TT: Julie Taymor’s complaint

The ex-director of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is still making news, and the news she’s making is the subject of my “Sightings” column in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
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Blame it on Twitter. So says Julie Taymor, who claims that she got fired from “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” because unhappy audience members who saw the show in previews took to social media in droves to complain, spinning a web of negative buzz that ultimately led to her dismissal as the show’s director.
“Twitter and Facebook and blogging just trump you,” Ms. Taymor said at a recent meeting of the Theater Communications Group. “When you’re trying to create new work, and you’re trying to break new ground and experiment, which seems an incredibly crazy thing to do in a Broadway environment, the immediate answers that audiences give are never going to be good.” She added that the producers’ decision to rewrite the book of “Spider-Man” based on the input of focus groups was a mistake: “It’s very scary if people are going more towards that, to have audiences tell you how to make a show. Shakespeare would have been appalled.”
Ms. Taymor got one thing right: It’s crazy to experiment on Broadway, especially if you’re doing it with somebody else’s $70 million. But the rest of her lament was alternately self-serving and ill-informed, as anyone familiar with the history of New York theater could–and should–have told her.
Let’s start with the self-serving part. Ms. Taymor seems to think that her attempt to create a groundbreaking work of theatrical art was sabotaged by a horde of philistines who just didn’t get it. Er, how’s that again? “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” was, and remains, a commodity musical about a comic-book character. No matter how well they’re done, commodity musicals are not high art. Even if they’re supremely artful, like Ms. Taymor’s “The Lion King,” they’re still applause machines whose main function is to make pots of money for their backers.
As for the alleged culpability of social media, it’s true that Twitter, Facebook, and the Broadway-oriented message boards have accelerated word of mouth to the speed of light. It’s also true that innovative artistic ideas need time to be perfected–and to be assimilated by those who are seeing them for the first time. And social media definitely spread the word about the problems of “Spider-Man” early on, though much of the sharpest criticism was written not by furious fanboys but by thoughtful commentators who, like Chris Caggiano, author of the theater blog “Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals,” are at least as smart as the best print-media critics.
All this notwithstanding, the truth is that Broadway hasn’t been changed all that much by Twitter….
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Read the whole thing here.