Spiderman Preview Thread!- Page 24

[Katurian2]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 7:42pm

Boy Falls From the Sky is beautiful- loved watching all the youtube videos of Bono singing it as well. Wait though... only *heard* the show? And how pray tell does one do that?

[trentsketch]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 8:01pm

Here's my take on the score. If the lyrics aren't popping out, the actors can be told to enunciate more (oh, how annoying it is to whack the "rock means you don't have to enunciate" taste out of a young actor's mouth) and the sound mix can be adjusted. If the melodies are too simple, some basic harmonies can be added in relatively painlessly to spice it up at key moments. If the music sounds repetitive, the arrangements can be adjusted (it's a rock band in the pit so effect pedals and acoustic instruments might add some needed variety as well). These are all things that don't mess around with the flying, fights, and set design. I have a feeling these kinds of change will happen when they get all the techy stuff running smooth (well, the sound design can probably be fixed sooner).

The book is a bigger challenge. If it is still confusing after they smooth out the technical issues, they might need to rewrite or add dialogue to better tell the story. I get that the flight sequences are computerized, but someone is surely pressing the "go" button rather than HAL 9000 launching the harnesses at the same time every night whether the actors are in them or not. A few lines here and there won't kill the stagecraft. These smaller changes may not fix the plot problems, but they can at least ensure everyone understands the show.

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 9:21pm

So no one's there tonight to give an update?

[Orangesaretuesdays]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 9:24pm

The show wouldn't have ended by now.

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 9:30pm

No, but we should be to intermission.

[esparza 333]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 9:50pm

I truly hope this show has a productive preview period. The media has been so harsh on the show that I hope Taymor and Bono and the rest of the creative team pull through and have a successful show. While many here do not like Taymor, you have to give her credit. She is a visionary and she takes risks. She sometimes fails in what she is trying to achieve but don't they say that art evokes strong feelings. Taymor dreamt big with spiderman and is trying to achieve something huge. I hope she reworks the score and book because I do agree up until now she has been style over content. I don't think it her carelessness that causes this, I think it is just something she doesn't have enough experience with. Everytime I see her talk about her projects, I see passion and she does talk about the story and score a lot. I think she will keep evolving as director and learn more but I do think she needs some help in helping her ideas for the book come to fruition.

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 10:14pm

I'm with you, to a degree. Putting aside that this was a questionable idea in the first place, I'm a big fan of Taymor's work — as a designer. It's when she puts on her director's hat that she runs into trouble... particularly on big-budget projects where it's almost like she feels she has something to prove to someone. She gets so caught up in "concept" that, as someone wrote earlier, it's like watching something written in a foreign language. Yes, she thinks big -- and thank god someone in professional theatre still does -- but it's always a huge crap shoot. For every LION KING (where you know she was kept on a tight leash by Disney) you have an ACROSS THE UNIVERSE and (sorry to say it, guys, but it's true) MAGIC FLUTE: great big high concept things that sorta visually meander, in spectacular ways, from one SQUIRREL! moment to another. She actually seems far more imaginative when she's working on a smaller scale, when her real skills at ritual theatre can shine through in truly dazzling ways.

I mean, look at it this way: wouldnt a project like SPIDERMAN be better suited to a company like Cirque de Soleil, which has extensive experience in this kind of high-production-values kind of thing?

[PopAria]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 10:22pm

How do you guys feel about rock musicals and not being able to understand what people are saying? I know American Idiot was popular, but that was a crazy show that was hard for me to understand. I wonder how much of the Spider-Man score is clear/audible.

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 10:35pm

Rock musicals are really no different from more conventional Bway scores: some are good, some are pretty tedious. It's how well you use the music in tandem with everything else that makes or breaks a show. For me personally? RENT was amazing. SPRING AWAKENING not so much so. The granddaddy of them all, HAIR? It's aged pretty gosh-darn well. AMERICAN IDIOT? Probably wont.

[uncageg]

Posted: 11/30/10 at 10:38pm

I loved "Spring Awakening" at The Atlantic. Saw the tour in a big house. Still enjoyed it but not as much. I avoided it on Broadway as I wanted to remember the impact it had in a smaller house.

