The Importance of Being Spiderman

You might have heard about the upcoming Spiderman musical on Broadway.  I thought about it because, as you’ll see at the link, I read that it’s been delayed, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about whether producing a Spiderman musical is audience-oriented or merely pandering.

And first, let me say, I have no idea what this show is going to be like.  I have absolutely no insider information and I wouldn’t presume to judge the upcoming show’s merits from the information that’s out there.

But I can talk about what it would take for Spiderman to be audience-oriented and what would make it pandering, which not coincidentally, would also make it likely to fail commercially.

It will fail (or at least, not succeed) if the producers are cynical about it and feel that they’re doing something that’s beneath them in order to lift a few bucks out of the pockets of the great unwashed.

It will fail if the producers decide that Spiderman needs to be “fixed” and that the things that have made the character an enduring figure in popular culture for 30 or 40 years need to be eliminated.

It stands a chance of being successful if the producers preserve the core elements of Spiderman (loyalty, bravery, the everyman geekiness of Peter Parker) while also bringing a new, but complimentary dimension to the character.  This was done brilliantly in the movie version several years ago and also done brilliantly on The Dark Knight, a couple years ago.

A counter-example, in my opinion, is what was done to Dr. Seuss’s characters in the movie version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”  In an attempt to be ‘edgy,’ the producers made the whole thing nasty, with the whos looking and acting like greedy, materialistic, brainless pigs.  It wasn’t a total bomb, but a scant couple of years later and it’s forgotten, in favor of the original cartoon from the 60s.

It’s easy to take superheroes lightly.  They’re for kids; they wear insane costumes; they’ve been done 100 times.  But the reason they’ve been done a hundred times is that they’re rich material.  They remind us of who we are at our best and what our weaknesses might be if we were under the stress of having to save the world.

In fact, I don’t see much difference, other than the difference in the tastes of people in different eras of time, between Spiderman and Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero of Wagner’s Ring series of operas.  A hero being put to a high-stakes test.  As a worthy subject for great art and a source of entertainment, I don’t see much difference at all.

Other than the fact that Spiderman can shoot webs out of his hands, that is.