More Like Spider-Man: Turn ON the Dark. Eh? Get it? [Rant]
The musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark made an appearance at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year and as if the world didn’t need reminding, it’s uh….well…most of us would rather watch High School Musical. 3.
Take it from a local New Yorker…
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is a musical that we in the Greater New York City Area loved to joke about: every time we think Broadway has reached it’s most ridiculous extreme (think American Idiot), we’d get something crazier. As someone who fancied themselves a theatrical technician for several years, I ranted again and again about the insanity of both the story and the stunts that Turn Off the Dark featured, and as the accidents piled up, the show became an easy target for newspapers and bloggers alike.
Finally, after a revamped script (that is often referred to as Spider-Man 2.0, although I prefer to call it Ultimate Spider-Man) persuaded reviewers to upgrade their scores from “the worst show ever” to “really bad, but entertaining stunt work when they don’t have to take unscheduled intermissions every 15 minutes,” the show has settled down and slipped out of the consciousness of locals despite its strong ticket sales – not The Book of Mormon strong, but they’re doing OK. As the weeks have turned into months and the show is no longer a daily joke, it’s become socially acceptable for the press to write fluff pieces about it. Enter Time Out New York.
Time Out New York’s Sharon Steel (that’s an awesome name to have if you’re writing anything that has anything to do with superheros, by the way) brings us Get Super Fit, a tale of how Turn Off the Dark star Reeve Carney gets jacked to fill out his Spider-Man costume – or, maybe I should say that it tells us the workout plan that gets Spider-Men jacked. You see, Mr. Carney is jacked, plays Peter Parker and he’s occasionally in the Spider-Man suit (I don’t know the exact percentages), but the show is complicated and dangerous, so he can’t always be Web Head – sometimes, it’s one of his stunt men in the suit.
Now let’s have some fun. Guess – guess how many stunt men work on Turn Off the Dark. Just guess! Well, if you counted them in the photo, you already know the answer is ten. Ten! Ten Spider-Men! (AH, AH, AH!) Take that, Spider-Island! Imagine if they all suit up and the eleven of them walk down the street, a Spider-Gang looking for trouble.
Just something to think about the next time you’re in New York City.
More Spider-Man @ acomicbookblog.com/tag/spider-man
1 Comment
This was just mean. I can understanding slating something because it’s bad, but by your own writing, you haven’t even seen the finished product. Bullying isn’t in vogue, mate. If you don’t like musical theatre, which your writing would lead one to believe, why critique it?