a mythical spider, but whatever.)

We were in the cheap seats, ie, one of the top balcony boxes. We had it to ourselves, and the chairs were both comfortable and not attached to the floor, which was nice. This meant we had a perfect view of all the aerial stuff, but it meant we couldn't see down the barrel of the stage. Which meant, since the stage is incredibly deep, the actors looked hilariously dwarfed by the sets. And the sets were surprisingly sparse (Zefferelli this was not), so sometimes they looked like they were in a rehearsal space, there was so much emptiness around them. I suspect this was aggravated by having a skew view, but I think it would have been a problem anyway.

The highlight of the show are, of course, the Spider-Men. Up in the balcony, we could see them when they came out onto two little platforms at the front of the balcony and got hooked up before swooping in. There were a bunch of kids in the balcony that were SO EXCITED by this OMG. So it was more fun to watch Spidey waving at them than whatever was going on on stage.

The costume design was all over the place. Every decade in the twentieth-century! This was only jarring for me because of how sexist the thing was overall. I mean, a chorus of shrill secretaries, preening and typing. Peter wins the science award and MJ wins the drama award (cause she's a girl!). I mean, the story's exactly as sexist as the time when it was written. But to me the only thing that makes the sexism palatable is the time. So if you're going to be talking about Facebook and cell phones and customer service phone menus, then lose the secretaries, huh?

So that happened. I knew it would be bad going in, so I'm not disappointed. It's what I expected. Though I was reading articles on it today and man, I wish I'd seen it before the rewrite. I'd take mind-bendingly awful over bland every day.

Here is how boring this was: In the first act, the chorus sings a chord progression that pinged my memory so hard, I knew I'd heard it in some other musical somewhere, one that I owned, but I didn't know what. In the middle of the second act, as MJ and Peter sang a love song, I finally placed it and leaned over to mithras to say, "Evita! It was Evita!"

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Someday I would like to own a room with a dictionary stand, a floor-standing globe, and a baby grand piano in it.