[PReeves2]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 12:54am

there is no preview tonight.

[crewdude]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 1:08am

"Most non-Broadway centric people have never heard of Follies, either. Doesn't mean it's obscure."

Actually, Mister Matt, that's actually what obscurity means.

It's an obscure reference to a an obscure show that the average person walking down the street of Kansas, Ohio or Indiana would have no idea of what you were talking about. Broadway shows and actors and composers are not exactly common knowledge for most of America. The average citizen would not know what "Follies" is nor do they know who this Stephen Sondheim person is, nor do they care. We of the Broadway community and the fans of Broadway have an inflated perspective view of our place in society and pop culture.

Broadway "Fame" means "fame" in a very small community. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm saying that it is reality.

[americanboy99]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 1:55am

I'm listening to the show right now. Wow. These lyrics are ROUGH.

PM me.

[jonartdesigns]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 2:24am

"I'm a big fan of Taymor's work — as a designer. It's when she puts on her director's hat that she runs into trouble..."

I couldn't agree more, the most questionable additions to the show (like say the whole greek mythology angle and making "Arachne" the star of the show) have "Taymor run amok" written all over them.

Her costume designs... well that's a whole other problem. They're characters from a COMIC BOOK- they started out brightly colored and visually interesting and didn't need her "help", her take on several of them is just far too bizarre (dragonfly green goblin I am looking at YOU!)

[karatekid1]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 3:26am

i would love to hear the show...

[uncageg]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 3:44am

Well the buzz just hit our local news in Denver. They called the first preview a "disaster" with bad "reviews".

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 7:18am

>> "the average person walking down the street of Kansas, Ohio or Indiana would have no idea of what you were talking about"

The average person's knowledge today of musical theatre ends with OKLAHOMA and SOUND OF MUSIC, if that. What a change from a couple of generations ago, when a new musical opening was tantamount to hearing a new 45 from that bunch of long-haired kids from England. But it shouldnt be surprising, not when you look at culture in the larger sense -- everything, from movies to TV to pop music to books to videogames, is so pretested and premarketed that there's no room for originality. A musical adaptation back then meant adding something unique, making the theatre work its own beast -- now, look at what the producers of GHOST say: "We're trying to make it adhere to the original as closely as possible" -- in other words, exactly the same piece with a bunch of lackluster songs tacked on (and in the case of GHOST, oy, "lackluster" is being kind, if the snippets in the front page video are any indication). We're taken away originality and put "style" in its place. No wonder no one aside from the hardcore fan boys and the frantic investors cares about this stuff anymore.

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 7:29am

Remember shows with long preview periods

Legs Diamond
Nick & Nora
Golden Rainbow

[Midnight Radio]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 10:23am

... Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

[finebydesign]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 10:44am

"Her costume designs... well that's a whole other problem. They're characters from a COMIC BOOK- they started out brightly colored and visually interesting and didn't need her "help", her take on several of them is just far too bizarre (dragonfly green goblin I am looking at YOU!"

Eiko Ishioka is the costume designer not Taymor.

[tazber]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 10:47am

yes, but it was collaborative. Which probably means Taymor did the vast majority of the conceptualization.

I mean, you can look at them and tell.

[Katurian2]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 11:04am

I want to know how they plan to break all of this down and tour it domestically or internationally. If they can't even get the tech working with all the original operators here, how are they going to move it about? It seemed a large portion of the anticipated profits from this were based from other productions stemming from it.

[jonartdesigns]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 11:19am

I doubt this will ever tour. It's a bitch to make peter pan swing out over the audience on tour due to the various ceilings in tour venues, I'd imagine this much more involved audience flight would be an impossibility.

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 12:16pm

*If* they do an arena tour (which IIRC is all that's been mentioned thus far and would make the most sense, given the U2 fan base), it'd probably be less flashy technicals and more U2 music cranked up to 11 on the volume bar. Spidey would fly, but not to the extent here.

[BroadwayBound115]

Posted: 12/1/10 at 12:25pm

I believe the set was built like a circus set to travel easy. I may be wrong, but I remember hearing that from somewhere. Obviously the technical issues they are having now would be almost impossible to work out from house to house though.