(Because at least part of this weekend was spent writing the Onomatoepia newsletter, here’s the essay from last month’s, as way of apology.)
It should be noted, even though the world collectively forgot to be shocked by the news at the time, that Spider-Man: Turn Out The Dark (also known as “That Spider-Man Musical With The Worst Name Imaginable, Seriously Bono, We Don’t Care If You’re In U2, That’s A Ridiculous Name And Even You Know It And By The Way, Stop Selling Out And Appearing In Advertisements For Everything Under The Goddamned Sun, Wasn’t Having Your Own Special iPhone Brand Enough For You People And, Really, We Were All Being Polite And Pretending To Like ‘Vertigo’ Because You Haven’t Done Anything Good In Years” - although that title was only ever unofficially used in the trade magazines as it was thought to be too long for a theater marquee) has been forced to shut down pre-production after running out of money and is now no longer expected to open in February 2010 as originally planned. There are many reasons for this - some of which we’ll go into in this special edition of Fanboy Rampage Goes To Broadway - but the main one is, undoubtedly, the simple fact that it was a musical based on a superhero, something that historically has never done well.
Thanks to the internet, many people now pretend to be aware of such Broadway misses as It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Superman! and What’s The Smell Of Fish, Oh It’s You, Aquaman - Most fondly remembered these days for giving the young Stanley Tucci his first professional acting role, as Squiggle The Baby Porpoise, of course - but the rain-splattered streets of New York’s fabled theater district is covered with the corpses of many other failed attempts at bringing the magic of the superhero genre to the stage. Tonight, we’ll list just some of the more high profile of these miserable failures for your musintertainment. Join us - After this break!
Shall We Bat?
The partnership of Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin produced many popular movie musicals from Cover Girl to… well, Cover Girl, but a little known fact about the musical careers of both men is that, following the initial success of National Publications’ “Batman” character after his 1939 introduction, creator Bob Kane teamed with the songwriters with the idea of taking Bruce Wayne to Broadway. Initially announced as “an evening of dramatic entertainment punctuated by beautiful music and romance,” the playfully-titled Who’s That Masked Bat? was to feature a story “written” by Kane - Experts who’ve looked over the remaining notes believe that it was, unsurprisingly, actually the work of Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson - with five songs by Kern and Gershwin.
The show, sadly, didn’t even make it to the end of the writing process; Kern, already warned by his doctor to stick with Hollywood as the process of working with artists in such a confined space as a theater caused him multiple heart attacks, withdrew from the project following a series of arguments with Kane over whether or not Bruce Wayne should reveal his secret identity to Selina Kyle’s Catwoman character during the climactic number “Darling, I Have Something To Tell You (We Both Lead Double Lives That Bring Us Into Such Repeated Contact That It Must Either Be Fate Or Crappy Writing),” and the entire project was forced to be shelved when Gershwin’s brokered peace between the two was surprisingly ended by Kern’s death in 1945.
(Much criticized at the time, few comic fans realize that Jeph Loeb’s “Hush” was actually based upon the unproduced show, complete with Kern’s much-hoped-for reveal. The idea to adapt the show wasn’t Loeb’s, however, but instead something that artist Jim Lee came up with when Loeb missed several deadlines upon visiting a psychic and being told that he would one day write Marvel Comics’ Ultimatum. It took Loeb months to come out of the entirely understandable shock upon learning that terrible truth.)
This Is The Dawning Of The Age of Galactus
Buoyed by the surprise success of their hippiecal Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical when it opened on Broadway in late 1967, writers James Rado and Gerome Ragni looked around the shifting American culturescape for material for a follow-up that would have a similar pop-cultural impact while also allowing them to deal with even more “out there” themes and imagery. This coincided with Marvel’s Stan Lee opening his heart to the idea of selling out just a little bit more, and Lee, Rado and Ragni collided in a cloud of smoke, dreams and bullshit before announcing to the world that Broadway would soon tremble before the might of Spider-Man: The All-Singing All-Swinging Pop Art Musical.
The plot for Spider-Man was simple; Rado and Ragni convinced Lee to allow them to expand upon the classic origin story to allow for a poignant lament on the inescapable nature of destiny by the radioactive spider that bit Peter (”Got These Fangs For A Reason”), a nude bedroom number between Uncle Ben and Aunt May (”Don’t You Know I Love You Despite Your Wrinkles And Unexplained Health Problems That Will Plague Our Nephew For Years To Come”) and, most unexpectedly, an extended “freak-out” following Peter discovering his powers that changed his chosen career from pro-wrestling to go-go dancing at the Coffee Bean (featuring the classic “That Boy (Ain’t No Woman, But He Sho’ Knows How To Move),” later a radio hit for Billy Preston and Syreeta). The villain of the piece wasn’t a familiar Spider-villain, but instead a new creation of the writers, The Man, said to personify everything that was, like, squaresville and old-fashioned about America at the time. In a controversial (and ultimately excised before the show premiered) scene, The Man admitted to Spider-Man that he thought that Vietnam was groovy, and that Paul McCartney was an underrated but essential part of the Beatles’ cross-generational appeal, offering a comforting familiarity for older listeners that eased their entry into some of the more outre songs provided by an increasingly erratic John Lennon; unsurprisingly, it was the latter opinion that was deemed too much for the target audience, and Ragni and Rado agreed to replace the exchange with a dance number where Spider-Man showed his disapproval by taking off his shirt and screaming at the sky.
