Ouch! Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark 2.0 reviews NOT coming up roses for Spidey

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/spider-man-opening-delayed-yet-again/?hp




November 4, 2010, 8:36 am
‘Spider-Man’ Opening
Delayed Yet Again
By PATRICK HEALY


A building-size banner covered the front of the Foxwoods Theater in
New York, where preparations are under way for the opening of the
“Spider-Man” musical.


The $60 million musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the most expensive and technically elaborate Broadway show in history, will delay the start of performances this month by two weeks and open in January instead of Dec. 21 because more work is needed on it, two theater executives with knowledge of the plan said Thursday.

The executives, as well as people working on or plugged into the production, described a tremendous amount of creative commotion behind the scenes in interviews this week. Flying sequences were still being developed and the music, special effects and scenes of plot and dialogue were still largely in separate pieces even though performances were originally set to begin on Nov. 14.

The director, Julie Taymor, a Tony Award winner for “The Lion King,” has spent chunks of the 11-week rehearsal period experimenting over and over with the flying stunts and other special effects rather than preoccupying herself with deadlines, those involved with the production said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they had either signed nondisclosure agreements or feared being fired if their names were published.

 The poster for the “Spider-Man” Broadway musical.The show, which has music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge of U2 (both in their Broadway debut), will now begin previews in late November and open in the first half of January. The lead producer, Michael Cohl, will set the exact dates on Thursday, the two executives said. Mr. Cohl, the other producers and the creative team are partly banking on the delay’s stirring interest in the big-budget special effects among the news media and especially theatergoers, who thus far have shown modest interest in buying tickets, according to the two executives and others involved in the production.

The show’s advance ticket sales so far total about $8 million in hard cash with an additional $2 million to $3 million in unpaid group orders – amounts that would be healthy for the standard $10 million Broadway musical, but low against the $60 million capitalization and the likelihood that the show will cost upwards of $1 million to run each week.

On Wednesday the producers and creative team were unable to present all of the two dozen flying and aerial maneuvers for safety inspectors from the New York State Department of Labor, requiring the inspectors to return before performances can begin. A department spokesman, Leo Rosales, said that the production had prepared only several of the maneuvers to demonstrate for the inspectors. The state agency must sign off on all of the sequences as safe before performances can begin.

It has opened a separate investigation, as has Actors’ Equity, into one flying maneuver in which actors are launched from the back of the stage like a slingshot. Two actors were injured performing that sequence this fall, with one breaking both wrists when he landed on the lip of the stage.

“Spider-Man” was originally supposed to have begun performances back in February, but the production shut down for months in 2009 after the original producers could not raise the money to capitalize the show, which at the time was estimated to cost around $40 million. Mr. Cohl, a prominent rock-concert promoter for U2 and other bands, came on board as lead producer a year ago and has since raised the money.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/theater/24spider.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all


'Spider-Man’ Starts to Emerge
From Web of Secrecy
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: November 23, 2010


The opening moment of the musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark."


At left, from left, the show’s creators: the composers the Edge and Bono, the director Julie Taymor
and Glen Berger, who wrote the book with Ms. Taymor.



Nine years in the making, the moment came on Saturday to try running through the first act of the new musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” without stopping. As the band struck up an ominous tune that wailed like an ambulance siren, the enormous stage curtain rose to reveal a young woman dangling under a mock-up of the Brooklyn Bridge. Above her appeared a masked man, clad in skin-hugging tights, red and blue and all-American.

We know him, but we may not know him, at least according to the musical’s creators. In their eyes, Peter Parker (and his alter ego, Spider-Man) is a character on a spiritual quest to reconcile human frailty with the possibility of greatness. It’s an idea that so enraptured the director, Julie Taymor, and the composers, Bono and the Edge, of U2, that they have built a $65 million (and counting) show around him, replete with perspective-skewing scenery and flying sequences that are unprecedented for Broadway.

“Peter Parker is the one,” in Ms. Taymor’s words, “who shows us how to soar above our petty selves.”

If he can soar, that is. Four minutes into the Act I rehearsal, a “Spider-Man” crew member announced on his mic, “We’re gonna hold.” It was the first of several pauses to deal with technical glitches, mostly in transitions between scenes. By the dinner break, only 15 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour show had unfolded. And the first scheduled performance (this Sunday at 6:30 p.m.) was just eight days away.

In the last week, the nervous creators of the show, the most expensive in Broadway history, have begun to see the hand-drawn sketches, the digitally animated videos, the comic-book-inspired costumes come to life — to see “Spider-Man” “Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning,” said Bono, leaning forward in Row A on the aisle, as Reeve Carney, playing Spidey, rehearsed onstage. “This feels like it.”

Yet time is running out.

At the creators’ last dinner on Friday night before Bono and the Edge left for a U2 tour in Australia, Bono said bluntly that the show “won’t get out of the gate” and have a chance to catch on with audiences if technical problems persist, as they have in rehearsals.

Still, he and the others did not dwell on mundane matters like flying harnesses. They are all artists who dream big, who compare the show’s themes to great literature and philosophy.

“We’re wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, ‘Wings of Desire,’ Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones — the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you’re separate from others,” Bono continued. “If the only wows you get from ‘Spider-Man’ are visual, special-effect, spectacular-type wows, and not wows from the soul or the heart, we will all think that we’ve failed.”

Achieving all those wows demands a profound double duty for Ms. Taymor, because many moments of pathos come in scenes where special effects are also in play. Slowly and only recently, she has been unveiling aspects of the show — both the story line and the effects — partly to counteract the negative press that has come with an oft-delayed and stratospherically costly production.

“Take the ending of the show,” Ms. Taymor explained. “We’re going for what will be an intimate moment, but also one that will reflect some of the technical spectacle, and we will need to figure out how to stage that.”

Bono murmured, “Figure out how to stage that?” He barked out a series of coughs for comic effect: “Nine days!” He coughed. “First preview!” Cough. “Nine days!”

Ms. Taymor said: “Oh, nice of you to say, Bono, you’re out of here in Australia, and we’ll be here strapped with this thing. I’m just gonna drink my martini, man.”

Bono observed: “The scope of this thing is just hard to grasp sometimes. It just doesn’t fit into the normal —— “

“Broadway mishegoss,” Ms. Taymor said.

“Right,” Bono said. “And trying to blend comic books — which is a very American contribution to the world of mythology — and rock music and Broadway into this thing of art that we don’t even have a word for.”

For Ms. Taymor, delaying preview performances further — they were supposed to begin on Nov. 14 — is not an option. “Delaying just costs too much money, too much money, too much money,” she said. The show is scheduled to open on Jan. 11.

Every week’s delay eats up to $2 million in lost revenue and, especially, higher expenses for technical rehearsals that require additional crew members. But Ms. Taymor said she hoped that those who bought tickets to preview performances, many of which have been offered at reduced prices, will “get to enjoy the art of making theater, as well as the magic of it.”

Ms. Taymor has shielded that magic, as well as most other details of the show, from public view for years now. In recent weeks most attention for the show has dealt with the flying sequences, which New York State safety inspectors have been evaluating (as required by law). That inspection is expected to conclude shortly.

Like the first “Spider-Man” movie, the show begins as an origin story, though Ms. Taymor has reached for Greek mythology in creating a brand-new villainess named Arachne, based on the woman who was turned into a spider by the goddess Athena and doomed to spin webs in the shadows for eternity. The introduction of Arachne (Natalie Mendoza) features some of the first breathtaking images, as a giant loom of interwoven silks takes form on the stage, and Arachne descends over the audience on a platform.

As with the human-controlled puppets in her hit musical “The Lion King” and the dreamlike sequences in her movies “Across the Universe” and the forthcoming “Tempest,” Ms. Taymor’s artistic imagination hatches to life in Arachne.

“What I really wanted to do, and what the ‘Spider-Man’ movies and comics haven’t done, is go to this absolutely fantastical, mythic place that is out of time, somewhere between reality and the dream world,” she said.

And where the fits and the starts have occurred. At the Act I run-through, as Ms. Mendoza’s Arachne began descending, her spider-legged costume came undone because of a malfunction. Ms. Mendoza was hoisted back aloft; about 20 minutes later, the scene unfolded without incident.

Such moments are the price of striving for a new sort of Broadway production, which was the high bar that the creators set for themselves at their first meeting in the winter of 2002. “We all agreed that there was no point in doing this unless it was new, groundbreaking, something that made it worthwhile for someone to see Spider-Man onstage instead of just getting the DVD for the first film,” said the Edge, U2’s lead guitarist.

At meetings at their various homes in New York, Los Angeles, Ireland, and France, the four creators began improvising dialogue, lyrics and whole scenes.

Bono, for instance, suggested that they base the character of Norman Osborn, an environmental scientist who becomes the villainous Green Goblin, on Ted Turner, the billionaire entrepreneur whose eccentricities had stayed with Bono after meeting at Mr. Turner’s rustic getaway in Georgia. “Bono described this fast-talking, always-thinking, brilliant and strange Southerner, and you’re always looking for vivid characters who will pop on the stage,” said Glen Berger, who wrote the show’s book with Ms. Taymor.

The musical’s Osborn/Goblin (Patrick Page) has the gray hair and Southern accent of Mr. Turner and shares his concerns about the environment (hence, here, the “green” angle). “I hope Ted will like it,” Bono said.

The Marvel comics became more than a source of storytelling inspiration: they contributed to clever moments in the pop-up design of the production, as when Peter Parker’s classroom at a Queens high school unfolds into view. In another sequence, in the side-by-side homes of Peter and his love interest, Mary Jane, the characters in one household freeze like two-dimensional figures in a comic book, while those in the other house interact in a three-dimensional conversation.

“Part of the balance we’ve been trying to strike is how ‘comic book’ to go and how ‘human’ to go,” Ms. Taymor said toward the end of dinner. “What helps is that of all the superheroes, Spider-Man is the Everyman. His spiritual and psychological sides give us so much to explore.”

After kissing Bono and Edge goodbye as they prepared to depart for Australia, leaving the first performances in her hands, Ms. Taymor looked at the open door that would lead back to the theater.

“Every day,” she said, “I just wish there was more time to go even deeper on the story, the acting, the ideas at the heart of the spectacle.”

[Meryl]

This sounds really cool.  I don't go to musicals much, but this one sounds worth checking out! 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

This sounds really cool.  I don't go to musicals much, but this one sounds worth checking out! 

Tick...tick...tick...tick...!

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Reeve Carney:
the new Spidey (on Broadway)!

Reeve Carney
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reeve Carney (born April 18, 1983) is an American singer-songwriter and actor.




Early life
Carney was born and raised in Southern California. Brought up in a musical family, he learned to play the piano before he took his first steps. His mother couldn’t afford guitar lessons while Reeve was growing up, so she took him to blues clubs. When Carney was eight years old, he sang at Avery Fisher Hall in Manhattan, and later got to sing with Michael Jackson. At the age of sixteen, he got the chance to perform at B.B King’s Blues club.

Musical career
Carney's band, appropriately called Carney, consists of Reeve, his brother Zane Carney on guitar, Aiden Moore on bass and Jon Epcar on drums. Carney released their debut album, Mr. Green Vol. 1, in May 2010. The group attributes their sound to their very own idols such as Walt Disney, The Beatles, and Tim Burton.

Reeve has toured with musicians such as Jonny Lang, The Black Eyed Peas, The Pretty Reckless, Athlete and The Veronicas. He says that he is a musician first, that music is his passion, and that all he wants to do is make great art.

Current projects
Reeve is currently residing in New York City, where he is preparing to star as Spider-Man in the new musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, scheduled to open in November 2010. He is working with director Julie Taymor as well as musicians Bono and The Edge.

Taymor first discovered Reeve at one of his band's shows, after which she asked him to audition for her film The Tempest.  The Tempest  will be released by the end of 2010. Reeve continues to play shows, mostly in New York, with Carney. The rest of the band is currently rehearsing as part of the pit band for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.


Website: www.reevecarneymusic.com

[Monika]

this all sounds so crazy that it almost has to be good

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Good luck, everybody--and be safe!

 




http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/curtain-to-rise-on-spider-man/?hp

Curtain to Rise
on ‘Spider-Man’
By PATRICK HEALY
November 28, 2010, 2:12 pm

The marquee of the Foxwoods Theater,
where “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”
begins performances on Sunday night.

