from NYT:
Bathed in green light, Patrick Page took center stage at the Foxwoods Theater on Broadway and hissed his lines with the sinister glee of a villain back from the dead.
Which he is. Playing the Green Goblin in the musical extravaganza “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” Mr. Page saw his character killed off in Act I during all 145 preview performances of Julie Taymor’s version of the show this winter. Yet there was the Goblin alive and well in Act II at Friday’s rehearsal of “Spider-Man,” cracking wise in a new scene lampooning telephone voice mail.
Resurrected at the urging of focus groups that the producers convened, the Goblin and his patter are among the signs that “Spider-Man” has largely abandoned Ms. Taymor’s Wagnerian ambitions and high-concept artistry, going for a comic-book sensibility instead. The musical is aiming to capture “the 8-to-88-year-old market,” in the words of Philip William McKinley, who is now overseeing the show’s direction, as the producers seek a strategy to make good on their record-setting investment of $70 million.
After a three-week performance hiatus to accommodate a creative overhaul, at a cost of $5 million, “Spider-Man” is set to resume previews on Thursday with what its producers said they hoped would be a lighter, circuslike spirit. Five flying sequences have been added to the previous two dozen. The roles of Aunt May, Uncle Ben and Mary Jane Watson — cherished characters from Spider-Man lore — have been expanded. The musical’s composers, Bono and the Edge of U2, have added a few new songs and rewritten several others.
Bono and Edge, in their first news media interview about “Spider-Man” since performances began in November, said on Monday that they loved much about Ms. Taymor’s version but felt it relied on spectacle rather than on story. Theater critics savaged that show in February, and Bono and Edge said that all of the original collaborators — not simply Ms. Taymor, who was fired in March — shared responsibility. But for “Spider-Man” to succeed, they said, it needed to stir people emotionally.
If all you need is to stir people emotionally, you can make it the story of a man getting dropped from the cable system and breaking his arm, and his ambition to continue being Spider-Man. Meta, but effective.
