Dear Outdoor Community Theater Back Home That Keeps Sending Me Facebook Invitations to Plays I Don’t Want to See,

I have fond memories of you from a few years ago. You were so popular (still are, in fact), people from all over New Jersey would line up hours before one of your shows just to buy tickets. Once we all parked our cars in the lot next to the theater, we were stuck there for the rest of the day. After all, it was only a matter of time before someone parked behind us, then had someone park behind them, and so on. We had no choice but to bring picnic baskets and spend the day in the park, or walk over to the nearby mall to kill a few hours until the show started, and we did so with big smiles on our faces. I have to admit — you are a huge slice of Americana, the perfect setting for the sun to set on the cheeks of thousands of children as they sit outside and eat ice pops. In fact, my entire family was so enamored by you, we went from lowly patrons to employees. My two sisters spent summers working in the costume and prop shops in the afternoons, then worked the wings as stagehands at night.

And I mean, you’ve probably forgotten by now, but one summer not too long ago, I was a performer.

Let me refresh your memory, because I assume my headshot is nowhere to be found in the theater anymore: you decided you wanted to put on a production of Thoroughly Modern Millie and needed two Asian guys to play Chinese-speaking henchmen. I was performing a bit in college and was talked into auditioning by a friend of mine. At your final callbacks for the roles, you ended up with me, a Taiwanese guy named Jeff, and a short Jewish guy whose eyes were as big as egg yolks. You were stuck with me, and you knew it, but we ended up having a blast. Our show together was widely recognized as the best one you put on that summer and for quite a while, you had me thinking I could be an actor for a living someday.

Then, as you probably expected I would, I soon found out there aren’t many roles for Chinese guys who flirt with being 5’9 only in certain types of shoes. I’ve since moved to New York City and hold no grudges, but you really did have me going for a little while. And in retrospect, your alumni are pretty impressive. Plenty of the performers I acted alongside are now on Broadway, on national tours, on television. Your infamous “theater pet” graduated from Princeton and ended up on The Amazing Race and Spiderman, The Musical (don’t get me started on that shit). Hell, even I went on to get an MFA, albeit in creative writing.

I’m sure all of us would say that our experiences with you, however extensive or limited they might have been, played a big part in motivating us to dream big. But that’s the thing: I have bigger fish to fry now. Not to be a dick or anything, but I’m knee-deep in research for a book I have no book deal for, I’m living paycheck-to-paycheck in a neighborhood I can barely afford, and I spend most of my free time wondering how the hell I am going to pay my credit card bill. I haven’t had a friend appear in one of your shows in years, and can see a Broadway play for not a whole lot more than what you charge. What on earth makes you think I am getting on an hour-long train to see a Broadway quality show?

That said, please accept this as a formal request to be taken off the mailing list you’ve created via your Facebook page. I would just unfriend you, but you’d never notice. And besides, it’s been a while. Just wanted to let you know that, contrary to whatever rumors might be circulating around town, I have not died.

One last thing – you’re doing Annie this summer? For fuck’s sake, have some dignity.

Sincerely,

Richard Moy

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The highly anticipated The Book of Mormon didn’t quite provoke the highly anticipated shower of controversy we were told to highly anticipate. In the months leading up to its debut, the show indulged the predicted criticism by dismissing it. Its website touted reviews calling it “blasphemous,” “boundary-pushing,” and “crudely provocative.” Trey Parker, one of the show’s directors/ writers/ composers, publicly declared “We’re just not scared… And not like in an ‘Awesome, we’re fearless’ way. We’re just reckless.”

Yet it seems Parker, Stone, and Lopez (of South Park & Avenue Q fame) had little to fear. In fact, the show made headlines last week when some of its LDS audience members were thrilled to have been “treated with affection” and declared themselves “pleasantly surprised by how incredibly sweet it was.” But how surprised should they have been? As Slate’s Christopher Beam pointed out, South Park has a long history of articulating conservative values with a decidedly liberal panache. And The Book of Mormon is in keeping with this tradition. In a brilliantly executed, entertaining production that crafts complicated and sympathetic protagonists, the show skillfully weaves a narrative that leads its audience to what is really the only reachable conclusion and then, in a final act almost religious in its blissful ignorance, concludes precisely the opposite. It seems the trio just wasn’t fearless enough to divine that while missionaries can be very, very good people, they are doing a very, very bad thing.