Despite the title, Spider-Man wasn’t the only Marvel character to appear in the show. Mr. Fantastic, the Thing, Professor Xavier and Captain America all made cameo appearances, with Cap demanding that he be replaced by a native American to truly personify America’s spirit before breaking down and weeping. In a final scene that many thought unnecessary, Peter Parker learned that while we were all beautiful people, the planet was about to be eaten by Galactus and so everyone should live life as if every day was their last, a lesson followed by a reprise of Hair’s infamous “everyone gets naked and has a love-in on stage” finale.
With music written by The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian, Spider-Man opened in early 1969 to rave reviews. It was only when Stan Lee visited the show and realized what had happened to his beloved and, by this point, much-licensed characters that he sued the show’s producers for slander, libel and words he’d never heard in the Bible and managed to get the show closed and expunged from the public’s memory (That last part came from a deal with Mephisto. You don’t want to know what he whispered in his ear).
To this day, you can occasionally find small underground revivals of the show in rep theaters across America, closely followed by those responsible for such revivals mysteriously disappearing and never being spoken of again.
Razzle Dazzler
While many are familiar with the origins of Marvel Comics’ Dazzler - Namely, a Hollywood producer, record executive and Marvel Comics editor got drunk in a bar one night and decided to make a superheroine who could be played in a movie by Donna Summer and have records released in the real world, but then everyone sobered up apart from the Marvel editor - far fewer know the true story behind Jim Shooter’s Dazzler The Movie graphic novel, in which Dazzler falls for the most thinly-veiled Frank Sinatra analog that you could legally get away with, gets fat (except she doesn’t), starts smoking and then realizes that she’s not going to do it anymore. Or something. As you can tell from its inclusion here, it was originally going to be a Broadway musical.
The 1980s were a weird time for Marvel Comics. As the company grew in stature, it started looking for new outlets with which to unleash the creativity that had resulted in such books as Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, The West Coast Avengers and New Mutants. Sure, there were the Saturday morning cartoons like Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends and The Incredible Hulk, but Shooter - the company’s gargantuan editor-in-chief at the time, and a man who’d gotten his start in the industry at age 14 and therefore had no experience of the real world - was convinced that there had to be more. Before too long, the publisher was working with toy manufacturer Hasbro to co-create the Transformers and GI Joe toylines in a deal that would see them make absolutely no money whatsoever from the subsequent multi-million-dollar movies each franchise would generate, but that wasn’t enough for Shooter. He wanted mainstream.
It was a wish that almost came true. As anyone who’s seen respected documentary The Muppets Takes Manhattan knows, the Big Apple is full of con artists pretending to be Broadway producers, men who’ll “love” your idea as long as you can invest a certain amount of money in the production yourself, just to “get it started.” Sadly, James Winston Shooter turned out to be as good a judge of character as Kermit T. Frog, and so it was that he invested the entirety of Marvel Comics’ profits in the promise of a Dazzler Broadway show that he, he had been informed, would have to write by Monday and, if possible, include a starring role for the “producer”’s good friend Frankie Sinatra. With stars in his eyes and ants in his pants, Shooter turned out a script in record time, only to discover that the producer had disappeared with the money, leaving the editor-in-chief with the best thing he’d ever written - Well, in his opinion, but bear in mind that this is the man who created Star Brand - and a bankrupt company. What could be done?
The answer, according to Shooter, was to turn the script into a comic, and show the world what comics were really capable of. It was the 1980s, after all, and books like Maus, Raw and American Flagg were showing mainstream critics just what the medium could really do, so why not blow them all away with the newly-renamed Dazzler: The Movie? Shooter knew that only the graphic novel format would suit such a groundbreaking book, and that it deserved the best art team possible - but, sadly, they weren’t available, so he went with Frank Springer and Vinnie Colletta. Rushed into production to save Marvel from years of financial woes that would involve the publisher being bought and sold all over the place before finally having to declare bankruptcy, Shooter saved himself from guilt and thoughts of foolishness over his actions by knowing that this book, more than any other, would define the cutting edge of comic storytelling for years to come.
The rest is history.
Spider-Man: Turn Off The Electricity, Please.
And so, finally, we come to the most recent casualty of the war between comics and Broadway, Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. Those involved with the production have claimed that they don’t know what went wrong, but I think it’s fair to say that “Spending all of your $40 million budget six months before the show’s supposed to open” and “Hiring movie actors with no Broadway experience” should probably be warning signs of some kind. Also, that name - which, in case the Scrabble buffs at home haven’t worked it out yet, happens to be an anagram of “This Show Is A Terrible Idea,” only with some other letters.
It’s hard to say whether or not this final failure will convince the world of that business we call “show” once and for all that superhero musicals are a bad idea - As you read this, Warners are working on The Wonder Woman Look-At-Those-Gams Revue for a late 2012 opening, featuring the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes as Diana’s Amazon high-steppers, after all - but we can all hope so. Although, if any Broadway producers happen to be reading this, I do have a script for a Green Lantern show that would knock your socks off. Just picture it: Thirty-six dwarves, painted blue, singing in harmony about needing to impose order on the world…
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Content © Graeme McMillan, 2008-2009.
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