Spiderman $65M Broadway Musical Needs A Hero To Save It

Last night I went to see the new mega Broadway musical "Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark," directed by Julie Taymor, with music by Bono. And despite all the bad press it was getting, I was very excited to see this huge $65 million dollar monster, and how they would bring this story to life.

Now granted, it was only the 8th preview (opening night is January 11th, I think), but this musical needs so much help, I'm not sure how long it will actually run.

Here's what I liked:

1. The design elements and the visual look of the show are stunning. The use of huge, hydraulically lifted set pieces was impressive and the masks and exagerrated costumes are incredible.

2. The flying sequences over the audience are thrilling.

Here's what I didn't like:

1. The use of four obnoxious teenagers to narrate the entire show. You know you're in trouble when the classic story of Spider-man needs to be narrated. Whoever came up with this concept should be shot. Every time they came on to move the so-called plot along, you could feel the audience give a collective groan. (Even with the presence of a recent Amazing Race alumni as one of the four, I couldn't stomach their constant interruption.)

2. The music by Bono is slow and tiring, and by the time the 10th ballad is sung in the second act, most of the kids around me were asleep. Has Bono ever seen a musical? Has he ever written a funny lyric or an upbeat tune? Because this score is so depressing that I don't think anyone into Broadway musicals will want to buy this album. It's particularly "telling" when none of the songs got much applause when they were over, and some didn't get any. I think the audience was just confused. Were we watching Spider-man or a Bono concert? (Did I mention all the self indulgent and unnecessary ballads?)

3. The main characters are bland. The guy playing Spider-man never moves past the pathetic wimpy stage, even after he gets super powers. You never feel anything for him, or for his equally dull girlfriend Mary Jane. (Do these people have any life in them, because it seems it was all sucked out by the giant set-pieces.)

4. The super villain costumes are very cool...but except for one, we never really see them do anything except pose on stage. Most of their "fight sequences" are implied, or illustrated with giant images of them exploding. (They are introduced in a "fashion show" runway --literally-- and that is about all we see of them.) The Swiss Miss costume was my favorite, as she looked like a gargantuan version of Grace Jones -- and who wouldn't be afraid of that?

5. The book of the show. It's like they spent all the money on dazzling special effects and design elements, and forgot the basic element of a show. The story. Without a compelling story and 3-dimensional characters, there's not much for the audience to hold onto. So instead, we just sit back and watch a three hour parade of overproduced spectacle that doesn't have much heart. (I even liked "Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown" better than this, and that has a whole bunch of problems as well. But at least it was funny, and you could actually hum some of the tunes as you left the theater.)

At the end of the show, no one in the audience stood up. No one even clapped that enthusiastically (except for the guy who played the Green Goblin, the only character with any flair). I think we were all trying to process what we just saw. Was this a show or a tax write-off?

I hate to sound negative or nasty, because there were actually elements of the show I liked. But the overall impression was that it was a lot of visuals with not much underneath.

As I said, they have a month to work on this show before it opens. So hopefully they will bring in a show doctor to help tighten it up. But unless they decide to throw out half of the score and completely rewrite the book, this musical should be retitled "Spider-man: Turn off the Set".

Curiosity Willed the Cat

This is my cat Trey, doing some light reading over the weekend on why it's important to have a Will. Not sure where he found this particular piece of literature, but it makes me wonder who he was thinking about while reading it--himself or me.

Confessions of a Closeted Collector

Some call it “nesting.” Others call it an “obsession.” Still others consider it a mental disorder and give you the number of a nearby psychiatrist. Whatever it is, the process of “collecting” has always been a part of my life. Even before I was consiously aware of doing it.

As far back as I can remember, I have been assembling items in groups. Comic books, movies, Disney memorabilia. Growing up, my room was filled with a mélange of items culled from various branches of my collection. Whatever I couldn’t put out on display was carefully packaged up in boxes and hidden away in the back of my closet, never to be seen from again until my mother forced me to clean it out.

You see, my mother had a philosophy that if you put something in a drawer or a closet, and you didn’t use it for more than a year, than you no longer needed it. Personally I never subscribed to that philosophy. I liked collecting things, so I would certainly never consider throwing anything away. Everything I bought, everything I owned, everything I was ever given, all became part of my massive “collection.”

The first thing I collected was Hot Wheels. They were my first true passion. I liked the pretty colors and the interesting designs on the cars. Lightning. Fire. Sparkles. The cars themselves were secondary. It was the paint job that took my fancy.

Then came the baseball card stage. Only I didn’t really collect traditional baseball cards, but rather the baseball card spin-offs. Things like Wacky Packages and Superhero cards. Or cards from popular movies and television shows.

I was manic about collecting them too, and sometimes couldn’t sleep until I’d successfully completed the latest series. But once the sets were complete, I usually put them neatly in a box and rarely looked at them again. I never ate the gum, either. It tasted like crispy chalk.

After the baseball card derivatives, I moved up to Scholastic books. Mostly because I really liked the process of ordering and receiving the books. I sort of lost interest when it actually came to reading them.

The process worked as follows: every two months or so you’d get a little flyer at school along with your Weekly Reader. The flyer would be filled with all the new books that Scholastic had for sale. You checked off the ones you wanted, handed the form back into your teacher, and four to six weeks later a big brown box arrived in your classroom filled with the books. Sometimes I didn’t even read them; I just added them to my “collection.”

After scholastic, I had an uncomfortable run-in with the Franklin Mint, which permanently stopped me from filling out order forms. Especially for things I couldn’t afford. Those “easy monthly payments” aren’t so easy when you only have a paper route for income.

So to avoid becoming financially bankrupt at the tender age of twelve, I finally settled on collecting simple things. Inexpensive things. Like comic books and plastic toys. Posters. Records. Tapes. Magazines.

When I first started making money as a graphic designer, I splurged on a number of Disney high-end porcelain figurines. They were so colorful and life-like that I just had to have one. Then one led to two. Two led to nine, and then seventeen, and then a hundred and forty, and that’s when I finally needed a storage locker. As well as someone to consolidate my credit card debt, because all those statues had apparently maxed my collection of VISAs to their limits.

On top of that, I had no room in my apartment to display any of these magnificent pieces of art, so most of them ended up in the storage locker. Their boxes collecting dust, their beauty hidden in the dark. My mother would have had a field day in that storage unit, tossing everything that didn’t move. Including me, no doubt, if I happened to get in her way.

But now I’ve moved into a new phase of my collecting. The selling process. I’ve finally managed to weed through some of the older branches of my collections to find things I can actually part with. And you know what? It’s quite lucrative. Some of my collections from childhood are reaping big rewards. Which means I’ve finally become something I never aspired to be—a smart businessman.

But that’s just me. What about you? What do you collect?