Ready or not, here comes “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

The most expensive show in Broadway history, at $65 million, or more than twice as much as the previous record-holder, “Shrek the Musical,” “Spider-Man” will hold its first preview performance at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday before more than 1,900 paying theatergoers, reporters, and several of the musical’s nervous producers and investors.

They will witness the latest attempt to run “Spider-man” from start to finish without stopping, after several failed outings over the past week, when the director, Julie Taymor, had to pause to work on scene transitions and some of the show’s unprecedented technical and special effects. Most new Broadway shows have at least one dress rehearsal before an invitation-only audience, but the producers canceled plans for one to give Ms. Taymor more time to work.

Ms. Taymor expects the first performance to stop at some point to work through technical glitches, executives involved with the production said on Sunday. In addition, the final 10 minutes are not fully finished and may not be entirely staged, according to the executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Ms. Taymor and the producers had forbidden public comment on the backstage work.

“Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” a musical version of the Marvel Comics superhero story, has attracted enormous media attention and public interest by Broadway standards, in large part because of the money and the talent involved. U2’s Bono and the Edge signed on to create the show nine years ago and have written a full-length score, their first for Broadway. Ms. Taymor soon joined as a Tony Award winner for one of the last musical spectaculars to open on Broadway, “The Lion King.”

The complexity of “Spider-Man” – particularly its flying sequences over the heads of audience members – has also stoked curiosity as well as concern, after two actors were injured (one broke his wrists) performing aerial stunts this fall. And the show’s growing cost – it is likely to exceed $65 million in the end – has drawn attention given the economy and the difficulty of raising money to mount the show. The musical was originally supposed to start performances last January.

The show has been a work in progress since rehearsals began in August. A new ending was conceived in the last few weeks by Ms. Taymor; her co-author of the book, Glen Berger; and by Bono and the Edge. The ending involves a mixture of spectacular effects and intense, intimate moments involving the lead characters Peter Parker (played by Reeve Carney) and Mary Jane Watson (Jennifer Damiano). But 12-hour rehearsal days (though everyone had Thanksgiving off) have not been enough to deal with the show’s many technical elements and the new ending.

The producers had already delayed the latest scheduled start of preview performances by two weeks; Ms. Taymor has said that a further delay would be too expensive. The producers have also canceled several matinee performances in December to give more time to Ms. Taymor and the cast and crew to work on the show.

A spokesman for the production said on Sunday that the estimated running time was two and a half hours, but he acknowledged that he could not say with precision how long the performance would last. Ms. Taymor and the show’s lead producer, Michael Cohl, declined interview requests.

Halting a show midperformance during previews to fix problems; making changes during early weeks of paid performances; and tinkering with production numbers and finales are not unheard of with new and technically ambitious musicals. But most of this work usually occurs during tryout performances in other cities, where producers go to solve problems far from the eyes of Broadway. “Spider-Man,” however, is opening cold on Sunday evening at the 1,932-seat Foxwoods Theater because the producers decided an out-of-town run would be financially unfeasible.

Another new musical, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” opened cold on Broadway this fall. Several performances were paused because of technical problems, and the show lacked a finale while the initial one was reworked. “Women on the Verge” opened to largely negative reviews in November. “Spider-Man” is scheduled to open on Wednesday night, Jan. 11, 2011, with most theater critics’ reviews coming out the next day.

One threat to starting performances has been tackled: Safety inspectors from the New York State Department of Labor have signed off on the 27 flying sequences in “Spider-Man” without asking for substantive changes, the executives with the production said. The inspectors made their fourth visit to the Foxwoods Theater on Friday to assess the most technically complex flying sequences — some for the second time — and gave the green light to hold Sunday’s performance. The department’s approval is required by law for aerial stunts used in public performances.

The executives added that Ms. Taymor had not made any changes on her own to the major flying scenes, including an elaborate aerial battle over the heads of audience members (without a net) at the end of Act 1 between Spider-Man and one of the show’s villains, the Green Goblin.

Leo Rosales, a spokesman for the state Department of Labor, said in an interview on Sunday that the inspectors had no issues with the safety of the flying maneuvers or their sequence in the show. “We are set,” Mr. Rosales said.

“Spider-Man” has timed a major media rollout to the start of preview performances; the CBS news show “60 Minutes” will broadcast a segment about the musical on Sunday night, a rare feature on a Broadway show on that much-watched television show. The musical is also set to begin running two television commercials in the New York area on Monday; the commercials were created by Jacob Cohl, a son of the lead producer.

The younger Cohl is a filmmaker and photographer who previously directed the documentary “Salt of the Earth” about the Rolling Stones. The band has long worked with Michael Cohl as their lead concert promoter. Jacob Cohl and his crew have hundreds of hours of footage after filming for months at the theater, in rehearsal rooms, and at meetings including Bono, the Edge and Ms. Taymor. The footage is the property of the musical production. If “Spider-Man” is a hit, few doubt that the Cohls and Ms. Taymor, who is also a filmmaker, will spin a documentary or other film project out of the material.

Among those expected in the audience on Sunday night are Lesley Stahl, the “60 Minutes” correspondent on the “Spider-Man” segment, and Sean Hayes, the star of the Broadway musical “Promises, Promises,” according to the executives with the production. Bono and the Edge will not be in the house, however, because they are on tour with U2 in Australia until late December.

[Front-Ranger]

I second that!!

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/theater/29spiderman.html?hp


Lines for a First Look at ‘Spider-Man’ Musical
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: November 28, 2010


Eight-year-old Logan Eayres with his grandmother Ruth Cardace was the first child in the long line.



Chris Canales, 4, wore a "Spider-Man" T-shirt, sweatshirt and hat.


Eight-year-old Logan Eayres was the first child in the long line of ticket-holders for Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” on Sunday evening, and he needed only a split second to say why he was so excited to see the long-awaited musical about his favorite super-hero.

“He’s going to be swinging out over our heads,” Logan said, “and I want him to fall on me so I can bring him home.”

Logan and his grandmother Ruth Cardace, both of Valley Stream, Long Island, were among hundreds of people – most of them adults – who snaked along West 42nd Street for nearly a full city block as they waited to enter the Foxwoods Theater for “Spider-Man,” which opened Sunday night. Ms. Cardace had bought their third-row seats this fall for Logan’s birthday on Nov. 7; those tickets, like many held by Spidey-goers for the first performance, were originally for the first preview that was scheduled for Nov. 14, which was delayed until Sunday night because more work was needed on the show.

“We’ve been waiting for what feels like a very long time, so we’re extra-excited, aren’t we?” Ms. Cardace asked her grandson, who nodded enthusiastically.

A bit down the line was Billy Jackson, also 8, and his father, Scott, who had rearranged their trip from Cincinnati after the Nov. 14 performances was canceled; instead, they made a Thanksgiving outing to New York and caught the holiday parade and other attractions, though “Spider-Man” remained the climatic moment of the trip.

“He’s one of my favorite characters in the movies,” Billy said. Asked what he was looking forward to most, he said, “That it’s going to be good like the movies. And I’d like to see some flying.”

For costume bragging rights, no one could probably compete with 4-year-old Chris Canales, who wore a “Spider-Man” T-shirt, sweatshirt and hat, and said that he had a Spidey undershirt and underwear on, too. He came from Dix Hills, N.Y., with his godparents Bryan and Divina Salamone, who were also showing off some Spidey red for the musical, fo which they’d also purchased tickets several months ago.

“We told Chris that Spider-Man had gotten a little sick,” Mr. Salamone said, accounting for the production delays, “but now he’s better and ready to fight the bad guys.”

Among the adults in line was Chris McAvey, a 24-year-old “fan of Spider-man since the age of 5,” who bought tickets last winter when the performances were still scheduled to start in February 2010. Asked about his expectations for the night, he said, “Let me put it this way: For the time I’ve had to wait to see this, it better be good!”

[Meryl]

They did a piece on "60 Minutes" tonight about "Spiderman."  The set looks fab, the music sounds promising, and the flying is pretty high class entertainment. 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/11/no_one_killed_at_first_spider-.html

Actors Left Hanging
at First Spider-Man Preview
By: Lane Brown
11/29/10 at 09:45 AM

Success! Broadway's $65 million, actor-fracturing Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  made it through its first preview last night without any major casualties. The Bono-scored, Taymor-directed musical was, however, interrupted five times for technical difficulties, some of which left actors dangling above the audience as stagehands worked to ground them. But even after three hours and forty minutes, nobody had broken any wrists or feet.

So what did go wrong?

• The show started "24 minutes late" and included "few of the [planned] special effects." [NYT]

• It opened with a song, "Rise Above," from the show's eight-legged female character Arachne (Natalie Mendoza), but when she finished, "an apparent wire malfunction left her stopped in midair — where she remained for an embarrassing seven or eight minutes as stagehands worked feverishly to figure out the problem." [NYP]

• "Overhead stage wires dropped on the audience [and] scenery appeared on stage missing pieces." [NYP]

• A scene began in Peter Parker’s bedroom, but was "halted two minutes later ... apparently to free the lead actor, Reeve Carney, from an aerial harness." [NYT]

• At one point, Mary Jane was supposed to be rescued from the top of the Chrysler Building, "but part of the building was missing, and Mary Jane was nowhere in sight." [NYP]

• The night's biggest screw-up: At the end of Act I, Spider-Man was supposed to fly off dramatically over the heads of audience members. Instead, he was left dangling a few feet above theatergoers while stagehands leaped into the air, trying to grab his feet. "When they finally caught him, the stage manager announced intermission, and the house lights came on." [NYP, NYT]

• "A fifth stop an hour into Act II caused some theatergoers to walk out." [NYDN]

• Green Goblin–portraying Patrick Page's big number, which he performed on a piano, went "on ... and on ... as stage workers openly rushed around to fix faulty equipment." [NYP]

• Also, there were hecklers: "I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel like a guinea pig tonight!" "I feel this was a dress rehearsal!" [NYP]

All in all, not too bad!

‘Spider-Man’ Takes Off, With Some Bumps [NYT]

After many delays, 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' nets first Broadway preview to excited audiences [NYDN]

First 'Spider-Man' preview filled with problems [NYP]
.

[serious crayons]

Wow, somebody must have said "good luck" instead of "break a leg" or called it "Macbeth" instead of "the Scottish play." 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Wow, somebody must have said "good luck" instead of "break a leg" or called it "Macbeth" instead of "the Scottish play."  

Oh, gosh, it was me, Katherine, I'm to blame--I said 'Good luck' above within this very thread--sorry guys! (drops head in shame)

You know, Patrick Stewart says ( Macbeth ) rather than 'the Scottish play,' and IN the theatre too (!) but despite his name, he is a Yorkshire man, so I don't know.

Maybe actors should now call the production (at the Foxwoods Theater) the 'Arachnid play'  !

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

They did a piece on "60 Minutes" tonight about "Spiderman."  The set looks fab, the music sounds promising, and the flying is pretty high class entertainment. 

Here it is, Meryl--
Really good piece
with Lesley Stahl:

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1fLZ-P0ZOo[/youtube]

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Click photo:


This Week on "60 Minutes Overtime"

Overtime Original

Click photo:

Bono and The Edge: The Making of "Spider-Man"
Get a rare glimpse of two musical legends during their creative process. "60 Minutes" cameras capture U2's Bono and The Edge in the moment as they create songs for the highly anticipated musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark."



http://www.cbsnews.com/60minutesovertime#ixzz16mAFs54H

About 60 Minutes Overtime
60 Minutes Overtime is a web show that begins where the television broadcast ends. Each week, Overtime will air original web videos with new angles on 60 Minutes reports, conversations with correspondents, and revealing moments from our 40-year archive. After 60 Minutes credits roll on Sundays, continue the conversation here on 60MinutesOvertime.com

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Uh-oh.

 




http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/concussion-sidelines-spider-man-actress/?src=twt&twt=artsbeat




Concussion Sidelines ‘Spider-Man’ Actress
By PATRICK HEALY
December 3, 2010, 3:58 pm


 

A lead actress in the new Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” suffered a concussion at the first preview performance on Sunday night when, standing offstage, she was struck in the head by a rope holding a piece of equipment, a spokesman for the actress said on Friday. The actress, Natalie Mendoza, who plays the villainess Arachne, did not perform on Thursday night and is not expected to return before Tuesday.

