Without question, the title of this post – this tagline and joke – has been made many times in the last few weeks since the announcement that the January 4th evening performance of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark would bring down the final curtain on this Broadway show.
I got to see it during its three-year run. Twice.
HJ jr, Stretch and Sous Chef at “Turn off the Dark.” I am taking the photo… you can see my reflection in the poster.
I am not ashamed to admit that I loved this show. I loved it for being precisely what it should have been: fun, thrilling and exciting. I loved it because it was visually stunning. I loved it because it understood Peter Parker so well.
I have never seen anything like Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark in a theater. Never. It was more impressive than the Phantom of the Opera staircase , more arresting than Miss Saigon’s helicopter, more amazing than the barricade in Les Miserables.
I read a book about the fascinating train wreck that was the process of bringing this musical to the stage. It’s called Song of Spider-Man and was written by Glen Berger, who wrote the book for the show. (I cannot recommend this book highly enough, by-the-way) He called the musical a “rock-and-roll circus.”
That was exactly right. It was a circus. And one hell of a fun circus at that.
I saw Reeve Carney (Art Carney’s nephew) twice as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. He was game. He was engaging and entertaining. And, as it turns out, he was a hero.
Surely we all know the dangers that surrounded this show, the injuries and the disasters. As it turns out, the first time I was in town to see the show I saw on the local NYC news that Carney had been in the theater during a Saturday matinée when his understudy was playing Spider-Man. The understudy got hurt during the show – an all too common occurrence – and, after a brief hold, Carney stepped in to finish the performance. Pretty cool.
Turn off the Dark is a musical and the music by Bono and the Edge of U2 was, primarily, quite good. For every clunker like D.Y.I World or Bully by Numbers there was a Say It Now or a Rise Above. Rise Above in particular, is a GREAT song. The U2 version really rocks, but the Reeve Carney cut is much more in the spirit of the musical and the character.
The Spider-Team that played the web-crawler on stage, flew – literally – over the audience and brought the superhero to life did things (dangerous things) during the show that had really never been done on stage before. Much of what they did was breathtaking. The staging was unlike anything I’d ever experienced and it had to be. After all, the protagonist of the show has superpowers. Bringing off the visual of the wall-crawler, making Spider-Man swing through the skies of New York City, realizing the likes of the Green Goblin on stage was really, really cool to a comic-geek like me.
Look, Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark wasn’t Shakespeare. The plot was confusing, to put it mildly. The play was, perhaps, overly self-conscious. The proceedings bordered, at times, on the silly.
But I loved this show. I am sorry that it has closed.
I hear it may be moving to Las Vegas. I certainly hope so.
I hope it can rise above this New York closing.
I suspect it will.
With visuals like this, it would be right at home!
Photo from EW.com
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