Spider-Man returned for more scorn and derision this week, as the troubled show resumed previews after a hiatus in which several key members of the creative team were changed.
Has it struck anyone else how Peter Parker-esque this all is? Brainy whiz kid clearly has talent, but tends to put his insecure, uncertain, experimental self forward, while some pretty impressive feats go unnoticed, misunderstood and lambasted.
In any case, they’ve webbed in the appropriate rewriter for this new attempt to set the show on course. I knew Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa when he was a student at the Yale School of Drama, and we talked about comics a lot. One of the scripts he was working on at Yale, Weird Comic Book Fantasy, involved a comic book teenager strongly reminiscent of Archie Andrews shacking up with Chicago thrill-murderers Leopold & Loeb. A couple years ago, Aguirre-Sacasa wrote a completely new book for the 1966 Strouse/Adams musical It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane.. It’s Superman. Lots of his shows have had comic references in them, not to mention references like H.P. Lovecraft which fall within the vocabulary of comics geeks. His The Mystery Plays played Yale Rep in 2004 and Dark Matters (about an presumed alien abduction) was workshopped at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford in 2003.
Thanks in part to a Marvel Comics initiative to get young playwrights to script some of their comics, immediately upon graduation from Yale Aguirre-Sacasa landed a dream gig. He penned the mini-series 4, in which he had the Fantastic Four lose all their government grants while embroiled in class action suits against them; the hero team went bankrupt and had to go seek regular jobs. It didn’t long for Aguirre-Sacasa to earn the honor of writing for Marvel’s flagship character Spider-Man. This included taking the character in whole new action and fashion directions for the Sensational Spider-Man series (distinct from the original Amazing Spider-Man or the other arachnid adjectives). If any writer can connect the threads of the convoluted Spider-Man mythos into an action-packed scenario that theater audiences can comprehend, it’s Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. He was interviewed by the Associated Press, USA Today and other mainstream media outlets this week, making him the designated voice of the new creative team behind Spider-Man.
Not that the last Spider-Man scripter was shabby. It was Glen BergerAs with Aguirre-Sacasa, the Yale Cabaret was hip to Berger before just about anyone else was—his one-man sensation Underneath the Lintel had its world premiere at the Cabaret well before it became a long-running Off Broadway cult sensation. (It’s since been done locally at the Long Wharf and again just last year at the Cabaret.) Wier Harmon directed Berger’s Great Men of Science Nos. 21 & 22 as his graduate thesis for the Yale School of Drama in 1998.
As a curious outsider (the closest I’ve come to the show is getting handed a half-off flier during the last days of its previous preview period, while I was on my way down Broadway to something else), I worry mainly about the provincialism inherent in erecting such a mammoth, technically complex show. It appears to me that Spider-Man doesn’t have a hope of touring in any semblance of its high-flying, death-defying Broadway model.
Well, that’ll be a problem for a whole different creative team down the line.