Ms. Mendoza did perform at the second performance, on Wednesday night, against her doctor’s advice, said the spokesman, Shea Martin. A spokesman for the production, Rick Miramontez, said, “It was her choice, and she insisted on doing it.”

The show’s director, Julie Taymor, and the lead producer, Michael Cohl, were informed before Wednesday’s performance that Ms. Mendoza had a concussion, Mr. Miramontez said. The role of Arachne involves several flying sequences, including one in the first act where Ms. Mendoza is spun upside-down. Mr. Cohl would not comment and Ms. Taymor did not respond to interview requests by mid-Friday afternoon.

On Friday, representatives for the Actors’ Equity union and the New York State Department of Labor, which monitors safety in public performances, said they were looking into the accident.

Ms. Mendoza is the third actor in “Spider-Man” to be hurt working on the production; during rehearsals this fall, one dancer broke his wrists after landing incorrectly during a flying stunt, while another actor injured his feet doing the same stunt.

The actress did not report her injury on Sunday night; otherwise, Mr. Miramontez said, it would have been included in the stage manager’s post-performance report. The seriousness of the accident was also not clear; Mr. Martin said that she may have been hit by the equipment on the rope, as opposed to the rope itself, or that the rope may have been made by re-enforced materials. Ms. Mendoza, 30, is 5’6’’ tall with a slim, athletic build.

At some point afterward Ms. Mendoza saw a doctor — the cast had the day off on Monday — and, late Tuesday morning, she sent out a message via Twitter that simply said, “Concussion.” She informed the production on Tuesday that she had a concussion; the spokesman, Mr. Miramontez, said it was noted in the stage manager’s report for the Tuesday rehearsal.

On Wednesday, Ms. Mendoza told Ms. Taymor and the producers “that she strongly wished to perform” in the preview that night even though her doctor had advised against it, Mr. Miramontez said. The particulars of the discussion about allowing Ms. Mendoza to perform on Wednesday night remain unclear.

Ms. Taymor was in rehearsal on Friday and interview requests for her were pending with Mr. Miramontez and her personal publicist, Chris Kanarick.

On Thursday Ms. Mendoza fell ill, and the production announced that night that her understudy, America Olivo, was performing as Arachne through the weekend because Ms. Mendoza had a concussion.

Ms. Olivo is now scheduled to play Arachne until at least Tuesday night; she did not reply to an e-mail request for comment on Friday.

“Spider-Man” is the most technically complex show ever on Broadway, with 27 aerial sequences of characters flying and scores of pieces of moving scenery, some of which are among the biggest on a New York stage right now. Yet the show remains under-rehearsed: Ms. Taymor acknowledged in an interview in November that “the musical probably won’t be ready to do without stopping and fixing things in the first few performances.”

Performances had already been delayed by two weeks in November, at a cost of a few million dollars in ticket revenue and rehearsal expenses. “Spider-Man” has cost $65 million, more than twice as much as any Broadway show in history; it is scheduled to open on Jan. 11, 2011.

The actress declined an interview request made through Mr. Martin. He also declined a request to interview Ms. Mendoza’s doctor.

A spokesman for the state Labor Department, Joseph Morrissey, issued a statement in response to questions: “The Department of Labor’s agreement with the production says that if an accident or equipment malfunction happens as it relates to an aerial performance, we need to be notified. The production has explained to us the details of the accident. They also indicated that they have made changes to prevent this type of accident from happening again. We plan to follow up regularly to ensure that these modifications are adequate.”

Asked what changes had been made as a result of the accident to protect the actors and stagehands, Mr. Miramontez said that Mr. Cohl did not have specific details but “takes the issue of safety extremely seriously and everything is done to make sure that everyone involved in the show is safe and is knowledgeable about safety.”

[serious crayons]

Maybe actors should now call the production (at the Foxwoods Theater) the 'Arachnid play'  !

   The production is so plagued with disasters it's enough to give you arachnophobia.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

New York Magazine 's Year End Wrap-Up


A Very, Very Big Year
In 2010, over-the-top was often just right.

By Adam Sternbergh
Published Dec 5, 2010


If you were to gather the culture stars of 2010 in a room and ask them to retroactively pitch their biggest ideas, it would sound like an inmate’s meeting at an asylum for the delusionally grandiose....Yet if there was one thread that connected the highlights (and a few failures) of the last year, it was this: the Grand Gesture, the Big Gamble, the all-out Swing for the Fences....

How to Make a Splash
on Broadway
Estimated budgets of the year’s most expensive Broadway shows.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

 

Uh-oh.




http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/spider-man-opening-delayed-again/?hpw



‘Spider-Man’ Opening Delayed Again
By PATRICK HEALY
December 16, 2010, 1:58 pm



The lead producers of the new Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” have decided again to delay its opening night, now scheduled for Jan. 11, until sometime in February, two people involved with the musical said on Thursday. With preview performances now under way the delay is intended to provide more time for the creators to stage a new final number, make further rewrites to the dialogue and consider adding and cutting scenes and perhaps inserting new music from the composers, U2’s Bono and the Edge, who will resume working full-time on the show in late December.

The producers and creators are still weighing the extent of the changes that they believe the musical needs before theater critics see it during the week before opening night, according to the two people involved with the show, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the producers and their spokesman are supposed to make the only public comments. The spokesman, Rick Miramontez, declined to comment on Thursday.

Michael Cohl, one of the lead producers, is expected to announce the new date for opening night on Thursday or Friday, the two people said. It will be the fourth major delay in performances since January 2010, when previews were originally supposed to begin; the first two delays were due to problems raising money to mount the $65 million show, while a two-week delay in November, caused by the need for more rehearsal time, also pushed back the opening, which had been set for Dec. 21.

“Spider-Man” is one of the most highly anticipated shows on Broadway in years, given the talents of the director, Julie Taymor (a Tony Award winner for “The Lion King”), and Bono and the Edge, who are making their Broadway debuts, as well as the potential for a live musical about the popular comic-book superhero. Adding to the expectations is the show’s price tag, more than twice as much as “Shrek the Musical,” previously the most expensive musical ever.

Reflecting the view of some audience members who have criticized the show on blogs, Twitter and Facebook, Ms. Taymor and the producers have concluded that Act II has storytelling problems that need to be fixed. While Act I is a familiar rendition of Peter Parker turning into Spider-Man, Act II is largely the invention of Ms. Taymor and Bono, and includes some major reversals that can be hard to understand in the fast-moving show.

Bono and the Edge have been on tour with U2 in New Zealand and Australia since Thanksgiving; they have yet to see a performance of the musical, which they began working on nine years ago. They will be returning to New York before Christmas and are expected to become regular presences at the Foxwoods Theater through mid-to-late January, when they have to prepare for February concerts in South Africa. Bono and the Edge are not believed to be at work on any new numbers for the show, but the two people said that they might write some once they assess the show and huddle with Ms. Taymor.

Ms. Taymor and the playwright Glen Berger, who wrote the book together, have been inserting revised dialogue at almost every performance to clarify the action, with special focus given to Act II as well as the four characters who serve as a so-called Geek Chorus, comic-book devotees who serve as narrators. The two people involved with the show said that no decision has been made about hiring a script doctor to work on the dialogue and plot; some executives close to Mr. Cohl, the producer, have been urging him to bring in an outside set of eyes to work on the story. But the two people said that Ms. Taymor was fully aware that the musical has problems and had not been defensive about the criticisms of the storytelling.

Snags in the ambitious technical production have been largely smoothed out since the first preview performance on Nov. 28, when the show had to stop five times. Still, new elements are being added. At Wednesday night’s performance, for a scene toward the end of the show, a large net deployed to serve as a web where the villainous spider-woman Arachne and Peter Parker have their final confrontation.

Just pulling off that moment with the deployed net took a significant amount of time to plan, design and rehearse, the two people said; still to come is inserting a major final number, which is now in the works, but the two people said they could not guess how long it would take to perfect — one of the reasons for delaying the opening night.

The actress who plays Arachne, Natalie Mendoza, returned to the production on Wednesday night after a nearly two-week absence to recover from a concussion that she suffered backstage at the first preview performance, when a rope struck her in the head.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

 



http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/12/another_spider-man_turn_off_th.html


Another Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  Injury
By Bryan Hood
12/21/10 at 12:30 AM



The audience at tonight's performance of Julie Taymor's Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  was ushered out of the Foxwoods Theater after a performer was injured. Minutes before the end of the show, Spider-Man (reportedly an actor other than star Reeve Carney), Mary Jane, played by Jennifer Damiano, and some equipment, took an eight to ten foot fall into a pit. Almost immediately after, Damiano was heard screaming and an ambulance was called.

Shortly after the fall audience member Brian Lynch tweeted the following:

Spider-Man on Broadway. Stopped short near end. Someone took nasty fall. Screaming. 911 called. No idea what happened, kicked audience out

About an hour later, Lynch tweeted another update:

No joke. No explanation. MJ and Spidey took what seemed to be a planned fall into the stage pit. Then we heard MJ screaming.

Details are still sketchy as to what exactly happened, but reportedly the problem was a broken rope. This, of course, is not the first time a cast member has been injured during the production. A release from the show's press representative said the that the injured cast member seems to be okay:

"An actor sustained an injury at tonight's performance of 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.' He fell several feet from a platform approximately seven minutes before the end of the performance, and the show was stopped. All signs were good as he was taken to the hospital for observation. We will have more news shortly."

Having already had it's official opening delayed(for seemingly the umpteenth time) until February 7, one has to wonder what this latest mishap will mean for the seemingly cursed production.


COMMENT:

By msfabulous on 12/21/2010 at 1:11am

I was sitting in the front row of the balcony when I saw the actor slip off the ledge and fall thirty feet into the pit at the center of the stage.

There was a scream. A voice yelled "Someone call 911!". Then there was silence. A minute later, the stage was still dark. Then there was an announcement that the show would be delayed. A few minutes later, a second announcement that the performance would not continue. The lights came up.

The shocked audience slowly exited the theater. Everyone was concerned for the actor, many stayed to catch a glimpse of Spiderman to see if he was okay. He was carried out to the ambulance still in costume.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

 



http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/performer-is-injured-during-spider-man-performance/?hp






 
Actor Injured in Fall During
‘Spider-Man’ Performance
By DAVE ITZKOFF and HAMILTON BOARDMAN
December 20, 2010, 11:47 pm


An actor playing Spider-Man was injured during a performance of the
Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” on Monday night. Above,
an image from a video taken by a New York Times  reader.



A photograph taken by a reader showing a “Spider-Man” actor being
transported to an ambulance outside the Foxwoods Theater.


1:21 a.m. | Updated

An actor performing in the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” was injured during a performance Monday night, according to the police and several witnesses.

Theatergoers who attended Monday’s performance of “Spider-Man,” a $65 million musical featuring complicated aerial stunts, said they saw a performer playing the title hero fall about 8 to 10 feet into a pit during the closing minutes of the show, and that some equipment fell into the audience when this occurred. A video of the performance showed a line holding the performer apparently snap.

A police spokesman confirmed that a male actor was injured at about 10:42 p.m. and taken to Bellevue Hospital Center. No other information was immediately released.

A spokesman for the musical did not immediately identify the injured actor, but said in an email that it was not Reeve Carney, the lead actor who plays Spider-Man and his alter ego, Peter Parker. Other actors play Spider-Man throughout the show during various stunts and action sequences.

Steven Tartick, an audience member, said the accident occurred during a scene when Spider-Man is rescuing his love interest, Mary Jane, as she dangles from a rope attached to a bridge.

Mr. Tartick said he saw the actor playing Spider-Man appear to trip and fall from the bridge, into an open pit at the end of the stage.

“You heard screams,” Mr. Tartick said. “You heard a woman screaming and sobbing.”

Mr. Tartick said there was a blackout, and then the house lights in the theater were restored. An announcement made in the theater first said there would be a delay in the performance. The announcement was then updated to say the show was over.

