Spider Nonsense

Michael Schulman in this week's New Yorker wonders if people are flocking to the Spider-Man Broadway play less in the hopes of seeing classic theater, and more in hoping somebody busts their ass:

Matt Clements, a cameraman from midtown, had come to the show with his girlfriend. “She wants to see blood,” he explained.

The girlfriend, a lawyer named Carol Barbeiro, didn’t deny it. “It’s like Formula One,” she reasoned. “You want to see the car crash.” She added, “We like to go to Rockefeller Center to watch the ice-skaters fall.”

I would assume that of course that's why they're going; a bigger question to me would be how the fuck did this get play (a MUSICAL, to boot!) about a teenager turning into some creepy web-crawling superhero get put on in the first place? And it's THE most expensive Broadway production ever, at $65M? How did this happen? THIS is the kind of play people are looking to shell out $200-$300 to go see? Comic book heroes? Really?

I'm no expert on the theater. Duh. I've never even been close to a Broadway play. But I would like to think that if one day I was priviliged enough to go, I'd spend the entire time totally confused, baffled by all the symbolism I was missing, constantly asking my companion "WHAT'd he say??!!!" and in general thinking "wow, these people are so much smarter and classier than me!!, and that the sentence "oh yeah, I saw that in the cartoon" would not once pass my (perfectly sculpted, btw) lips.

But hey, that's me. Maybe I'm a theatre snob.