John Lahr's New Yorker review/commentary on Spider-Man goes at the musical's narrative structure in some of the ways I alluded to yesterday:In The Lion King, Taymor had strong producers to oversee her and a solid-gold piece of Disney business art, from whose plot she could not veer. Here she has neither. The result is a triumph of narrative indulgence over theatrical expertise. Taymor is no storyteller. The corny conceit of “Spider-Man” is that we’re watching a show that is being dreamed up by Marvel comics nerds—the coyly named Geek Chorus—who deconstruct and construct the character even as the story comes to life before us. The activity mimics a spider’s weaving—doing, undoing, redoing—but the musical doesn’t know how to integrate the device or how to make it pay off.Of course, I don't agree that Taymor is not a storyteller, just that she finds herself stuck among many stories and many ways of telling a story. The presence of the Greek Chorus which 'deconstructs and constructs' the comic book character signals that Taymor is conscious of the play's fragmented, vignette structure, but she hasn't taken this unique mode of storytelling far enough or made it clear enough ... yet.
Lahr's write-up is an outstanding portrait of the show; he mounts a justifiable critique of the musical's current form but praises Taymor in respects other reviews have conspicuously glazed over:
As a stager, however, Taymor is bold, elegant, and eloquent. Although it takes a while for Peter to get airborne, when he does the flying is thrilling, a full-tilt leap into the extraordinary ...Taymor has a dynamic, painterly sense of space; she can marshal all the sensual elements of movement, light, and perspective into amazing stage pictures. ...Before our eyes, for instance, the New York sky line is tipped ninety degrees, so that what begins at street level ends up a bird’s-eye view, with buglike yellow cabs skittering below; in another scene, the spider chorines dance before us, with their eight syncopated limbs. In these moments—and there are plenty of them—the audience finds itself exactly where Taymor wants it to be: in a waking dream.Follow the link below for the full review.
[quotes and image from The New Yorker]