Scott Smith and Matthew Smith, brothers who attended Monday’s “Spider-Man” performance, watched the show from the balcony of the Foxwoods Theater. In an interview outside the theater, Matthew Smith said: “It looked like it was supposed to happen. But he fell at a faster pace. It didn’t look right.”

Brian Lynch, an audience member, described the scene at the Foxwoods Theater on his Twitter feed, writing: “Stopped short near end. Someone took nasty fall. Screaming. 911 called. No idea what happened, kicked audience out.” He added: “No joke. No explanation. MJ and Spidey took what seemed to be a planned fall into the stage pit. Then we heard MJ screaming.”

Christine Bord, another eyewitness, described events outside the theater in a blog post on her Web site, onlocationvacations.com.

In a telephone interview, Ms. Bord said two ambulances and a fire truck were already waiting outside the theater when most audience members exited. The actor was quickly brought out on a stretcher, wrapped in protective gear and wearing a neck brace. He acknowledged the crowd which clapped for him before an ambulance took him away. Ms. Board said this transpired in no more than five or ten minutes.

The “Spider-Man” musical has faced several setbacks during its preview period, with one of its actresses suffering a concussion and two actors who were injured by a sling-shot technique meant to propel them across the stage. On Friday it was announced that “Spider-Man” was delaying its official opening by four weeks to Feb. 7 so that creative changes could be made to the show.

A press representative for “Spider-Man” said in an email message: “An actor sustained an injury at tonight’s performance of ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.’ He fell several feet from a platform approximately seven minutes before the end of the performance, and the show was stopped. All signs were good as he was taken to the hospital for observation. We will have more news shortly.”

[Jeff Wrangler]

Interesting to note the discrepancies in reports of the distance of the fall.

It's time they hang this show up before someone is killed. Seriously.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/theater/22spider.html?_r=1&hp



‘Spider-Man’ Matinee
Is Canceled
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: December 21, 2010


An audience member captured an actor’s plunge Monday night.


The producers of the new Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” canceled its Wednesday matinee to add safety precautions after a lead stunt actor playing the superhero sustained serious injuries from falling more than 20 feet into a basement beneath the stage during Monday night’s show. He was the fourth performer to be hurt working on “Spider-Man” since September.

The accident prompted investigations by federal and state occupational safety inspectors, as well as by representatives from the Actors’ Equity union, who went to the Foxwoods Theater on Broadway on Tuesday, when no shows were scheduled, to examine equipment and meet with the production team.

A spokesman for the production, Rick Miramontez, said on Tuesday that the accident, which caused the performer, Christopher Tierney, to be hospitalized, was the result of human error, without offering specifics. An Actors’ Equity spokeswoman confirmed that explanation, but also said the union would “step up” monitoring of the show. A spokesman for the state safety inspectors, however, said that he had no details on Tuesday about the accident’s cause or the new safety measures, and that their investigation was not complete.

Mr. Miramontez said the show would be safe enough to perform on Wednesday night after the new measures were put in place. “The production knows exactly what happened at Monday’s performance, and it is being dealt with,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This is a maneuver that has been done hundreds, if not a thousand times, without incident, and additional redundancies are being put into place to ensure that will never happen again,” he wrote, referring to the accident.

The stunt that Mr. Tierney was performing was, in fact, one of the less ambitious technical sequences; it was not one of the two dozen flying scenes that raised concerns about safety this fall, for instance. The $65 million production, the most expensive and technically ambitious in Broadway history, has faced several setbacks over the past few months; one of its lead actresses suffered a concussion at the first preview performance on Nov. 28, and two actors playing Spider-Man were injured by a sling-shot technique meant to propel them across the stage.

The episode occurred during one of the final scenes of “Spider-Man,” when the masked superhero appears to be running toward the edge of an elevated platform above the stage as he tries to rescue the show’s heroine, Mary Jane Watson, who is tied and hanging under the platform. On Monday night, the usual stunt took place, with Mary Jane, played by Jennifer Damiano, dropping (attached by a wire) to the basement below the stage.

But a moment later Mr. Tierney lost his footing and toppled off the platform. A person involved with the production said that Mr. Tierney had been properly attached to a tether, but that the tether was not affixed correctly to the equipment that was supposed to hold him in place.

The theater immediately went dark, and some audience members reported hearing shouts for help before house lights were restored. An announcement made in the theater first said there would be a delay in the performance, then that the show was over. Mr. Tierney was quickly taken from the theater on a gurney and transported by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital Center.

An experienced dancer with two decades of credits, Mr. Tierney suffered broken ribs and internal bleeding, among other injuries, according to people involved with the production who spoke on condition of anonymity because only Mr. Miramontez and the producers and creators are supposed to speak publicly. Mr. Tierney was listed in serious condition at Bellevue on Tuesday, a hospital spokesman said; he was conscious and receiving well-wishers, including some fellow actors and Julie Taymor, the director of “Spider-Man,” who had previously worked with Mr. Tierney on her film “Across the Universe.”

In response to interview requests, Ms. Taymor released a statement through a spokesman: “An accident like this is obviously heartbreaking for our entire team and, of course, to me personally. I am so thankful that Chris is going to be all right and is in great spirits. Nothing is more important than the safety of our ‘Spider-Man’ family, and we’ll continue to do everything in our power to protect the cast and crew.”

Leo Rosales, the spokesman for the state safety inspectors, said he did not know if the tethering attached to Mr. Tierney was one of the technical elements that the inspectors reviewed and approved during several visits to the theater in November. “All I can say right now is that we’ve agreed that the producers will provide us with a write-up on the safety protocols and procedures that they are going to put in place immediately,” he said.

Asked if the state would allow performances to resume on Wednesday night if it were not able to verify and test the new safety protocols, Mr. Rosales said the state did not have the authority to shut down the show while its investigation was still under way.

The production began preview performances in late November after state inspectors announced that the show — which includes aerial sequences that are unprecedented for Broadway — was safe for public performances.

During its first three weeks of performances this month, several technical problems were smoothed out, most dealing with scene transitions and some of the flying. But some theatergoers have taken to blogs, Twitter and Facebook to criticize the quality of the script, music (which is by Bono and the Edge of U2) and acting; on Friday the producers announced that “Spider-Man” was delaying its official opening by four weeks to Feb. 7 so that creative changes could be made.

The show has been selling extremely well daily at the box office, grossing more than $1 million for its six performances last week; the next two weeks, through New Year’s Day, are among the most lucrative for big brand-name Broadway musicals like “Spider-Man,” which tend to attract tourists.

Dave Itzkoff and Hamilton Boardman contributed reporting.

[serious crayons]

Oh, gosh, it was me, Katherine, I'm to blame--I said 'Good luck' above within this very thread--sorry guys! (drops head in shame)

You know, Patrick Stewart says ( Macbeth ) rather than 'the Scottish play,' and IN the theatre too (!) but despite his name, he is a Yorkshire man, so I don't know.

Maybe actors should now call the production (at the Foxwoods Theater) the 'Arachnid play'  !

Yesterday's status update from a Facebook friend in New York:

Actors: please replace "Macbeth" with "Spiderman" on your list of verboten backstage words.

[Front-Ranger]

Sending well wishes to Christopher. 

[Penthesilea]

Wow, somebody must have said "good luck" instead of "break a leg" or called it "Macbeth" instead of "the Scottish play."  

I know about not wishing any stage artist (and all the people working behind the stage either!) good luck, but what's up with Macbeth? I've never heard of that.

In Germany, arists always say "Toi, toi, toi" instead of good luck. It's symbolic for spitting over the person's shoulder three times.
Do you have this, too?

[Meryl]

I know about not wishing any stage artist (and all the people working behind the stage either!) good luck, but what's up with Macbeth? I've never heard of that.

In Germany, arists always say "Toi, toi, toi" instead of good luck. It's symbolic for spitting over the person's shoulder three times.
Do you have this, too?

The tradition of avoiding saying the name of that play has gone on for many years.  Here's the lowdown on it: http://www.angelfire.com/fl3/Defymcbeth/Super2.html.  I'm hoping it has no effect on you if you're doing the opera rather than the play, because I just found out I'm going back to Alaska in 2012 to direct it!  

We say "Toi, toi, toi" a lot in my business, along with "break a leg" and "merde."  Also popular for opera singers is "In bocca al lupo" (in the mouth of the wolf), referring to when Romulus and Remus are saved and mothered by a she-wolf (according to an online definition).  But since the proper response is "Crepi il lupo" (may the wolf die), I wonder.  Once someone told me that it made reference to the actual stage being the "mouth."  Since in our theater the top proscenium's design could be said to resemble giant teeth, this is perfect.  

[Penthesilea]

The tradition of avoiding saying the name of that play has gone on for many years.  Here's the lowdown on it: http://www.angelfire.com/fl3/Defymcbeth/Super2.html.  I'm hoping it has no effect on you if you're doing the opera rather than the play, because I just found out I'm going back to Alaska in 2012 to direct it!  

We say "Toi, toi, toi" a lot in my business, along with "break a leg" and "merde."  Also popular for opera singers is "In bocca al lupo" (in the mouth of the wolf), referring to when Romulus and Remus are saved and mothered by a she-wolf (according to an online definition).  But since the proper response is "Crepi il lupo" (may the wolf die), I wonder.  Once someone told me that it made reference to the actual stage being the "mouth."  Since in our theater the top proscenium's design could be said to resemble giant teeth, this is perfect.  

Thanks Meryl!
You're going back to Alaska, directing another play! Whoo-hoo, how hot is that.
Congratulations, Meryl! You're the best, I would hire you, too.

[Sason]

You're going back to Alaska, directing another play! Whoo-hoo, how hot is that.

Not hot at all. More likely very, very cold.  

[Meryl]

You're going back to Alaska, directing another play! Whoo-hoo, how hot is that.
Congratulations, Meryl! You're the best, I would hire you, too.

Excellent, Chrissi!  I've always wanted to work in Germany.  Got any connections in Bayreuth? 

Not hot at all. More likely very, very cold.   

You can say that twice and mean it! 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/theater/23spider.html?hp


‘Spider-Man’ Shows Canceled
to Test a Safety Plan
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: December 22, 2010


Customers lined up in the box office on Wednesday after the 8 p.m. performance of "Spider-Man:
Turn Off the Dark" was canceled.



A scene from the musical.


The Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” canceled its two Wednesday performances to test a new safety plan for the show’s 38 aerial and stage maneuvers, which involve actors hoisted or tethered in harnesses, including the maneuver that failed at Monday night’s performance when a stunt actor fell more than 20 feet and broke his ribs.

By canceling the performances at a cost of roughly $400,000 in ticket sales, and by adopting safety measures recommended by state and federal officials, the producers of “Spider-Man” sought to project a sense of urgency and understanding that action was needed to make the show safer. While the producers said that Thursday night’s performance would go on, they also committed, according to state safety officials, not to hold performances until the new measures were in place. The state officials said the plan could be tested successfully by Thursday night.

Under the plan, one offstage crew member will attach the harness and related cables, wires or tethers to the actors, and a second stagehand will verify that the attachments are made. That second stagehand will then verbally notify a stage manager that they are safely connected. The actor will also verify that the attachment is made. Previously, there was no second stagehand to verify or communicate with the stage manager, and the actor was not required to check his harness.

The producers and creators moved on other fronts Tuesday and Wednesday to gain a stronger footing for the show. While publicity about Monday’s accident and a backstage one on Nov. 28 has stirred interest in the show, the buzz has also left some actors and stagehands feeling demoralized, as well as protective of fellow company members.

The producers and creators held a private meeting with the entire company for more than two hours on Tuesday, two people who attended said. Some cast and crew members vented frustrations to the director, Julie Taymor, and the lead producer, Michael Cohl, about their decision-making — including whether the show had had enough time this fall to rehearse before performances began. The show had more than two months of technical rehearsals inside the Foxwoods Theater, far more than most musicals. Yet “Spider-Man,” with its two dozen aerial sequences and dozens of pieces of enormous moving scenery, is the most technically complex show ever on Broadway as well as the most expensive by far, at $65 million, more than twice the cost of the previous record-holder, “Shrek the Musical.”

