Throwing Shit

I am no fan of musical theater; like most opera fags, I actively disdain it. But the Lincoln Center Theater revival of South Pacific is playing in Pittsburgh, and it's quite lovely, although admittedly buoyed enormously by David Pittsinger, an accomplished operatic bass-baritone who plays the role of Emile de Becque. South Pacific was my grandmother's favorite musical (my grandfather served in the Pacific), and if its themes of racial tolerance seem a bit ham handed, well, the heart is in the right place, and the tunes are certainly hummable. It's a big production and technically quite impressive, yet it's well-scaled for touring, which is where the real money is made in the theater business.

Compare then to this hilarious failure, Spiderman: the Musical, karma's revenge on Julie Taymor for ruining the Met's Magic Flute after they inexplicably retired David Hockney's beautifully restrained production design in favor of a light-up green Rubik's cube and a sensibility somewhere north of Jim Henson on a straight IV drip of cocaine--without, I hasten to add, even a shadow of Henson's good humor or basic human empathy. Taymor is also the mad genius behind Disney's The Lion King, a perennial blockbuster stage musical that begins with an impressive parade of animals and then grinds the audience into a dry grit for eight hours of Music By Elton John, Lyrics by Tim Rice, all in service of a bad rewrite of Hamlet. She also made a superviolent film version of Titus Andronicus, the worst thing Shakespeare ever wrote. (The Wikipedia article on the play has an un-cited quote by Harold Bloom: the only appropriate production of Titus would be directed by Mel Brooks. I doubt he really said this, and yet I hope he did.) Soon her version of The Tempest will be released. That may be the best thing that Shakespeare ever wrote, line for line, and I expect that, like Spiderman, her production of it will stick to the wall.