Author: Mike Gold

After an infinite number of delays, the Wonderful White-eye Webster will be swinging his tunes on Broadway at last.

Why am I not thrilled? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because the idea of a Spider-Man musical is stupid. Maybe because the Superman musical sucked. Maybe because Spider-Man 3 was too much of a musical for comfort. Or maybe because it’s called Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.

Directed by Julie Taymor (The Magic Flute, Salome, Titus Andronicus and, oh yeah, The Lion King) and written by Taymor and Glen Berger, the Spider-Man musical will sport toe-tapping tunes by Bono and The Edge, evidently because Elton John was busy. It stars Reeve Carney in the lead, with Jennifer Damiano as Mary-Jane and Patrick Page as Norman Osborn and, of course, The Green Goblin.

What, you were expecting the otherwise unburdened Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Willem Dafoe? No such luck. If you were expecting Rachel Wood and Alan Cummings, they bailed out of this thing some time ago.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark opens at the Foxwoods Theatre,
formerly known as the Hilton Theatre, on December 21; previews start November 14. Ticket prices for this $50,000,000 extravaganza have yet to be announced, but the going rate these days for seats on Broadway is about $125 – $135 per. Take a family of four to Spider-Man after dinner and you’ve spent close to a grand.

You’ll be shocked to learn they’ve got a web-site.

Creator/producer Russell T Davies has started serious work on fourth season of Torchwood. Right now, that means doing his writing bit – and gathering the other writers for the 10-episode season. His team lacks nothing in heroic fantasy street cred.

According to the Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan, joining Davies and returning Torchwood writer
John Fay will be John Shiban (Breaking Bad, Supernatural, The X-Files), Jane Espenson (Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy), and friend of ComicMix  Doris Egan (House, Smallville, Tru Calling, Dark Angel). That’s one hell of a writing staff.

Despite the presence of five writers, the season is expected to be tightly woven together, more along the lines of the third season’s Children of Earth five-parter than the first two seasons, which featured single-episode dramas.

Once Davies has fleshed out the new characters, filming will begin in North America around the first of the year. This new season is being co-produced by the BBC and by Starz, and will be run in the United States next summer on the Starz premium channels.

John Barrowman and Eve Miles will be returning as Captain Jack Harkness and Gwen Cooper, respectively. It will be set at Torchwood’s
North American operation, and Barrowman will no longer be the sole American in the cast. The Doctor is not expected to make an appearance in this series, but one should not rule out Captain Jack returning to Doctor Who in the next season or two.

No word on the return of the weevils as of yet.

UPDATE

According to Zap2It, Russell T. Davies told a press tour that “Torchwood picks up a while after the events of ‘Children of Earth,’ but still deals with Capt. Jack’s state of mind after those devastating events… A new character, CIA agent Rex Matheson (who has yet to be cast), will serve to introduce new audiences. Rex has no idea what Torchwood is and has to investigate. We also have a watch analyst at the CIA called Esther. The two become embroiled in the Torchwood legend. 

“The Welsh setting still features in a really significant way,” Davies continued. Gwen Cooper’s “story will take place in the U.S. but also very much in the U.K.” Davies also noted that Cooper’s husband and baby will be in the story, but James Marsters will not be in the next season.

He further noted that since Torchwood is on a premium cable network, it can have nudity and sex scenes but, as they always say, only if the story demands it. Right. Hello!!! We’ve seen the first three seasons of Torchwood! 

Just when you thought everybody who wanted to was already publishing comic books, here comes The Tea Party!

The first three issues of Tea Party Comix have hit the Internets, and if you enjoy subtle humor, well, you’ll be disappointed. However, if you’re looking for blatantly racist comics with a dash of anti-Jewish sentiment, this is the place for you.
Three 40-page collections of parodies of classic American comic book covers
have been published – with the original trademarks intact, such as, you know,
Superboy, Batman, and Thor.

Guys, you might wanna take on Obama and the commies, but
if you’re actually going to take on the lawyers at Disney and Warner Bros, then I actually feel sorry for you.

Each issue depicts a vision of President Obama that make minstrel show advertising look like handbills for the Black Panther Party. He’s doing all those things that keeps the paranoid right up at night: death panels, illegal immigrants taking over the nation, even Obama choking the life out of the “poor little neo-con,” Richie Rich.

That last one’s my favorite.

Political satire is hard to define and even harder to produce, and it has to maintain the ambiance of reality to work. Not only is this crap lacking in perspective, it’s also lacking a sense of humor. Normally
I’d give you the links so you can see for yourself, but for this one, forget
it. Go Google.

 Some tea baggers have disavowed these books, and at least a few have declared them plants from the left-wing commies. 

Now that’s funny.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out who’s made his second fantastic comeback in seven months.

Last Christmas Robert Downey Jr.’s [[[Sherlock Holmes]]] was great fun, featuring a contemporary approach
that actually had a lot more to do with the original stories than the subsequent movies and teevee shows. I’m looking forward to the sequel.

Last week, the BBC debuted its new series of [[[Sherlock]]] teevee movies, created and produced by [[[Doctor Who]]] showrunner Stephen Moffat, who also wrote the pilot. He took the great detective and set him in contemporary times.

Yeah, I know. 
As Rocket J. Squirrel famously stated, “But that trick never works.”
There’s nothing new about this: Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock battled Nazi spies during World War II. We watched Moffat’s Sherlock strictly because of my overwhelming enthusiasm for Moffat as a writer, and we weren’t disappointed. It was a non-stop thrill ride with a perfectly obsessed
Holmes deploying cell phones and nicotine patches in his exhibitions of genius.

As Sherlock, actor Benedict Cumberbatch was right on the
money: intense, possessed, and brilliant. He’s a bit like Moffat’s Doctor Who,
Matt Smith, although he’s actually older and less restrained. Evidently, he
turned down an offer to play Doctor Eleven because he didn’t want his face on lunch boxes. Still, it doesn’t take a fanboy to wish for a crossover.

His comrade-in-sleuthing Dr. Watson was admirably portrayed by Martin Freeman, of [[[The Office]]] fame (that’s the original one, not NBC’s Americanized version). His performance reminds me a bit of John Simm’s work on [[[Life On Mars]]]; that’s high praise in my book.

The updating went well. Everybody is acting as though it
is really 2010 and the cast is expanded to reflect current reality. It’s been a
long time since I had so much fun watching a teevee pilot, and I highly
recommend it. It will show up stateside on PBS’s [[[Masterpiece]]] whenever they feel like running it.