A few company members also questioned Ms. Taymor — and in some cases challenged her — about whether the show was as safe as it could be and whether crew members had had enough time to absorb technical changes, and actors enough time to run through them. Two actors were injured this fall doing aerial stunts before preview performances began; during the first preview, one of the lead actresses suffered a concussion while in the wings just offstage, and, on Monday, the stunt actor, Christopher Tierney, fell from a platform when the tether attached to his harness was not properly affixed.

By all accounts, Ms. Taymor responded calmly to the questions and emphasized that safety was her foremost concern. Her representative did not respond to a request to interview Ms. Taymor on Wednesday.

Mr. Cohl first canceled Wednesday’s matinee (one of the most lucrative of the year, given the Christmas week tourist market) to spend time on the safety measures and to prepare other actors to step in for Mr. Tierney, who performed some of the most complex stunts in the show. As rehearsals continued Wednesday, Mr. Cohl, joined by Ms. Taymor, met with the safety inspectors to walk through the new redundancies, and — according to state officials — the two concurred that performances should not be held until those plans were fully tested. (Mr. Tierney remained in serious condition at Bellevue Hospital Center on Wednesday.)

Maureen Cox, director of safety and health for the New York State Department of Labor, which oversees the state inspectors, said on Wednesday that the producers assured her team that “Spider-Man” would be performed only with the safety measures in place, and that the show’s actors would be empowered to stop performances if they did not feel safely strapped in. Ms. Cox added that no cast or crew members had approached the state inspectors this week to express concerns about safety.

The show’s spokesman, Rick Miramontez, said all involved believed that the safety measures would be in place and tested by Thursday night’s show. He added that the producers did not believe more crew members needed to be hired to carry out the plan, but they would be if necessary. The show already has one of the largest work forces on Broadway.

Assemblyman Rory I. Lancman, a Democrat of Queens and the chairman of the New York State Assembly’s subcommittee on workplace safety, sent a letter to Mr. Cohl on Wednesday expressing concern about the current state of the production. Mr. Lancman said he would hold a news conference on safety issues and “Spider-Man” on Thursday outside the theater.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/70311/


Nascar for Gleeks
Whatever finally becomes of the show itself, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
has succeeded at creating a new kind of New York entertainment.

By Adam Sternbergh
Published Dec 23, 2010



L ike Spider-Man swinging from building to building across the New York skyline, his namesake musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,  has lurched from headline to ominous headline. Broken bones. An SNL  parody. Preview performances marred by glitches and catcalls. In the fourth and most serious accident, a cast member was injured after a twenty-foot-plus plummet. Spider-Man has gone from a $65 million punch-line-in-waiting to a kind of malevolent machine that runs on cash and spews out tabloid fodder. It’s now less a Broadway show than an amusement-park thrill ride: See the clattering catastrophe! You never know what will go wrong next!

All of which is no doubt terrifying to its producers, who have pushed back its official opening (yet again) to February 7 and spent the days before Christmas batting down a rumor that the show had gone on indefinite hiatus. Yet there’s a perverse upside to these continuing calamities. Spider-Man has become a hot ticket for rubberneckers. Tamron Hall, guest-hosting on Today,  blurted, “I’d love to see the show,” after a segment on last week’s incident, and she’s not alone. “I hope no one else gets hurt,” a theatergoer told the Post,  “but it is part of the allure of going.” Told prior to the performance that it might be halted by technical problems, audiences have cheered, then applauded stoppages (when they didn’t involve falling bodies). It’s sort of what they came to see, after all.

Along the way, the whole Spider-Man saga has evolved into something new and fascinating: a hyperentertaining reality show about a Broadway fiasco, playing to a wide and rapt audience and unfolding, 24/7, in real time. Until recently, this brand of metaspectacle would not have been possible or even conceivable. But reality TV has given us a template for this experience, and technology has given us the means to collectively construct it. The former, as a genre, is expertly built around carefully orchestrated disasters, whether composed of desert-island deprivation or contrived dustups between combustible housemates. As for technology, who wasn’t drawn in by the tweet from the show’s star, Natalie Mendoza (who has herself sustained a concussion), after the most recent accident? “Please pray with me for my friend Chris … A light in my heart went dim tonight.” This was followed up by angry online protests from various Broadway actors, including one from Adam Pascal on Facebook that denounced the show as a “steaming pile of actor crippling shit.”

Meanwhile, we speculate feverishly as to the saga’s eventual climax. Can director Julie Taymor and her team make the safety fixes regulators are ordering without dulling an already muddy plot? Will, heaven forbid, some darker tragedy strike? Or will it somehow finally premiere to raves and record attendance, a redemptive tale, à la Avatar,  of hubristic persistence and artistic bravado?

Barring a miracle, the show seems unlikely to recoup its costs (its technical requirements and safety considerations will make touring the show a whole other headache). The way things have been going, by the time you read this, it may have been announced that it will never officially open. But even so, its creators can take some solace in the fact that they have already mounted the most fantastic show of the season. Whether or not you actually get the chance to see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,  it’s still been more gripping than any Broadway production in years.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHFc_sO4VyA&feature[/youtube]

AssociatedPress | December 21, 2010
Two theatergoers from Houston, who saw the accident happen Monday night during a performance of the Broadway musical, talk about the experience.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.popeater.com/2010/12/24/spider-man-resumes-performances/



Amazing! 'Spider-Man'
Swings Back into Action
with Accident-Free Show
By Elizabeth Townsend 
Posted Dec 24th 2010 07:30AM


Reeve Carney at right after the performance.

Broadway's much-troubled 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' musical resumed performances on Thursday night with new safety protocols in place following Monday night's accident when a stunt performer plunged 30 feet when a cable snapped during an aerial stunt -- the musical's fourth accident since October.

The good news? No accidents or major delays in the show. The cast and crew was ecstatic.

"It's a safer show now, show star Reeve Carney said as he signed autographs after the performance. "It was always safe, but now it's safer. It was beautiful to see everyone come together tonight." Producer Michael Cohl was a bit more blunt in his assessment for the AP. "If you weren't nervous tonight, you'd have to be an idiot," he said.

The 'Spider-Man' company met earlier in the week with federal and state investigators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the New York State Labor Department and Actors' Equity to discuss "additional safety protocols," 'Spider-Man' spokesperson Rick Miramontez said Tuesday in a statement. "It was agreed that these measures would be enacted immediately."

Those new measures, focusing on a three-step process to ensure proper harnessing before each stunt, were announced Wednesday by Maureen Cox of the New York Dept. of Labor. Before continuing with the show on Thursday night, the producers had to confirm with the Department of Labor that all of the safety measures were in place.

How does it work during the show? The operator or stagehand will fix the latch to the harness of the performer. Then, another stagehand nearby will verify that it's attached properly. That second person will then be in contact with the stage manager to verify the measures have been completed.

The show canceled its matinee performance on Wednesday in order to rehearse the new protocols. Around 5 PM a sign was posted outside Foxwoods Theatre announcing that the evening performance would also be postponed.

The show's director and co-writer, Julie Taymor, says that Christopher Tierney, the actor recovering from his injuries after his scary fall this week, gets the credit with inspiring the cast to rise above recent troubles.

"We all got together before the show tonight and talked about Chris," Taymor told the AP after the show. "Chris gave us the spirit tonight."

Despite the controversy swirling around the show, ticket sales are "hotter than ever," according to the AP.

"People are coming because they love Spider-Man, U2 or because of morbid curiosity," one theater insider tells PopEater.  (U2's Bono and The Edge wrote the show's music and lyrics.)

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/spider-man-actor-was-fortunate-to-survive-father-says/




'Spider-Man’ Actor Was Fortunate to Survive,
Father Says
By PATRICK HEALY
December 26, 2010, 1:50 pm


Christopher Tierney, right,
and his father, Timothy Tierney,
at the Foxwoods Theater,
before his fall.


The injuries suffered by Christopher Tierney in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” could have been far worse if he had not tucked his body and rolled sideways midair as he fell more than 20 feet at Monday’s performance, doctors have told his family. “My understanding is that Chris is fortunate to be alive,” Mr. Tierney’s father, Timothy Tierney, said in a telephone interview on Sunday.

In the fullest accounting yet of the accident and injuries, Mr. Tierney’s father said that his son, a 31-year-old actor and veteran dancer, was falling headfirst but managed to land on his right side in the basement below the stage at the Foxwoods Theater. That is where he plummeted midperformance when a safety tether to his harness malfunctioned during an acrobatic maneuver. He sustained a hairline fracture in his skull, a broken scapula, a broken bone close to his elbow, four broken ribs, a bruised lung and three fractured vertebrae, his father said. Mr. Tierney is one of several performers who play Spider-Man during stunt sequences.

After back surgery on Wednesday, Mr. Tierney took his first steps on Friday with the aid of a brace and a walker. He remains in the intensive care unit at Bellevue Hospital Center, his father said; family members had hoped to move him back to their home in New Hampshire for rehabilitation, but he is to remain in New York City. Doctors will decide on Monday whether to begin rehab therapy this week.

Timothy Tierney said doctors were “cautiously optimistic” that his son would eventually resume his performing career. “If they’d had to fuse Chris’s vertebrae during surgery, that would have just been very awkward for dancing, because his mobility would have been restricted,” he said. “Fortunately, they did not have to fuse. The doctors have some pins in his body and rods in his body for now to hold everything together, but a great deal of this is about self-healing, and time.

“We just feel very blessed that Chris is alive and well, and thank goodness that he knew enough to roll onto his right side and land that way rather than land on his head or back,” Mr. Tierney continued. “Some people fall from a lesser height than Chris and suffer more damage, even fatal damage.”

“Spider-Man” — the most expensive (at $65 million) and the most technically complex show ever on Broadway, with 38 flying and acrobatic sequences that require safety harnesses and wires — canceled two performances on Wednesday after Mr. Tierney’s accident, the fourth injury to a “Spider-Man” actor during rehearsals or performances since September. At the direction of state and federal workplace safety inspectors, the producers put in a place a new safety plan that involves more backstage crew members rigging up the actors for stunt maneuvers. “Spider-Man” performances resumed on Thursday night.

Timothy Tierney said his son did not assign any blame for his fall and was not considering a lawsuit. “Chris told me that the word ‘accident’ was invented for a reason, and this was an accident, pure and simple,” Mr. Tierney said. “He’s just chomping at the bit to return to dancing, to go back to ‘Spider-Man.’ He loves this production so much. I haven’t had a chance to see it, but we have tickets for opening night. It looks like Chris will be in the audience with us that night, and we’ll be glad to have him there.”

[serious crayons]

This is becoming like the plot of a horror movie. Black Swan, which I saw last night, is mild in comparison.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

This is becoming like the plot of a horror movie. Black Swan, which I saw last night, is mild in comparison.

You could be right, Katherine. Yikes.




http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/a-lead-actress-departs-spider-man-turn-off-the-dark/#more-154507





A Lead Actress Departs
‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’
By PATRICK HEALY
December 28, 2010, 8:52 am


Natalie Mendoza with her “Spider-Man”
co-star Reeve Carney.

One of the lead actresses in Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” Natalie Mendoza, who suffered a concussion during the musical’s first preview performance last month, is leaving the production, according to two people who work on the show and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Ms. Mendoza’s representatives and the producers of “Spider-Man” have been hammering out an exit agreement for days now, and an official statement is expected as early as Tuesday, the two people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the producers have forbid public comments given that lawyers and others are still fine-tuning the language to explain Ms. Mendoza’s departure, an artistic loss and embarrassing blow to the production.

Ms. Mendoza’s spokesman, Shea Martin, on Monday declined a request to interview the actress, and also declined to comment on her departure. Ms. Mendoza did not reply to messages sent to her on Monday morning. Her last performance was on Monday, Dec. 20; the production has said that she has been on vocal rest since then, under doctors’ orders. But she was also shaken by a bad accident that occurred mid-performance on Dec. 20 involving her castmate and friend, Christopher Tierney, according to a fellow actor in the musical.

Ms. Mendoza played Arachne, a spider villainess who has a major role in Peter Parker’s becoming Spider-Man and who becomes obsessed with the super-hero. Arachne is a signature creation of the show’s director, Julie Taymor, who said in an interview last month that she conceived of the character several years ago after having a dream about the transformation of a normal teen-age boy into a powerful super-human. Much of the Act II story revolves around Arachne, and Ms. Taymor had collaborated closely with Ms. Mendoza on developing a distinctive look and manner for the character. Arachne delivers the musical’s title number and sings on five other songs, including an Act I turning point, “Rise Above,” and the finale, “Love Me or Kill Me.”

