Fire Alarms Systems

If you were haven 't after the massive disaster that the Broadway production of the Spider-Man: Turn Off the DarkYou 've missed a massive train wreck in slow motion. Julie Taymor, the original person behind the effort is fired in March and finally about the scathing reviews of the show has got everything together (apparently speaking is the only reason to go see the show, hoping to catch someone gets hurt be). Apparently it 's not their fault, the fault of all other writers, actors, musicians, etc. No, no. You see, it 's all Twitter' s fault. Obviously with people writing bad reviews on Twitter, overreacted to the producers:

Break their silence on "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," the Broadway musical from which it was released in March, Julie Taymor criticism implied her former producers on Saturday afternoon to audience focus groups said that the rise of Twitter and blogs for instant theater criticism shows damage ...

"It's very scary when people go more to the to the audience telling you how to do a show," she said. "Shakespeare would have been horrified. Forget it. It would be impossible, this works because there is always something that people do not like to come."

[...]

"Twitter and Facebook and blogs just trump you," Ms. Taymor said during a moderated discussion at the annual meeting of the Theatre Communications Group, an umbrella organization of regional and nonprofit theaters. "It is very difficult to create. It is incredibly difficult to be in a shot glass and a microscope like that."

Good, good. It turns out that not only Taymor is not very well judge the quality of this particular play, but it seems pretty ignorant about history. Clive Thompson reminds us that the audience in Shakespeare's time, didn 't quiet type their opinion about the games they see on the Internet, they were talking about him now:

Shakespeare's audience was far more boisterous than are patrons of the theatre today. They were loud and hot-tempered and as interested in the happenings off stage as on. One of Shakespeare's contemporaries noted that "you will see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by the women, such care for their garments that they be not trod on . . . such toying, such smiling, such winking, such manning them home ... that it is a right comedy to mark their behaviour" (Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, 1579). The nasty hecklers and gangs of riffraff would come from seedy parts in and around London like Tower-hill and Limehouse and Shakespeare made sure to point them out:

These are the youths that thunder at a playhouse,
and fight bitten apples; that no audience but
the tribulation of Tower-hill or the limbs
Limehouse, their dear brothers, are able to endure.
(Henry VIII, 5.4.65-8)

In addition, Thompson also points out that the audience for theater in New York City haven 't always so nice and pointed at the famed Astor Place riots, as the anti-UK sentiment in New York City at the time caused audience members start to happen "loudly express their displeasure with boos and hisses" while Shakespeare 's play, which about a possible riots:

It seems that some fans bitch about a crappy production, which seemed like a bad idea from the start seems pretty tame in comparison, Julie.

Permalink | Comments | E-mail this story