Yesterday, Roger Friedman, over at ShowBiz411, spoke to Julie Taymor, the director of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and confirmed what many of us had already suspected: the musical is getting neither a co-director nor a new writer.
The rumors that the show would be bringing another writer on board had me thinking a lot about the musical's current story. Everyone is hung up on Spider-Man's story. And with good reason. The musical's coherence and clarity of narrative are by far its weakest elements. But I began to think: how important is story? At the risk of sounding glib, I'll clarify my own inquiry: what are the different kinds of storytelling that a piece of theatre can engage in?
In the course of his article, Friedman compares Taymor's Turn Off the Dark to Cirque du Soleil's Beatles-tribute, Love.
I kept thinking how amazing it was that Taymor was trying to pull off something similar in a Broadway house. If Turn off the Dark had opened in Montreal with Cirque du Soleil, it would have been hailed over and over.
The comparison to Cirque du Soleil is interesting if we're thinking about story. Certainly the kind of storytelling that the Montreal company does is quite different from that which we expect in Broadway musicals. My narrative expectations when I enter the circus are entirely distinct from that which I expect in a Broadway house. At the circus I probably expect a governing creative aesthetic that should translate across music, design, costume, etc. but I also expect mini-narratives, many entirely unrelated, that will codify around recurring characters as well as that overarching aesthetic. On Broadway, however, I largely expect linearity and cogency of story: major and minor characters which consistently interact and engage in a unifying structure of rising action-climax-intermission-falling action-finale.
Herein lies the tension. Taymor and her team definitely do not give us this arc. In its current form, Turn Off the Dark is largely disjointed and fragmentary. There are flying sequences, rock concert set pieces, and sporadic (often unrelated) bursts of narrative. Even Taymor, in an advert for the production, says:
We can't really tell you what this is, but it has rock and roll, it has drama, and it has circus. [video below]
The show is all of these things and that is part of what makes it so fun to watch. (It’s okay to like spectacle!) However, the show seems too hesitant to embrace this multi-faceted, circus-like storytelling -- frankly, it doesn't go far enough. That the musical is fragmented is not its problem. Nor is the problem, as some have claimed, that the show tries to do too much. In essence, the vignettes are actually both a compelling and inventive structure, as in to say: 'we all know the story of Spider-Man but look at all of these ways that this simple story can be imagined, re-imagined, and framed'.
The musical runs into difficulty when it too feebly holds on to some false notion that a traditional narrative arc (beginning, middle, and end) actually exists. The first act, in particular, seems to constantly remind the audience of its narrative failings by inadequately staging dramatic scenes from the film franchise. Instead, the show should embrace its free form and a different kind of storytelling, something closer to the spirit and mythology of the comic book hero.
In the musical's current draft, Taymor and her team don't give the audience a steady prism through which to see and understand the production. The musical needs a conceptual framework that does for the audience what walking inside a circus tent does. Audiences don't go into Cirque du Soleil expecting cohesive narrative and, in a sense, these disjointed expectations is what critics and audiences are struggling with. If it clearly and visibly embraces circus, and the many stories of Spider-Man, as a governing structure then the conversation surrounding the show's story might be realigned entirely.
In many ways, this is the conceptual direction the show is already leaning in but the device of the nerdy Greek Chorus lacks precision. Turn of the Dark has a potentially unique, fragmentary identity that needs to be fully embraced. I’m excited to see where Taymor takes it.
