HAHA LOL Remember that time at the dinner table on Thanksgiving when your uncle pretended he was about to make an hilarious joke, but instead he jabbed you with a condescending comment about the sentence structure in your recently published memoir?
Oh. Wait. That wasn’t Thanksgiving. And it wasn’t your uncle having a go at you. No. It was yesterday. And it was Broadway’s former Green Goblin, Patrick Page, taking swipes at scribe Glen Berger while doing a ‘dramatic reading’ of an excerpt from his tell-all Song of Spider-Man.
No, but seriously. What the fuck was going on up in there?! Was this supposed to be a joke?
Because before we even hit the minute mark everything had fallen apart. Things went from “OMG, the Spider-Man team is totally in on the joke of their own fraught existence! This is genius!” Directly to “Holy shit. This isn’t funny, it’s mean.”
Page went from simply reading for us — so faux-earnest and resonant that it’s hilarious — to judging the material for us, too. And he was judging it harshly — sneering at Berger’s sentence structure and commenting on his use of italics.
The tone had shifted.
But… how? How did Patrick Page, such a champ through the whole Spider-Man process — greeting fans outside cancelled shows, vamping to save everyone’s lives while computers spluttered to a halt and actors dangled from the rafters, behaving graciously in the press — end up here?
Was this his choice? Or was he directed to act this way? Did the production team — all clearly in on the joke — just not hear how things were sounding? Or was this petty nastiness the whole point? Am I losing my mind? And would this have been better, or worse, if it was someone besides Patrick Page, who we hear Berger paints like a hero in the book?
Mostly I’m just left with a thousand questions. And a bad taste in my mouth. Which is shame, because this could have been so, so fun.
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