While all the bloggers are at San Diego, the rest of the freaks are apparently in New York City. Except for me. I’m in the suburbs, about a half hour drive from New York City. That’s close enough, right?

I’ve talked before about my experience of seeing Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Again, I say that I can’t in any good conscience call it good, but I can call it incredibly worth watching due to being too strange to exist. Words are only words, though. Finally, I have something to show you.

Now, since I’ve seen the show, there was a major upheaval. The show was shut down and rewritten because Julie Taymor is fucking crazy and had some overly-strange/stupid ideas in there. A lot of the bad stuff was removed. For instance, everyone loved Patrick Page’s portrayal of the Green Goblin, yet he was killed halfway into the story and only appeared for the rest of it as an illusion meant to torture Peter. In actuality, the true villain of the play was the Greek mythological character Arachne. Now they’ve scaled back Arachne’s role considerably and gave Green Goblin the keys to the villain throne. This in turn caused them to drop a musical number where Arachne sings about… well, shoes. Yes, really.

To make up for this void, Bono and Edge created a new song for Green Goblin which Rolling Stone described as, “the Grinch singing Lady Gaga, with an Abba-esque chorus.” WOW. That rose up my list of shit I needed to see.

Luckily, the Late Show with David Letterman had a Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark-based show where he had Edge and Bono as guests. Check out the final segment of the show.

There’s so much insanity in there, I don’t know where to start. I’ll just let you enjoy it as you repeat viewing it a dozen or so times.

On Friday night, I journeyed into New York City to see the show that I was destined to see. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has been the butt of many jokes and it’s hard not to join in. David Uzumeri summed it up for me nicely with the term “spiderfreude”. The whole broadway show concept, the inflated budget, the head-scratching reviews and the laundry list of injuries and mishaps has made it a phenomenon for absurdity-loving comic fans such as myself. The whole thing is too strange to exist and I knew I had to get on the train before it crashes for good.

Lo and behold my amazing, spectacular Christmas gift of tickets to see the show.

And it’s a good thing, too! The show is being closed down in a few weeks for the sake of being retooled. Best case scenario, they’re going to change a lot of stuff and I got to see the rougher draft of the Broadway show. Worst case scenario, they’re going to deep six the entire production and I got to look into God’s eyes before it was too late.

It also makes me feel less bad about going into full spoiler mode. For those who don’t want to muck through the spoilers and want the gist of my experience, I didn’t think it was bad. There are parts that are pretty awful and kind of embarrassing, but it really starts to gain steam. The performances are really good, especially Patrick Page as the Green Goblin and the set designs are so extravagant that at no point do you wonder where all those millions of dollars went. The music… I’m not really qualified to comment on. I’m no theater expert and I’m sure if I listened to them in one more go I’d have more impressions, but my main reaction was mostly, “Yes, that is most certainly something inspired by Bono.”

I should also get the obvious out of the way. No, nobody died or got horribly injured from what I saw. The only mishaps were few:

1) One of the Spider-Man stuntman guys swung around over the crowd, bounced around and ended up on a high platform where the right side of the stage cuts off. Noticed by some, he could be seen momentarily strangled by his cables before getting free.

2) The obligatory “Spider-Man: NO MORE!” scene lost a little oomph when Peter’s tights bounced out of the garbage can and fell on the floor.

3) There was a part in the second act where the curtain wasn’t closed all the way and some could get a pretty good look at one of the actresses during a costume change. Actually, scratch everything I said. This show was awesome.

Read the rest of this entry �