In a genre not known for its subtlety, this musical stayed away from stereotypes, portraying its two missionary heroes as deeply earnest, deeply flawed, and often deeply conflicted about their own beliefs. The young, idealistic, mismatched pair comes from a world that has thus far been far smaller than the isolated village in Uganda where they are sent on their first mission.

Before seeing The Book of Mormon, I remarked that for religious people, death isn’t scary. Life is. After the musical number “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” I was singing a different tune. (Namely, that one.) The story humanized a religious minority that is often subject to mean-spirited parody and immature, unclever humor, and instead showed its audience how struggling to live by such a strict code can be overbearing and torturous for young people.

The irony, of course, is that these young people have been sent halfway across the world to impose this code on others. But when they attempt to do so, they are faced with far more immediate and pressing concerns than their religious text is equipped to solve. Upon hearing a missionary describe the deep-seated spiritual ennui that results from a life lived without Christ’s love, one villager mistakes this condition for the deep-seated physical discomfort that results from having maggots in one’s scrotum. “You should see a doctor about that,” the missionary suggests. “I am the doctor,” he responds.

We are eventually led to believe that doctrine, however fantastical, can be useful to struggling people when treated as a metaphor. Stone described this musical as being partly borne out of the questions “Do goofy stories make people nice? What if, in their goofiness, these stories somehow inspire that in the right way. Is that a social good?”

But doesn’t the practice of proselytism undermine the value of religion as social good? Any humanitarian effort requires some kind of framework in order to truly affect lasting change, but imposing a religious framework is dangerous and arbitrary. It’s based on the illusion that your stories are best suited to solve the problems of others. But everyone’s religion has evolved to provide them with the support and comfort that their environment requires. How can someone armed solely with his scripture claim to know the best way to earthly salvation? Isn’t it cruel in its recklessness to promote the notion that serious problems can be solved through religious belief, which after all can’t fill empty stomachs or exterminate the maggots in one’s scrotum?

And if the point is that religion really can save the destitute, then how far is it really from the argument that religion, or a lack thereof, is what damned them in the first place? Somehow, the three most politically incorrect people on the planet have found a politically correct way to rehash the age-old argument that the world’s wretched suffer because they have yet to discover the power of Christ.

Stone may be right when he suggests that “At the end of the day, if the mass delusion of a religion makes you happy, makes your family work better, is that bad or good?… I’m not sure the veracity of the stories is that important.” This is true only when mass delusion achieves the desired outcome. But can any religion effectively produce that outcome? If scripture is revered enough to have that kind of impact, it cannot be flexible enough to change with social mores and scientific progress. There’s an underlying danger that the show rightly touches upon, but far too playfully. Aren’t today’s parables tomorrow’s doctrine?

I was entertained, not insulted, by the crude boundary-pushing of The Book of Mormon. But these are all complicated questions that deserve complicated answers. And there is no holy book malleable or sophisticated enough to provide them. If anything was blasphemous about this play, it was the notion that there might be.

How does one “turn off the dark”? (See video above for an example of how to turn on the dark.) Is this question answered in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the long-suffering Broadway musical that is still only its preview period after almost a season’s worth of technical mishaps, a couple of them gravely injurious? Maybe the critics have the answer. Regardless, the critics have spoken — more than a month earlier than they are supposed to (opening day is scheduled for March 15).

A number of major newspapers chose to run reviews of the show in today’s editions. Understandably, the musical’s rep was not happy. But maybe the critics are — not without snark — doing the musical a favor by potentially putting the spectacle to bed before it can disappoint an untold number of paying customers, as these writers seem to unanimously claim it will.

Herewith, a roundup of the reviews, because critics are seldom rewarded for their ability to be critical. This, if nothing else, is a nice lesson in criticism.

Ben Brantley, New York Times: “This production should play up regularly and resonantly the promise that things could go wrong. Because only when things go wrong in this production does it feel remotely right — if, by right, one means entertaining.” Things did go wrong during the performance Brantley saw, and a cast member chose to ad-lib a joke about the musical’s mishaps during the “mechanical difficulties.”

Elizabeth Vincentelli, New York Post: “A breathtakingly beautiful scene is followed by a laughable one. The flying sequences can be thrilling, as when Spider-Man first takes off over the orchestra; other times, they look barely good enough for Six Flags…”

Chris McNulty, Los Angeles Times: “[T]he investors of ‘Spider-Man’ have inadvertently bankrolled an artistic form of megalomania.”