The show marked the Broadway debut for Ms. Mendoza, a 30-year-old film and theater actress and musician who is perhaps known for playing the lead character Juno in the 2005 horror movie “The Descent.” Ms. Mendoza’s understudy, America Olivo, is expected to take the role of Arachne; another actress, T.V. Carpio, performed the part on Thursday night and may well become an alternate.

On Sunday, Ms. Mendoza wrote on her Facebook page that she was grateful to be down to two nausea tablets and four painkillers per day to cope with her concussion. “Thank goodness I had such a brilliant neurologist who made sure I recovered properly,” she wrote. “Nice to be almost back to normal…. almost anyway haha! Thanking God for peace, real friends, love and health and healing.”

Last Tuesday, in the aftermath of the injuries sustained by Mr. Tierney, who fell more than 20 feet after his safety harness became untethered, Ms. Mendoza wrote on Twitter: “Please pray with me for my friend Chris, my superhero who quietly inspires me everyday with his spirit. A light in my heart went dim tonight.” She did not appear in the next performance after the accident, on Thursday night, nor in any of the Christmas weekend shows.

In another recent post on Twitter Ms. Mendoza wrote: “Can feel a trip to India coming on & visiting my magic little orphanage Ramana’s Garden in Rishikesh. Raising funds as we speak. Be the change.” She has not written anything about her departure from “Spider-Man.”

A spokesman for the production, Rick Miramontez, said on Monday night that he could not confirm that Ms. Mendoza was leaving. Michael Cohl, the lead producer of the show, declined an interview request on Monday.

Ms. Mendoza sustained the concussion during the show on Nov. 28 when she was struck in the head by a rope holding a piece of equipment while standing offstage. She was seen by two doctors; one of them, a specialist hired by the production, advised her to take time off to recover, the actress’s spokesman said early this month. But Ms. Mendoza insisted that she be allowed to go on at the next performance, three days later, and the producers and director, who knew about the concussion, allowed her to. Mr. Cohl spoke with the specialist before the performance, and a spokesman for the production said that the specialist said it would not be a major problem for Ms. Mendoza to perform as long as she took it easy.

The role of Arachne involves several flying sequences as well, including one in which Ms. Mendoza is spun upside-down, though they are conducted at a slower speed than those involving the character of Spider-Man himself. By the end of the performance on the night she returned, Ms. Mendoza had a headache and nausea; she then took two weeks off to recover.

Ms. Mendoza is one of four actors who have been hurt working on “Spider-Man” since September; before performances began, one dancer broke his wrists after landing incorrectly during a flying stunt, while another actor injured his feet doing the same stunt. And Mr. Tierney remains at Bellevue Hospital Center recovering from his injuries, which included a hairline fracture in his skull, a broken scapula, a broken bone close to his elbow, four broken ribs, a bruised lung and three fractured vertebrae.

“Spider-Man” recently delayed its opening night by four weeks, until Monday, Feb. 7, to provide more time for its creators — Ms. Taymor and U2’s Bono and the Edge — to make changes in the $65 million show before theater critics review it.

Mr. Cohl cited Ms. Mendoza’s two-week absence from the show, as she recovered from the concussion, as among the factors that contributed to the delay of opening night.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

“Spiderward”
by Barry Blitt

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/u2-album-producer-to-work-on-spider-man-music/?ref=theater






U2 Album Producer
To Work On ‘Spider-Man’ Music
By SCOTT HELLER
January 13, 2011, 7:05 pm


Steve Lillywhite, the Grammy-winning record producer who counts U2 as among his most frequent clients, has come aboard “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark,” the $65-million Broadway musical featuring music by Bono and the Edge, the band’s chief songwriters.

Mr. Lillywhite, who has been at the Foxwoods Theater this week working with the actors on the show’s music, will also produce the original cast album. After an unusually lengthy preview period marked by several delays, the show is due to open February 7.

A spokesman for the show confirmed Mr. Lillywhite’s work with the cast, which was first reported by Deadline.com. Among the U2 albums produced by Mr. Lillywhite are “October,” “War,” and “How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.” He also produced songs on the band’s most recent album, “No Line on the Horizon,” in 2009.

While technical staging issues have preoccupied the “Spider-Man” creative team during previews, and the show’s book has come in for criticism on blogs and in chat rooms, the musical’s score — Bono and Edge’s first venture on Broadway — has not emerged unscathed. Some patrons have remarked about a muddy sound mix as well.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.popeater.com/2011/01/13/spider-man-broadway-musical-delayed-for-fifth-time/



'Spider-Man' Broadway Musical
Delayed for Fifth Time
By Rebecca Macatee  
Posted Jan 13th 2011 09:42PM



If your spidey senses were tingling Thursday night, you might head over to the Great White Way and lend a hand on set. The Wall Street Journal  reports that the problem-plagued Broadway musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" has once again pushed back its opening night.

This is the fifth time the show has delayed its first official performance, now scheduled for March 15. The show's received a lot of negative attention, for bad reviews and the multiple sidelining injuries incurred by the actors and crew.

A statement released by the show said they needed time to work on a new ending. Some theatergoers have been confused by what went down after intermission.

"We simply need more time to fully execute the creative team's vision before freezing the show," said lead producer Michael Cohl. He then reassured audiences this would be the "final postponent" of the show, which has been in an usually long preview period of more than 15 weeks.

Despite 'Spider-Man's' rather tumultuous start in theater, the clearly popular show was the number one musical on Broadway. I vote they keep working out those set kinks, brush off the critics and if at all possible, bring James Franco on board. Multi-talented Harry Osborn could undoubtedly weave a web of gold.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Ok, as the new movie  might be out before the musical finally opens, I'll post this here for now.

In re Andrew Garfield, I first thought--what?? After seeing this photo below, I'm thinking--Whoa!!




http://www.popeater.com/2011/01/14/andrew-garfield-as-spider-man/





First Look:
Andrew Garfield as
'Spider-Man'
By The Editors at Moviefone 
Posted Jan 14th 2011 01:30AM





The first official image of Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man has been released, courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

Dark, disheveled and skinny probably best describe this first image of Garfield as Spidey. He's without the mask, which leaves us a little more to look forward to, and based on that scar, as well as the expression on his face, the iconic superhero has just been through one of the toughest battles of his young career as the webbed crusader.

He's got a backpack slung over his shoulder, which reminds us that this is the beginning -- this is Peter Parker in high school, dealing with his new powers and learning about being Spider-Man, finding it may not be all it's cracked up to be. He's weak; he doesn't "get it" yet.

As far as the suit goes, it looks updated, but still familiar enough for fans. We like the lack of muscles and the frenetic spider graphic on his chest, as if he has no clue what he is or what he's doing.

This comes as good news for 'Spider-Man' fans as all is not well in the Spidey universe. The Wall Street Journal reports that the problem-plagued Broadway musical 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' has once again pushed back its opening night.

This is the fourth time the show has delayed its first official performance, now scheduled for March 15. The show has received a lot of negative attention, with multiple sidelining injuries incurred by the actors and crew and some lukewarm reviews.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Here's a slightly lighter version of the image:




 

[Front-Ranger]

Here's a slightly lighter version of the image:




 

Whoa indeed! He's come a long way since Imaginarium. He's sleek...he's creepy...he's hot!!

[Jeff Wrangler]

Whoa indeed! He's come a long way since Imaginarium. He's sleek...he's creepy...he's hot!!

He's a cute puppy, all right. 

[delalluvia]

I liked Andrew Garfield in the Imaginarium as well.  Am looking forward to see him take on the mantle.

As for the stage play - don't thespians, especially those in the theater, have superstitions about such bad omens?

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/theater/06spider.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all


‘Spider-Man’ Becomes the Punch Line of Broadway
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: February 5, 2011


Joan Rivers on Wednesday after seeing "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark." The show's official opening has been
delayed five times.


Joan Rivers gave a suggestion to the director Julie Taymor the other night: “Hire a stunt person to fall on someone every three or four weeks — that’ll keep audiences showing up.”

Like talk show hosts, magazine editors, entertainment bloggers, other comics, even an animation studio in Taiwan, Ms. Rivers is getting a lot of mileage out of the new Broadway show “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

She was there backstage at the Foxwoods Theater on Wednesday, schmoozing with the cast and Ms. Taymor, who is directing the show, to develop more material for her stand-up act, which lately has begun with a moment of silence for “those Americans risking their lives daily — in ‘Spider-Man’ the musical,” a reference to the four performers who have been injured working on the show.

“Spider-Man” has not even officially opened yet. The date has been delayed five times to fix myriad problems, with Sunday afternoon being preview performance No. 66 and the opening planned for Monday night being pushed back five more weeks to March 15. But this $65 million musical has become a national object of pop culture fascination — more so, perhaps, than any show in Broadway history.

Starting with Conan O’Brien’s spoof of Spider-Man warbling in rhyme on Nov. 30, two nights after the musical’s problem-plagued first preview, the show has been lampooned on every major late-night comedy show and by The Onion,  which portrayed the producers as still being optimistic about the show despite a nuclear bomb’s detonating during a preview. Recently, Steve Martin slyly referred to it in a series of tweets about watching the “Spider-Man” movies at home.

“Settling in to watch Spiderman 3 on deluxe edition DVD, but I fell from hanging cables in screening room. 2 hour delay,” he wrote.

Media celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Glenn Beck and the hosts of “Morning Joe” have all raved about the musical, especially Mr. Beck, who said in an interview on Friday that he had seen it four times.

Mr. Beck has framed its appeal on his radio broadcast as a face-off between regular Americans and cultural snobs (i.e., liberals). In the interview, however, he was more fanboy than fire breather, rattling off plot points and design elements with the practiced eye of a Sardi’s regular.

“The story line is right on the money for today, which is to be your better self, that you can spiral into darkness or — ” here he quoted one of the show’s anthemic songs — “you can rise above,” said Mr. Beck, who estimated that he sees a dozen shows a year. “In fact, I just wrote an e-mail to Julie” — Ms. Taymor — “about how much I loved the new ending.”

Last month, “Spider-Man” became the first Broadway show since “The Producers” to land on the cover of The New Yorker;  the cartoon, by Barry Blitt, who also did “The Producers” cover in 2001, showed several injured Spider-Men in a hospital ward.



“Spider-Man” became the first Broadway show on the
cover of The New Yorker since 2001


“For our cover we always ask ourselves, would our one million readers know what we were making reference to?” said Francoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker.  “But in no time at all, ‘Spider-Man’ has gotten enough notoriety that we knew the cover would make people laugh. Even the show’s producers laughed; they’ve been hounding us to buy copies of the artwork.”

If most theater artists and producers are intensely protective of their shows, those at “Spider-Man” have a peculiar financial interest in being mocked. The musical, which marries a hugely popular comic book brand with music by Bono and the Edge of U2, is grossing about $1.3 million a week in ticket sales, the most of any Broadway show except the blockbuster “Wicked,” despite relatively little advertising and no major reviews yet.

By all accounts, including from inside “Spider-Man,” the show is a hot seller week to week — rather than building a huge eight-figure advance commensurate with its $65 million cost — which would suggest staying power. And that popularity has been fueled by the echo chamber of jokes, dinner party chatter and media attention among the fashionable and their hangers-on surrounding this technically ambitious show.

For all that, of course, there are some adults and children who simply have an attachment to Spider-Man, who want to see people swing from webs, or who think that the show might make for enjoyable live theater.

“Our sales are strong; they continue to be strong, which is terrific news, but I can’t give you one clear reason why the show becomes such a draw every night after night,” Michael Cohl, the lead producer, said in an interview. “What I know is that people are talking about ‘Spider-Man’ to what seems like an unprecedented degree.”

Philip J. Smith, the chairman of the Shubert Organization, which owns and books 17 of Broadway’s 40 theaters, said he had never seen a show become such a curiosity. “It has become a phenomenon for reasons, it seems, that have very little to do with the show itself,” Mr. Smith said. (“Spider-Man” is not in a Shubert theater.)

