Friday Feature: Spiderman (Spectacular, Spectacular)

Friday Feature: Spiderman (Spectacular, Spectacular)

The setting: the most expensive Broadway play of all time. The draw: in the technical feat of a lifetime, Spiderman and company will soar over the heads of audiences. Enter, stage left: director Julie Taymor, of “Lion King” fame, whose artistic vision of unprecedented technical achievement has left actors in the hospital and leads threatening to quit.
Spiderman: the Musical, based on the comic series, employs the use of never-before seen technology wherein the heroes and villains of the series will fly over the theatre (not just the stage, the entire theatre) using automatic rigs for the actors. Usually, in a show that requires actors to fly, a union technician manually operates the machine. This ensures that actors who get stuck or caught on the rope can be lowered quickly and safely, hopefully without interrupting the performance. However, in the case of Spiderman, the actors who get stuck on the electric path either must be rescued while the entire show is stopped or, if they are unlucky, they fall.
Spiderman: the Musical continues a long tradition of Broadway showstoppers where the main draw is the spectacular spectacle and the sheer drama, not the acting or the play’s theatrical value. This style (a supposed audience-magnet, though the dwindling ticket sales do not exactly confirm this) is not new to the theatre world or even to Broadway, for, after all, most audiences want to get some literal bang for their buck. Miss Saigon, for instance, employed a fully operating helicopter for its Broadway run. The Blue Man Group relies on pounds of toilet paper that fly out the ceiling at the audience as strobe lights run wild.
Let lavish sets and over-the-top (and potentially dangerous) technical feats not be the legacy of Broadway. There is so much more to an excellent performance than just the spectacle. In traditional theatre, a set could be something as minimal as a few seats and a makeshift wall: the focus was on the performance.
If Spiderman is really causing people to go see theatre, then that is fantastic. Mass consumption of theatrical art is always a good thing. However, the returns are not really coming in for Broadway shows in general- the same shows that are trying to pull in audiences with huge spectacles.
It is unfortunate that extreme excess has become the norm in Broadway instead of truly great performances. Especially in this economically rough time, Broadway has the responsibility to ticketholders to produce its best work, rather than a capitalistic explosion of sets and technical extravaganzas.
This post originally appeared in the Rank & File, rank-n-file.com.