Jason Zinoman, Slate: “Imagine the gall it takes to have Spider-Man wrestle a cheap-looking blow-up doll in the most expensive musical in history. Or to have an almost incoherent book so witless that what passes for a joke is a character misunderstanding the difference between “free will” and Free Willy. Then there’s the Bono-and-the-Edge anthem about shoes, and the more mundane issues such as inconsistencies of character …”

Peter Marks, Washington Post: “Story-wise, ‘Spider-Man’ is a shrill, insipid mess, a musical aimed squarely at a Cub Scout demographic. Looking at the sad results, you’re compelled to wonder: Where did all those tens of millions go?”

Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News: “The show reportedly cost $65 million and that’s clearly gone into mechanics, hydraulics and aerial rigging. It seems only 10 cents has gone into the confusing story and humorless dialogue.”

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune: “In essence, Taymor and Berger tie themselves in knots trying to shove the inherently dualistic nature of melodrama into a psychological hexahedron of their own creation.”

There you have it. Enter the psychological hexahedron at your own risk.

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First, a prediction: Next February when the three drag queens in the 1994 road film-turned-stage musical Priscilla: Queen of the Desert pull up on Broadway — after hugely successful spins in Australia and on London’s West End and a North American test drive that began last month in Toronto — gays, straights and everyone in between will turn out in droves to welcome them. Multiple Tony nominations are possible and a long, lucrative engagement is probable.

When it comes to gay-themed entertainment for the straight masses, a good drag queen is as close as you can get to a sure thing — and the more, the merrier. Straight-up gay men with active sex lives still can be a tough sell — note the as-yet-unreleased-in-the-U.S. I Love You Phillip Morris, starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as jailbird lovers (latest promised arrival date: December 3)  — but squeeze them into women’s clothing, paint them with garish make-up, and give them some funny jokes, and everyone’s laughing right along.

Back in the ’90s, I met up with a friend in Chicago for a three-day drag pageant. Yes, a drag pageant. Though I’ve never been particularly interested in drag, I went to Chicago because I love the Windy City, and I saw it as an opportunity to spend quality time with a good friend while working in a totally new experience.

Surprise! Not only was the talent on display at the drag pageant just as impressive as anything you’d see televised on Miss USA or Miss Universe, but it involved so much more than lip-synching to Garland, Streisand, Cher and Madonna. And the turnout was massive. Yes, the crowd was predominantly gay and lesbian, but there was a significant number of straights in the mix, including the mother of my friend.

By the time I left New York City in 2006, drag no longer had quite the drawing power in the U.S. that it had in the ’90s when Rupaul was a major star and Wigstock was one of the biggest events of the year, but it’s still a big part of gay culture in Argentina and in Australia. In Buenos Aires, most gay clubs and bars feature drag on the entertainment menu, and on some dancefloors, drag queens and transgendered patrons are nearly as populous as muscle studs.

The gay scene is similar down under. Perhaps it’s a lingering after-effect of the Oz-set Priscilla movie (which spawned the unfortunately titled U.S. copycat To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, the following year), but in nearly every gay joint in Melbourne and Sydney, there’s yet another visual spectacle — big hair, big make-up, big personality — cracking jokes onstage and mouthing the words to Kylie Minogue’s “Get Out Of My Way” like it’s some kind of drag mantra.

But what happens when cross-dressing and gender-bending are no longer played strictly for laughs and/or visual effect? Despite the long-standing popularity of actors in drag (from Some Like It Hot to Bosom Buddies to Tootsie to Mrs. Doubtfire to Tyler Perry’s Madea films), and the steady presence of gays and lesbians in prime time and film (Annette Bening is currently the Best Actress Oscar frontrunner for her sapphic turn opposite Julianne Moore’s in The Kids Are All Right), transgendered characters (like Priscilla‘s saddest drag queen — natch!) remain largely on the outskirts of entertainment, showing up every few years to remind us that they, too, exist.

