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Ex-'Spider-Man' director Julie Taymor in LA to talk about show
Julie Taymor on stage at 'Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark' Broadway opening night at Foxwoods Theatre on June 14, 2011 in New York City with The Edge of U2, Bono of U2, and the show's directors.
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Ex-'Spider-Man' director Julie Taymor in LA to talk about show
Three months after producers fired her as director of Broadway’s $65 million musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” Julie Taymor is set to talk about the experience for the first time at a Los Angeles theater conference on Saturday. The talk, which is not open to the public, will be hosted by Roger Copeland, an Oberlin College theater professor.
Copeland wrote a long article in American Theatreabout Taymor last year
"I’ve tried to imagine what it would be like to have your work become the butt of jokes every night on Leno and Letterman and Colbert," he said.
Many others in the media — and at last Sunday’s Tony Award ceremony — made sport of Spider-Man’s technical problems, cast and crew injuries, and cost overruns — which was in some ways a first for the theater community. "This seems to be the first theater production of the Twitter age where you’ve got people attending the earliest preview performances, five minutes into the production, tweeting online their reactions," he said.
Copeland says Taymor’s version of the show in previews included ambitious concepts. He liked the second act’s dark images of danger that seemed to loom from every screen, even though many critics considered those elements pretentious and out of control.
"To me it was like a really rich fever dream and there was this wonderful metaphor for New York City post 9/11," he said.
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