How a Spider-Man musical became a theatrical disaster- Page 3

[joevitus]

Nice try dude, but no. I've made the same point from the beginning.

[ScottyDoesn'tKnow2]

Whatever happened to this musical, I would have loved a non-campy, unironic duet or even dance between Peter and Mary Jane (I said Mary Jane and not Gwen Stacy) to U2's "With or Without You". I think Spiderman should always have humor because Peter Parker annoying the villains with his puns and quips is just part of the Spiderman experience, but the drama of him dealing with juggling his two lives should be taken seriously.

[joevitus]

I agree.

There's an, I guess, famous anecdote about Sondheim wanting to make a musical out of Sunset Blvd, and Billy Wilder saying "This movie cannot be made into a musical; it can only be done as an opera." I somewhat feel the same way about Spider-Man, not in the sense that the show has to be sung-through but in that fact that the emotions behind the story are so intense.

You can't do a campy Spider-Man, though you can give him humorous lines in his fight scenes, because this is essentially the story of an alienated person whose life-defining character arc actually makes him even more alienated. And really, Mary Jane (or Gwen, depending of which storyline a scenarist chooses to go with) and Aunt May are all he's got. And that has to be played very real, because that's his grounding in his real life--what he's "really" about.