Occasionally, they’re played by actors and actresses who are too impressive for Oscar to ignore: Chris Sarandon and Al Pacino as, respectively, a pre-op transsexual and his boyfriend planning to rob a bank to pay for the operation in 1975′s Dog Day Afternoon; John Lithgow as a transsexual woman in 1982′s The World According to Garp; William Hurt, the first winner (Best Actor) for a transgendered role, in 1985′s Kiss of the Spider Woman. In the ’90s, Jaye Davidson, a man, received a nomination for portraying a transsexual woman in The Crying Game, and Hillary Swank won the first of her two Oscars for playing transgendered teen Brandon Teena in 1999′s Boys Don’t Cry. Most recently, Felicity Huffman scored a nod for her performance as a pre-op man-to-woman reunited with the son she never knew she had in Transamerica.

On TV, they’ve made sporadic appearances over the years, in sitcoms like The Golden Girls and Ally McBeal, in South Park and Family Guy, and in Normal, a 2003 HBO drama starring Emmy nominee Tom Wilkinson as a middle-aged dad who stuns his wife (Jessica Lange, also Emmy-nominated) by announcing that he wants to have sex-reassignment surgery. America’s Next Top Model featured transgendered competitor Isis King a season or two ago. Chris O’Donnell played a transsexual who dated Charlie as a woman and slept with Charlie’s mom as a guy on Two and a Half Men, Rebecca Romijn costarred as Alex Meade-turned-Alexis Meade on Ugly Betty, and several years ago, Broadway star Jeffrey Carlson played Zoe, a transgender rock star on All My Children.

Still, as was the case with gay and lesbian characters until recently, transgender characters — and certainly the majority of the ones mentioned above — are generally defined by their gender identity and the situations that arise from it. Modern Family features a gay couple doing “straight” things like going to work, bickering and getting their kid into a good pre-school, but where’s the hunky crime scene investigator who just happens to have once been a girl? (Transgender TV and film portrayals are almost always man-to-woman, though, according to the American Psychological Association, roughly 1 in 30,000 biological females is transsexual compared to 1 in 10,000 biological males, so Chaz Bono — formerly Chastity and the son of gay icon Cher — is part of a significant community.)

What an intriguing twist it would be to come across a transsexual lead living a normal life where gender-reassignment is not the crux of the character, or used for comic relief or as the source of angst. Someday it might happen, but for now, it seems about as likely as new American Idol judge Steven Tyler thinking “Dude looks like a lady” to himself as next season’s winner is announced.

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Benjamin Walker (center) and the company in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

Joan Marcus

It isn’t news that America’s political past was as contentious and chaotic as its present. But the point isn’t often squeezed for its satirical juice as thoroughly as it is in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, the purportedly “emo” bio-musical currently playing at Manhattan’s Public Theater. (Twice-extended, the show’s run currently ends May 30.) For writer/director Alex Timbers and composer/lyricist Michael Friedman, the wave of popularity on which Jackson rose from Tennessee backwoodsman to Indian-fighting, expansionist general to the Presidency inaugurates our national habit of investing politicians, rather than policies, with a near-Messianic capacity to realize “the will of the people” – especially politicians who can sell themselves, as Jackson did in the 1820s, as “outsider” alternatives to a corrupt, out-of-touch Washington elite.

Or, as this Andrew Jackson calls them, “croquet-playing cock-gobblers.” In Brian Walker’s portrayal, Old Hickory is by turns a petulant teen, a man of action, and a heartthrob in packed jeans: as the groupies at his rallies have it, “We want to fuck you…and also, we hate the tariff!” He’s a rock star, in other words, a conceit that underlies both the show’s score and its primary theatrical mode, which might be called allegory-by-anachronism. The 19th century White House is outfitted with speakerphones and sleek, boxy furniture; Congressmen hand out Valtrex to their constituents; “like”s and “brah”s pepper the dialogue. The device’s wittiest payoff comes with the entrance of Martin Van Buren, John Quincy Adams and other Beltway insiders – over a century before there was a Beltway – who vogue against neon and a pre-recorded Spice Girls track like so many Prada models. (Washington is techno; the frontier is “indie.”)

There’s also no shortage of cartoon violence. Early on, Jackson’s parents keel over to the thwack and twang of offstage arrows, inspiring young Andrew’s animus toward Native Americans. A narrator in a motorized wheelchair – played hilariously by Colleen Werthmann as a cross between The Church Lady and Kids in the Hall’s Cancer Boy – gamely offers historical context, until Jackson tires of having his story told by someone else and picks her off with his rifle. “Sometimes you’ve got to shoot the storyteller,” the ensemble sings. “Sometimes you’ve got to kill everyone.”

