Human Failing and Triumph in "Spider-Man"

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In Mastering the building block of strategy, management consultancy McKinsey & Co. speaks less about content, and more about process, of strategy.  Conversation within the corporate team is critical, in particular debate and argument:

Getting executives to grapple with the issues can be a messy process, and the debates may be quite personal. After all, formulating good strategies typically involves revisiting fundamental and deeply held beliefs about a company’s past and future, and people tend not to shift their views without a fight.

From Glen Berger's account of the Broadway staging of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the creative team may not have had enough of that grappling. Conversation is a two-way street: At any given moment, (a) at least one person has to initiate, allow or facilitate some talking, and (b) in turn one person has to begin talking.  Director Julie Taymor apparently fell short on the former:

Early on, Ms. Taymor, whom the alternately enthralled and smirking Mr. Berger suggests may have won a few too many prizes for being “uncompromising,” falls hopelessly in love with an idea that has few other fans. She clogs “Spider-Man” with a back story about the myth of Arachne that is based on little more than the comic book panels that everybody skips in order to get to the fun stuff. In Mr. Berger’s telling, she is the show’s impossible, transfixed mom-as-Fury.

Berger himself did little of the latter:

Scenes in which Mr. Berger wrestles with what the show’s story should be, or in which he tells his collaborators that their bad ideas are bad ideas, are curiously absent. “Privately, I wondered if maybe narratively it wasn’t the best choice,” he writes at one point (and thinks at many others). Wait, why privately? To hear him tell it, he was star-struck and intimidated — and also shut down by Ms. Taymor, who, he frets, saw him as an obedient dialogue typist rather than a full partner. But years later, when asked by the writer who supplanted him on the show, “If you disagreed with Julie so much from the very beginning, why didn’t you just quit?” he didn’t have much of an answer. He still doesn’t.

The grappling that McKinsey highlights must be constructive, but it didn't even surface sufficiently enough for it to have any meaningful benefit in the case of Spider-Man.  Whatever bubbled up was shut down, internalized, and left to tick in quiet arrhythmia.  

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Most musicals are birthed, legitimately, in hope, but “Spider-Man” was conceived in cynicism and born out of deadlock. When it finally opened in 2011, all that its quarrelsome creators could agree upon was that things had gone terribly wrong. That such a craven lunge at commercial success was masterminded by people with little native instinct for musicals and what Mr. Berger calls a “nausea for disposable pop culture” — an odd qualification for creating a comic-book adaptation — might have offered a clue that trouble lay ahead.

Reference: A Spider-Man Caper Full of Broadway Characters, All of Them Real.

In Fantasy and Reality Converge on "Spider-Man," I marveled at the engineering and technology behind the production, and acknowledged, too, that the complexity of staging and the fallibility of people were a recipe for a Broadway disaster.

It's a shame that this human failing had to happen for what I believe was an awesome idea.  Seeing a superhero on stage live must be a thrill to any child-cum-adult.  Alas, the Spider-Man creative team needed a trusted, overarching figure who could surface the underlying tensions, facilitate constructive grappling, and reconcile things adequately enough.

Still, while there are cost overruns, Spider-Man apparently has raked in nearly $200 million of as last summer.  So there is clearly a large audience for this, two years in the running now.  So the production cannot be a categorical Broadway disaster.  I'd say it is also a human triumph.