The Green Goblin fight scene was pretty cool. I guess that’s where they kept getting injured?
I remember that even Sesame Street couldn’t resist getting in on it.
6 Likes
How they sold the aerial combat:
music sounds very u2ish-- but I dunno if this reflects the show.
Ok, you can have my nerd credentials back. I’m giving Slott too much credit.
sounds like the same music early in this vid, then it gets more dramatic when they start fighting
1 Like
Damn, is that music monotonous.
Having now watched a ton of these clips and songs, I can absolutely understand how
- They persevered through injuries, rewrites, and millions of dollars to try and make this work
- It still failed miserably.
The music is mostly atrocious. U2 given free reign to their worst impulses, with little guidance or pushback from an editor or composer who actually understands what makes musical theater work. The lyrics are both boring and confusing, and somebody needs to take The Edge’s guitar away from him forever.
The costuming is inexplicable, it needed to be either 50% less campy, or 200% more campy.
But… there are glimpses of something truly special here. When the wire work works, it works. The concept of using the whole three-dimensional theater space is magical, there’s a real spark there. If they just had a better score and script from the beginning instead of trying to repair the airplane in mid-flight, it could have been legendary. I mean, it’s still legendary, just for all the wrong reasons.
3 Likes
It’s damned difficult to properly record live theater.
1 Like
Oh, it’s not the recording. Oh no.
Oh, it’s all nonsense, of course. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, even with the fervent annotations of the Chorus helping us through. The show’s metabolism speeds up in the second act, even as its central nervous system breaks down, and eventually, even Taymor seems to be feeling a little winded. She starts relying heavily on massive video-screens, featuring naive CGI versions of a villainous pantheon that includes Carnage, Swarm, and Lizard. The second act, taken all in all, is basically how I’ve always imagined the Björk–Matthew Barney honeymoon: lots of atavistic rock-moaning, lots of 40-story phallic symbols, lots of bees.
All I can think of when reading Turn off the Dark is Adam Scott and Scott Aukerman’s extended riff on the title on U talkin’ U2 2 Me.
ETA: turns out someone has animated it. Still hilarious
1 Like
Me, apparently. I saw this on a trip to NYC a few years ago. I’m not a big fan of musicals generally. My partner suggested this, possibly thinking that she would have more luck convincing me to see this one than some other options. (I would have gone to whatever she wanted, but I wasn’t going to argue with her). Also we didn’t have a ton of money so we were somewhat limited to whatever we could get cheap tickets for.
At the show we went to, there was a malfunction which led to Spiderman flying around above the crowd for much longer than planned. No one fell or was injured though.
The set design was absolutely incredible though. So they got that going for them.
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
