Theater review by Helen Shaw
It’s a surprise, when you think about it, that we aren’t up to our eyeballs in superhero musicals. Our culture so loves its Aqua-, Bat- and Supermen, it seems like going comic would be a license to print money. Maybe musical-theater writers have been scared off by the debacle of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, or the mild response to Fortress of Solitude, or the chilly reception all those years ago for It's A Bird…It's A Plane…It's Superman! It certainly took guts (and a special effects budget) for playwright John Logan and composer-lyricist Tom Kitt to wade into those treacherous waters with Superhero, now at Second Stage.
The protagonist is Simon (big-voiced Kyle McArthur), a character heavily derived from Peter Parker: a white New York teenager with an artsy bent, sad because of a dead father and a crush on a girl (Salena Qureshi) at school. While he doesn’t want to talk about any of that with his mother, Charlotte (Kate Baldwin), he is intrigued by their mysterious neighbor, Jim (Bryce Pinkham). After Simon sees Jim—seemingly just a shy bus driver—punch a fire hydrant flat (kudos to illusion designer Chris Fisher), the kid ickily persuades his mother to hit on Jim and try to winkle out his secrets.
Despite Simon’s noisy anguish, the heart of the show is actually this tentative romance between the hardworking widow and the secret-keeping übermensch in 4B. The pair doesn’t evince much chemistry, but their music papers over that; the twining of Baldwin’s rich, expansive voice and Pinkham’s penetrating tenor provides a seduction that isn’t otherwise there. Since Jim is basically a mumbly version of Green Lantern—powerful alien, great responsibilities, etc.—Charlotte is the show's one truly flesh-and-blood creation in a world of cutouts from other comic traditions. This is the musical's secret identity: a portrait of down-to-earth single-mom desperation. The world may be ending, but what do you do when your boyfriend won’t tell you what he does for a living? Or when you realize you can’t believe your own son?
This solid central concept notwithstanding, most of the show seems underprepared and overbalanced. Simon is drawing a character called the Sea Mariner, but that storyline goes nowhere, as does a gesture towards addressing global warming. There’s one piece of clever choreography by musical stager Lorin Latorro and director Jason Moore, in which the underused secondary characters all put on copies of Simon's red hoodie and scamper around the stage. They become multiple iterations of the "same" boy in a time-lapse sequence of Simon running, like a three-dimensional version of the panels on a comic book page. The show could use a dozen more moments like it.
Book writer Logan’s imagined world is thin, so most of the characters remain sketches. And Kitt, capable of writing heartbreakers like Next To Normal, composes a series of repetitive, un-marvelous numbers that slide out of your memory almost as you’re hearing them. Frankly, the bar in this genre has gotten pretty damn high. Superhero sometimes seems to believe that it is daring to subvert superhero dogma ( “It’s not like in the movies”), yet its core point is simply that the ability to help can be a terrible burden. This isn’t a radical thought; it’s the overt theme of nearly every superhero comic and film of the last fifteen years. What does seem radical is the choice to sit and listen to a single mother sing her heart out. Miraculously, Baldwin—whose voice is confident, conversational, and astonishing—sings your heart out while she’s at it. If everybody has a superpower, that one is hers.
Second Stage (Off Broadway). Book by John Logan. Music and lyrics by Tom Kitt. Directed by Jason Moore. With Kate Baldwin, Bryce Pinkham, Kyle McArthur. Running time: 2hrs 15mins. One intermission.
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