Jackson’s military exploits, and the “clearing” of Northern Georgia, among other tribal lands, take place offstage, but his personal life supplies all the sanguinity promised by the title, as the “cutting” kink – more goth than emo, really – shared by Jackson and his initially bigamous bride Rachel Robards is presented in Grand Guignol (or Sweeney Todd) fashion, with gouts of stage blood. That scene also leads to the score’s gamiest song, “Illness as Metaphor,” which ends with the line, “Susan Sontag’s dead, so I guess her cancer wasn’t metaphorical after all.” Complaining that the joke is tasteless only proves that one’s buttons have been pushed, I suppose, but it’s also clunky – the night I saw the show, the audience merely groaned – and distractingly remote from the show’s main concerns.

With this kind of clusterbombing of satirical targets, it’s fair to question the show’s coherence as political theater. “Sound familiar?” moments abound, without adding up to a one-to-one correspondence with current events. The mass appeal of Jackson’s feckless conviction is meant to bring to mind Dubya’s famously “incurious” character; but when his first presidential contest is thrown to the House of Representatives, who hand the office to “legacy” John Quincy Adams, the parallel to Bush v. Gore casts Jackson in the latter role. Even co-creator Timbers notes in an online interview that, over several years of workshop productions, the show has successively “felt like” a comment on Bill Clinton, George Bush, Mike Huckabee, and Obama. (Surely Sarah Palin could be added.)

The company in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Joan Marcus

Of course, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is “about” all of these figures, and none. When the show gives itself a chance to pause for breath, it puzzles over broader questions about the relative merits of representative and direct democracy that are (at least) as old as Rousseau and as current as the latest batch of California ballot initiatives – conundrums it can hardly be expected to solve in ninety minutes. The core of the play may be an extended Oval Office sequence in which Jackson comes to realize that the “people” – White House tour-groups of idolatrous gawkers – have no cohesive idea of what their own “will” might be, vis-à-vis the “Indian Question” of the day, or any other. Sound familiar?

Michael Friedman’s music takes on the difficult task of scaffolding the show’s potentially ramshackle structure. The arrangements, performed by an onstage power trio (with cast members strapping on additional guitars as needed), are appropriately direct, managing to approximate rock-club intimacy and volume in a theatrical setting. That said, the lyrics’ juxtapositions of suburban angst (“Why wouldn’t you go out with me in high school”) and frontier rage (“I’m pretty sure it’s our land anyway”) sometimes feel strained, laboriously emphasizing connections made more effectively by Walker’s performance.

As to whether this is the world’s first “emo” musical, let’s just say that dedicated Rites of Spring fans are not the intended audience. The show’s signature sound – call it “Glee-mo” — isn’t thrashy but clean-edged, anthemic, and insistently if sardonically upbeat, underlining major-key hooks with ensemble choruses (“Populism, yeah, yeah!”) and full-band breaks (WHOMP – “This is the age of Jackson!”). Friedman’s compositional chops are apparent in some clever contrapuntal passages and harmonic turns, especially in the stand-out “The Saddest Songs,” but that’s just evidence that he’s plugged into the same feedback loop between musical theater and the pop-rock mainstream that allows Fall Out Boy guitarist Patrick Stump to confess his love for My Fair Lady’s “Almost Like Being in Love” and brings Green Day’s American Idiot to Broadway.

A full evening of this kind of meta-rock might be numbing, and the score wisely turns down the amps at strategic intervals, with a patter song on electoral machinations for Van Buren and his cohort, and a dark reworking of “Ten Little Indians” that serves as comment on Jackson’s dishonorable (and eventually dishonored) treaties with the Creeks and Chickasaws. If that sounds glib, the show’s culminating tableau is anything but, as a ghostly frieze of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears rises up while an older Jackson struggles to justify his career. In fact, the introspective tone of the show’s last fifteen minutes – and its closing song, the acoustic “Second Nature” — is at odds with the irreverence of much of what has gone before. Then again, it isn’t surprising that a show that questions the means by which Jackson pursued national unity would undervalue the dramatic kind; in a way, these shifts in tone reflect the creators’ acceptance of the final verdict on its central figure’s legacy handed down by the “Storyteller,” who reappears as a puffy-sweatered angel near the show’s end: “You can’t shoot history in the neck.”

