Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Theater: Legacy Edition?

Societas Raffaelo Sanzio
The farcical hullabaloo around the production of Spider-Man: Turn of the Dark took a tragic turn recently with the "dismissal" of director Julie Taymor, who had been developing the project for nearly a decade.  I say tragic in the sense of the ambitious folly that gives the production of art its sense of grandeur and drama.  When you rally the army, even a few casualities bring about the scrutiny that quickly leads from courage to shame.  All that those outside of New York have seen of this production are a few brief promo clips & a series of striking stills which evoke a visual and storytelling language that takes the "showtime" of Broadway in a direction that would seem to reconcile the inherent glitz with a spicy dash of the experimental and a heaping of pop.  Or rather, that's what we would be led to believe on the basis of her many ardent supporters.