The injuries to the four performers generated the bulk of the publicity for the show this winter, including the departure of one of its stars, Natalie Mendoza, who sustained a concussion while backstage and left the production in late December after signing a confidentiality agreement and being paid an undisclosed amount.

But if the axiom that all publicity is good publicity has benefited the musical, what happens to “Spider-Man” when the publicity dies down?

Broadway shows become hits, by and large, because of word-of-mouth praise and excitement among so-called tastemakers, be they critics who championed plays like “Red” and “August: Osage County,” parents who tell their neighbors about the great time that the children had at “The Lion King” or “Wicked,” or wealthy older theatergoers who tell their friends about the sentimental fun of “Jersey Boys” or “Mary Poppins.”

A crucial question for “Spider-Man” is this: If tourists and parents with children head to the musical so they can have bragging rights at dinner parties or on the playground, will that translate into their friends going to see the show — once the laughs have died down — and will they themselves go back a second time or more, as many “Wicked” fans do? Some veteran theater producers say no.

“The $65 million price tag and the circuslike atmosphere of people getting injured or the show having technical problems, all of that is creating interest in the short term,” said Elizabeth I. McCann, who has been producing on Broadway since the mid-1970s and has won multiple Tony Awards, mostly for plays. “But at some point, I think, people are going to say that the emperor has no clothes where the so-called musical spectacle of ‘Spider-Man’ is concerned, and the adult audience will start to lose interest.”

The musical’s producers are trying to head off such a possibility by welcoming another set of tastemakers — celebrities — some of whom are friends of Bono and the Edge. Jon Bon Jovi, David Bowie, Kevin and Nick Jonas, Julian Lennon, Sean Penn and Jerry Seinfeld are among those who have seen the show. Kevin Jonas tweeted afterward: “Just saw spiderman on broadway so awesome! Everyone go see it.” Ms. Taymor and Bono, who are both close to Ms. Winfrey, cooperated with her on a long article in O: The Oprah Magazine.

Ms. Taymor has juggled giving interviews and greeting celebrity visitors like Ms. Rivers while continuing to make changes to the show, but she said that she had largely blocked out the cultural noise surrounding “Spider-Man.”

“I took off my Google alerts on the show a while ago because a lot of the jokes and comments out there are negative, and I thought it’s too hard to work under this kind of vitriol,” she said in an interview.

On Wednesday night, Ms. Taymor looked queasy after Ms. Rivers suggested dropping performers from the rafters for thrills. (Ms. Rivers also suggested selling umbrellalike helmets to make more money.)

“Of course, someone’s told you that before,” Ms. Rivers said.

“No,” Ms. Taymor said, before walking away, “you’re the first.”

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Oh my!  The Times  has decided--'fool me once--' and has gone with the previous deadline, February 7, to review the show--

Oh dear!








Theater Review | 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark'
Good vs. Evil, Hanging by a Thread
This show is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.



SLIDESHOW:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/02/08/theater/20110208-spiderman.html


The Web of ‘Spider-Man’ Interactive feature:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/08/theater/20110208-spiderman.html?ref=reviews







Good vs. Evil,
Hanging by a Thread
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: February 7, 2011


Patrick Page, left, as the Green Goblin, and Reeve Carney as Spider-Man, at Foxwoods
Theater.


Finally, near the end of the first act of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the audience at the Foxwoods Theater on Saturday night got what it had truly been waiting for, whether it knew it or not.

Calamity struck, and it was a real-life (albeit small) calamity — not some tedious, confusing tripe involving a pretty girl dangling from a skyscraper and supervillains laying siege to Manhattan. And not the more general and seriously depressing disaster that was the sum of the mismatched parts that had been assembled onstage.

No, an honest-to-gosh, showstopping glitch occurred, just as the title character of this new musical was about to vanquish or be vanquished by the evil Green Goblin. Never fully explained “mechanical difficulties” were announced by an amplified voice (not immediately distinguishable from the other amplified voices we had been hearing for what felt like forever), as the actors in the scene deflated before our eyes. And for the first time that night something like genuine pleasure spread through the house.

That glee soon took the form of spontaneous, nigh-ecstatic applause, a sound unheard in the previous hour. After vamping on a green fake piano (don’t ask), Patrick Page (who plays the Goblin with a gusto unshared by any other member of the cast) ad-libbed a warning to Reeve Carney (who stars as Spider-Man), who had been awkwardly marking time by pretending to drink Champagne.

“You gotta be careful,” Mr. Page said. “You’re gonna fly over the heads of the audience, you know. I hear they dropped a few of them.”

“Roar,” went the audience, like a herd of starved, listless lions, roused into animation by the arrival of feeding time. Everyone, it seemed, understood Mr. Page’s reference to the injuries that have been incurred by cast and crew members during the long (and officially still far from over) preview period for this $65 million musical. Permission to laugh had been granted, and a bond had temporarily been forged between a previously baffled audience and the beleaguered souls onstage.

All subsequent performances of “Spider-Man” should include at least one such moment. Actively letting theatergoers in on the national joke that this problem-plagued show has become helps make them believe that they have a reason to be there.

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. So keep the fear factor an active part of the show, guys, and stock the Foxwoods gift shops with souvenir crash helmets and T-shirts that say “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and lived.” Otherwise, a more appropriate slogan would be “I saw ‘Spider-Man’ and slept.”

I’m not kidding. The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from “How can $65 million look so cheap?” to “How long before I’m out of here?”

Directed by Julie Taymor, who wrote the show’s book with Glen Berger, and featuring songs by U2’s Bono and the Edge, “Spider-Man” is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.

I would like to acknowledge here that “Spider-Man” doesn’t officially open until March 15; at least that’s the last date I heard. But since this show was looking as if it might settle into being an unending work in progress — with Ms. Taymor playing Michelangelo to her notion of a Sistine Chapel on Broadway — my editors and I decided I might as well check out “Spider-Man” around Monday, the night it was supposed to have opened before its latest postponement.

You are of course entitled to disagree with our decision. But from what I saw on Saturday night, “Spider-Man” is so grievously broken in every respect that it is beyond repair. Fans of Ms. Taymor’s work on the long-running musical “The Lion King,” adapted from the animated Walt Disney feature, will have to squint charitably to see evidence of her talent.

True, signature Taymor touches like airborne puppets, elaborate masks and perspective-skewing sets (George Tsypin is the scenic designer) are all on hand. But they never connect into a comprehensible story with any momentum. Often you feel as if you were watching the installation of Christmas windows at a fancy department store. At other times the impression is of being on a soundstage where a music video is being filmed in the early 1980s. (Daniel Ezralow’s choreography is pure vintage MTV.)

Nothing looks truly new, including the much-vaunted flying sequences in which some poor sap is strapped into an all-too-visible harness and hoisted uneasily above the audience. (Aren’t they doing just that across the street in “Mary Poppins”?) This is especially unfortunate, since Ms. Taymor and her collaborators have spoken frequently about blazing new frontiers with “Spider-Man,” of venturing where no theater artist (pardon me, I mean artiste) has dared to venture before.

I’m assuming that frontier is supposed to exist somewhere between the second and third dimensions. “Part of the balance we’ve been trying to strike is how ‘comic book’ to go and how ‘human’ to go,” Ms. Taymor has said about her version of the adventures of a nerdy teenager who acquires superhuman powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.

Anyway, there are lots of flat, cardboardish sets, which could easily be recycled for high school productions of “Grease” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and giant multipanel video projections (by Kyle Cooper). That takes care of the two-dimensional part. The human aspect has been assigned to the flesh-and-blood cast members, and it is a Sisyphean duty.

Some wear grotesque masks that bring to mind hucksters on sidewalks handing out promotional material for fantasy-theme restaurants. (Eiko Ishioka is the costume designer.) Those whose own features are visible include — in addition to Mr. Carney (looking bewildered and beautiful as Spider-Man and his conflicted alter ego, Peter Parker) — a strained Jennifer Damiano as Mary Jane Watson, Peter’s spunky kind-of girlfriend, and T. V. Carpio as Arachne, a web-weaving spider-woman of Greco-Roman myth who haunts Peter’s dreams before breaking into his reality. (I get the impression that Arachne, as the ultimate all-controlling artist, is the only character who much interests Ms. Taymor, but that doesn’t mean that she makes sense.)

There is also the Geek Chorus (Gideon Glick, Jonathan Schwartz, Mat Devine, Alice Lee), a quartet of adolescent comic-book devotees, who would appear to be either creating or commenting on the plot, but in any case serve only to obscure it even further. They discuss the heady philosophical implications of Spider-Man’s identity while making jokes in which the notion of free will is confused with the plot of the movie “Free Willy.”

For a story that has also inspired hit action movies, it is remarkably static in this telling. (A lot of the plot-propelling fights are merely reported to us.) There are a couple of picturesque set pieces involving Arachne and her chorus of spider-women and one stunner of a cityscape that suggests the streets of Manhattan as seen from the top of the Chrysler Building.

The songs by Bono and the Edge are rarely allowed to take full, attention-capturing form. Mostly they blur into a sustained electronic twang of varying volume, increasing and decreasing in intensity, like a persistent headache. A loud ballad of existential angst has been written for Peter, who rasps dejectedly, “I’d be myself if I knew who I’d become.” That might well be the official theme song of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”



SPIDER-MAN

Turn Off the Dark

Music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge; book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger; directed by Ms. Taymor; choreography and aerial choreography by Daniel Ezralow; sets by George Tsypin; lighting by Donald Holder; costumes by Eiko Ishioka; sound by Jonathan Deans; projections by Kyle Cooper; masks by Ms. Taymor; hair design by Campbell Young Associates/Luc Verschueren; makeup design by Judy Chin; aerial design by Scott Rogers; aerial rigging design by Jaque Paquin; projection coordinator/additional content design by Howard Werner; arrangements and orchestrations by David Campbell; music supervisor, Teese Gohl; music direction by Kimberly Grigsby; music coordinator, Antoine Silverman; vocal arrangements by Mr. Campbell, Mr. Gohl and Ms. Grigsby; additional arrangements/vocal arrangements by Dawn Kenny and Rori Coleman; associate producer, Anne Tanaka; executive producers, Glenn Orsher, Martin McCallum and Adam Silberman. Presented by Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris, Land Line Productions, Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle/Tony Adams, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Norton Herrick and Herrick Entertainment, Billy Rovzar and Fernando Rovzar, Jeffrey B. Hecktman, Omneity Entertainment/Richard G. Weinberg, James L. Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, S2BN Entertainment, Jam Theatricals, the Mayerson/Gould/Hauser/Tysoe Group, Patricia Lambrecht and Paul McGuinness, by arrangement with Marvel Entertainment. At the Foxwoods Theater, 213 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; (877) 250-2929; ticketmaster.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.

WITH: Reeve Carney (Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Jennifer Damiano (Mary Jane Watson), T. V. Carpio (Arachne), Patrick Page (Norman Osborn/the Green Goblin), Michael Mulheren (J. Jonah Jameson), Ken Marks (Uncle Ben), Isabel Keating (Classics Teacher/Aunt May), Jeb Brown (M J’s Father), Mat Devine (Grim Hunter), Gideon Glick (Jimmy-6), Alice Lee (Miss Arrow), Jonathan Schwartz (Professor Cobwell), Laura Beth Wells (Emily Osborn), Matt Caplan (Flash), Dwayne Clark (Boyle/Busker) and Luther Creek (Kong).

[Front-Ranger]

It sounds like something that had a lot of potential on the drawing board. I think Ang Lee got hung up in the comic book web on The Hulk too...

This is especially unfortunate, since Ms. Taymor and her collaborators have spoken frequently about blazing new frontiers with “Spider-Man,” of venturing where no theater artist (pardon me, I mean artiste) has dared to venture before.

 

[Meryl]

Hoo boy, the truth hurts, eh? 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

MUCH better review than Brantley at the Times!

STILL terrible, but--interesting? Fun?