Information on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the “circus rock ‘n’ roll drama” whose Broadway premiere has now been pushed back to the fall, is scarce so far. What we know now, though, is that it’s directed by Julie Taymor, of Across the Universe and The Lion King fame; that its songs were written by U2′s Bono and The Edge; that its costume design is by Eiko Ishioka; and that it will involve Spider-Man fighting a host of villains: Electro, the Rhino, the Green Goblin, Carnage, Swarm, the Lizard, and Swiss Miss.

Wait–who was that last one? Swiss Miss is a new addition to the Spider-Man rogues’ gallery. Her Ishioka-designed costume has been described as white dominatrix gear, and apparently involves corkscrews and rotating knives. She’s also a genuine anomaly in the world of Spider-Man, who’s been fighting bad guys for close to half a century now. And they’re almost inevitably bad guys. Spider-Man has no villainesses from comic books interesting enough to put in a musical because, historically, his relationship with costumed villains is all about his alter ego Peter Parker looking for a replacement father and failing to find one. That doesn’t seem to have been an intentional theme–but it’s present anyway, and it’s turned up in the three hit Spider-Man movies, too.

The central canon of Spider-Man stories is the forty-odd comic books about the character by artist Steve Ditko and writer Stan Lee that were published between 1962 and 1966. An endlessly inventive and very odd cartoonist, Ditko gave Amazing Spider-Man a sense of constant motion and trembling tension. He had a remarkable knack for action and grotesquerie and urban landscapes and broad comedy. His spindly, contorted figures inspired the style of every subsequent Spider-Man cartoonist. And he drew almost all of the series’ villains as old men–much older men than Peter Parker, men old enough to be his father.

Peter’s father, in fact, is conspicuous by his absence in those early stories: he wasn’t named or even mentioned directly until 1968. As the first Spider-Man story begins, Peter is a teenage boy, living in Queens with his elderly aunt and uncle. Uncle Ben is murdered within a few pages, and the disaster that drives the rest of Spider-Man’s career is Peter’s realization that he could have saved his second father’s life.

After that, Peter’s blown it. Again and again, Spider-Man finds himself fighting men who represent one model or another of bad fatherhood. The Tinkerer, Electro, Dr. Octopus and the Lizard are all scientists, like Peter, but instead of mentoring him, they turn on him. (Before director Sam Raimi’s plans for Spider-Man 4 were scrapped a few months ago, he had been pushing for the Lizard and Electro to appear in it.) Kraven the Hunter is the bad father as alpha male, bloated with his own machismo and his need to prove his superiority. J. Jonah Jameson, the editor of the Daily Bugle, where Peter works, is a furious, pompous, unsatisfiable father who parcels out precious crumbs of respect amid torrents of abuse.

And then there’s the Green Goblin, Spider-Man’s chief enemy–but it wasn’t clear what kind of father he was until Ditko left the series. In their first issue together, Lee and new artist John Romita put the crown on the series’ bad-daddy motif. The Goblin, they revealed, is the wealthy, successful Norman Osborn, who seems at first to be a good father to Peter’s friend Harry–but turns out to be the worst kind of father, the kind who passes along his legacy of violence and lies to his son. The Green Goblin went on to murder Peter’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy a few years later. (By that point, Gwen’s own father, police captain George Stacy, had been killed off as well. In Spider-Man stories, bad fathers never stop coming back, but good fathers are doomed.)

Spidey occasionally got to fight women: he tussled with Medusa, a supporting character from Fantastic Four; he had a run-in with the Black Widow, who dropped in from the pages of The Avengers. (“How can I fight her?” he asked on that issue’s cover. “She’s a female copy of MYSELF!”) But he didn’t get an actual recurring villainess to call his own until the Black Cat first appeared in 1979. (In more recent comics, they’ve developed what can only be described as an enemies-with-benefits relationship.)

That brings us back to the curious case of Spidey’s new hot-chocolate-inspired, castrating-weapon-wielding adversary. It’s hard to imagine a Broadway extravaganza like Turn Off the Dark not featuring a woman as one of its central characters; unfortunately, the 48-year history of Spider-Man comic books simply doesn’t offer many options. Taymor and Ishioka have created an option of their own, and it sounds like Swiss Miss will be a visual spectacle in the tradition of Ditko and Romita’s inventions. But it’s the painful undercurrents of masculine identification in Spider-Man’s early battles–the sense that he was fighting the substitute fathers he could never again have–that made them more than just a spectacle.