Will all the to-do about Broadway's ill-fated Spider-Man musical, an arena show called "Batman Live" has launched in the United Kingdom under the global pop radar -- and according to at least one member of the press, delivers on the circus spectacle that was part of the Spidey show's raison d'etre. Although I disagree with this critic's characterization of the seminal Tim Burton "Batman" films (I thought the first half of the first one was edgy and great), Sam Jones of The Guardian had some enticing things to say about the Bat-spectacle that he saw in Manchester (for the full review click here):
"Fortunately for its young audience, Batman Live has more in common with the comics and Tim Burton films than graphic novels and Christopher Nolan movies. Despite a huge set that presents Gotham as a hellish metropolis, jagged and malevolent of skyline, and dirty and dark of street, the production has, for the most part, reined in the more unpalatable aspects of sociopathic vigilantism. And so the figure who strutted across the vast stage was a sanitised Batman, a crimefighter who prizes justice over revenge; a Dark Knight rendered a paler shade of black.
"There was, however, still plenty to thrill and chill the audience.
"Where else would a lively circus trapeze act find itself bookended by the murders of pères Batman and Robin?
"Or a hi-tech sweep around the subterranean depths of the bat cave be followed by nightmarish visit to Arkham Asylum, where the Scarecrow holds court and the strait-jacketed inmates hang, on chains, from the ceiling?
"And that's to say nothing of the flirty, leather-clad Catwoman who embraces our rubber-costumed hero in Gotham's museum of modern art while panting like a moggie in a microwave. And the Penguin chews the scenery as if coated in pilchard paste and quacks 'Penguins mate for life" into Catwoman's ear.'"