The review is fun, at any rate!




http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/02/stage_dive_scott_brown_on_spid.html

Stage Dive: Scott Brown Sees
Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark
2/7/11 at 1:15 PM

Some of my colleagues have wondered aloud whether Spider-man  will ever be finished — whether it is, in fact, finishable. I think they're onto something: I saw the show on Saturday night, and found it predictably unfinished, but unpredictably entertaining, perhaps on account of this very quality of Death Star–under–construction inchoateness. Conceptually speaking, it's closer to a theme-park stunt spectacular than "circus art," closer to a comic than a musical, closer to The Cremaster Cycle  than a rock concert. But “closer” implies proximity to some fixed point, and Spider-man  is faaaar out, man. It's by turns hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar.

But never, ever boring. The 2-D comic art doesn't really go with Taymor's foamy, tactile puppetry, just as U2's textural atmo-rock score doesn't really go with the episodic Act One storytelling. Yet even in the depths of Spider-man' s certifiably insane second act, I was riveted. Riveted, yes, by what was visible onstage: the inverted Fritz Lang cityscapes, the rag doll fly-assisted choreography, the acid-Skittle color scheme and Ditko-era comic-art backdrops. But often I was equally transfixed by the palpable offstage  imagination willing it all into existence. See, Spider-man  isn't really about Spider-man. It’s about an artist locked in a death grapple with her subject, a tumultuous relationship between a talented, tormented older woman and a callow young stud. Strip out the $70 million in robotic guywires, Vari-lites, and latex mummery, and you’re basically looking at a Tennessee Williams play.

First, some background for the six people out there who remain (miraculously) unpolluted by Spidey-leaks. (Skip this paragraph if you have  been in the loop.) Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark  is a much-delayed project announced years ago; producers have come and gone like fall foliage. Taymor, a revered visual artist and anointed director of The Lion King,  is at the helm, and co-wrote the book. A proud control freak, she saw in the Spider-man character a peculiarly American expression of ancient myth, and sought to put him in dialogue with the storytelling traditions that bore him. Meanwhile, Marvel Comics and the show’s producers sought to put Spidey in dialogue with tens of millions in front money, on the perfectly reasonable expectation that they’d see a healthy return. (This was back when the movie franchise was alive and kicking.) Since then, the show’s suffered several delays of its opening, the slings and arrows of a skeptical (and shut-out) press, and at least four high-profile accidents, some of them extremely serious.

The plot of the show leaked early, but still defies understanding. Sure, the first act is simple enough. It’s Spider-man’s familiar origin story, his transformation from mild-mannered dweeb Peter Parker into the famous Web Slinger. That arc is scripture for mass audiences, thanks to the first movie, and it’s charmingly carried out here by the L.A. rocker Reeve Carney in the lead role. The storytelling is assisted by a “Geek Chorus” of four nerds — one female (Alice Lee) and demonstrably sharper than the rest. (She goes by “Miss Arrow,” the name of Peter Parker’s feminine nemesis and “opposite number” from the comics.) They dream up a new story of Spider-man, complete with lots of swinging around — and here, Taymor delivers. Once the characters start flying (about 30 minutes in), they don't stop. The entire theater becomes a human aviary, and at least four sequences are devoted exclusively to showing off the aerial rig.

Then comes the second act, which cliff-dives headlong into the realm of dream and myth, allowing Taymor to interrogate the Spider-man character (and, one senses, her own artistic rationale for taking a corporate job). But her primary interest in Peter Parker is announced early on, in Act One: Where did he get the suit? (He obviously didn't make it. It's too beautiful to have been created by a heterosexual teenage boy.)

As a Spidey-story, Taymor’s show is a solid B-minus. (Some of the story basics get garbled and whiplashed, and basic foreknowledge of Spidey 101 is strongly recommended, especially for patrons over the age of 9.) As a pop-art installation treating the subject of pop art, however, the thing is off the scale. What you're watching is the stem cells of a protean imagination dividing and dividing and dividing, right out of control. Taymor's mind discards what she's made as fast as she makes it, always on the move, in search of its next impulse. A series of frames have been erected, one inside the other — the chorus, the superhero "origin story" — in an attempt to contain this monadic, nomadic Creator-force. But it's no use. The result is savage and deeply confusing — a boiling cancer-scape of living pain — that is nevertheless thrilling.

Did I mention there's a number where leggy lady-spiders try on shoes?

Focus!

For those of you who insist on paying a century note for unfinished goods, I'll try to respond to the burning-est of your burning questions, point by point.

1. Why does Glenn Beck like this show so much? The short answer is: Because it is a kid's show. (Which contains not one but two chalkboard scenes!) The longer answer: It's a kid's show with somebody's cockeyed gender-studies thesis stapled to its back. The even-longer answer: Beck and Spider-man  both exist in a state of perpetual adolescence; both are serious little Trapper Keeper scribblers, stream-of-consciousness free-associaters totally enamored of their own bad poetry. The key distinction: Taymor's bad poetry is still pretty ravishing. (Though both kinda make you want to stock up on canned food and gold.)

2. Do people fall and die? Not on my night. But it wasn't exactly smooth sailing, either. There was a technical glitch at the end of Act One, which apparently recurs on several nights: It has something to do with a climactic aerial battle between Spider-man and the Green Goblin (Broadway superhero Patrick Page) on top of the Chrysler Building. (The Chrysler pistons in and out of this show so relentlessly, it must violate blue laws.) These were the only delays and stoppages I witnessed, but they were enough to mangle an already contorted late-act storyboard into total nonsense.

Not to worry, though: Tech screw-ups are apparently just a cue for Page to start vamping. He's a master, and one gets the feeling he's had plenty of practice. He was in the middle of an evil cackle when the stage manager called for a caesura. "That just takes the villainy right out of ya!" he cracked, to enormous laughs. Then he plopped himself down in full foam-villain drag at a prop piano and "played" a reprise of "(I'll Take) Manhattan," which Gobby taunts Spidey with, atop the Chrysler. (Yes, it's true: The show's most delightful musical moment comes not via Bono and Edge, but Rodgers and Hart.) Carney, his Spidey mask doffed, joined him, sipping a prop champagne flute. "Careful there," said Page, still half in character, "you gotta fly out over the audience in a minute." This broke up Spidey, and the audience, too. Page surfed it, swiveled into an aside: "You know, I hear they dropped a couple of 'em." Huge, ghoulish laughs. For a moment, we get a glimpse of the show's potential as English "pantomime" — the sprawling, winking family entertainments they enjoy across the pond. Irony-wise, could it be Julie Taymor's done by accident what Dance of the Vampires  tried so hard to do on purpose?

At this point, I honestly hope they never fix the (non-injurious) glitches: They puncture the show's pretense and furnish meta-theatrical opportunities that can't be staged. We've had Epic Theater, we've had Poor Theater — is this the dawn of Broken Theater?

Corollary: Is it ghoulish that I'm half-expecting someone to fall? You bet! But don't worry about it: Your gleeful morbidity is part of a larger cultural disease, of which Spidenfreude is only the outermost protrusion. And isn't that half the fun of "circus art," anyway? The phrases "death-defying!" and "without a net!" weren't invented by Julie Taymor and Bono. Look, we're sick fucks. We've always been sick fucks. The only difference is, nowadays we pay more for it than we did in the 1890s.

3. Is this really Spidey? Or something else Julie Taymor made up in her Krang-like crazybrain and labeled "Spider-man"? No, it's Spidey. Or rather, it's just as Spidey as Alan Moore's Swamp Thing was Swamp Thing. Taymor's doing what any big-name writer does when she takes over a comic-book title: She's grafting her own obsessions onto it. Comics, despite all their surface pieties and supposed obsession with "continuity," are an incredibly plastic form, a substrate for almost any sort of storytelling. Taymor's taken full advantage of that, and announces her intention to meddle in the mythology by hauling out her "Geek Chorus." The fanboys, who are engaged in some vague act of comics creation, announce their intention to create the most "disgustingly extreme" version of the Spider-man story. They're challenged by Miss Arrow, speaking for Taymor, who argues with the received Spider-wisdom and posits a higher authority, Arachne (Across the Universe' s T.V. Carpio, perhaps a little too itty-bitty in voice-and-presence for a goddess role). Arachne, any student of the classics will remember, was the first spider — a human woman transformed by Athena after she won a weaving contest against the goddess. Turns out she's the root cause of Spider-man, the Gaean original predating the male demiurge. In the form of that genetically modified superspider — for she is all  spiders — Arachne gave Spider-man his powers. The not-so-subtle implication is that Taymor herself has now entered the stage: Artist and art have merged. ("I'm the only real artist working today," Arachne cracks.) At this point, we learn that Arachne's not just a weaver of cloth, but a weaver of dreams, and Taymor begins a light pillage of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" mythos. (You can't accuse her of not knowing her comics.) This also gives her free rein to break her own (already scanty) rules: Dream and reality warp and woof into a tapestry of total confusion, and the second act descends into mostly watchable chaos. There's a supervillain fashion show, an unforgivably punny plot point involving "the world wide web" (it's a web, get it?), and lots of swipes at the nasty old news media, with all its negativity and print-the-rumor churlishness. (Guilty as charged!)

Oh, it's all nonsense, of course. It doesn't make a lick of sense, even with the fervent annotations of the Chorus helping us through. The show's metabolism speeds up in the second act, even as its central nervous system breaks down, and eventually, even Taymor seems to be feeling a little winded. She starts relying heavily on massive video-screens, featuring naive CGI versions of a villainous pantheon that includes Carnage, Swarm, and Lizard. The second act, taken all in all, is basically how I've always imagined the Björk–Matthew Barney honeymoon: lots of atavistic rock-moaning, lots of 40-story phallic symbols, lots of bees.

4. Is the music any good? As far as I could tell, there are only two U2 songs in this show: "Boy Falls From the Sky," Spidey's big motif, and "Rise Above," Arachne's song. The rest of the music is a warm, not unpleasant ear bath of urgent rock pattern-building. Much of it's wonderfully cheesy, as if the Edge stepped out for a smoke and ceded the stage to John Carpenter. (Oh, if only!) I don't expect to see U2 back on Broadway anytime soon, but it's been fun having them over for an extended, if inconsequential jam. Reeve Carney's voice is an excellent instrument for this sort of thing: He's got an extremely gratifying rock tenor, nicely shreddy but never too emo-broken, and closer to Train than U2.

5. What's it like out there in the audience? What audience? Hate to break it to you, Joe Ticketbuyer, but you're just part of the scenery. The orchestra seating exists mainly to give us jeopardy (and a target) for the many flying people hurled overhead. Nervous? Don't worry, you're allowed to drink in the theater: Never before have I sat in a mezzanine so littered with beer cans! (Not to worry, theater snobs: They were Heinekens!)

So that's where things stand with Spider-man, on this February 7. As maximalist camp, it succeeds thunderously. Is that what it intends to be? Irrelevant. To ascribe intent would be to limit the power of this show's occasionally frightening, often confounding, always metastasizing imagination. I recommend Spider-man never open. I think it should be built and rebuilt and overbuilt forever, a living monument to itself.

Follow me at Facebook and on Twitter @scottstagedive.

[southendmd]

"Spidenfreude"!!  I love it.

Thanks, John.  That review is probably more entertaining than the show.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

"Spidenfreude"!!  I love it.

 



Also:

The second act, taken all in all, is basically how I've always imagined the Björk–Matthew Barney honeymoon: lots of atavistic rock-moaning, lots of 40-story phallic symbols, lots of bees.

Me too!!

 

[Jeff Wrangler]

I want to see the lady-spiders trying on shoes and the supervillain fashion show. 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Woah, dude! I'm thinking I believe this Taymor chick is righteously cool! Far out!!




http://www.slate.com/id/2284320/pagenum/all/#p2

With Great Power
Comes Great Irresponsibility
Spider-Man is a wild, sexed-up, Greek mythologized train wreck.
But it's Julie Taymor's train wreck, through and through.
By Jason Zinoman
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011, at 11:32 AM ET


Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark at the Foxwoods Theater


Considering the hype, the brand names involved, and great expense of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,  the show will probably run for a long time, perhaps even long enough to break even. But if it flops, I doubt $65 million will ever be wasted on a Broadway stage as compellingly again. This is not your typical train wreck.

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 Parker transforms from a nerd to a brooding hipster faster than he does from a man to a spider), of period (His Girl Friday or The Social Network  ?), and of style (comic books or Greek myth?).

Fixating on Spider-Man' s many problems, however, misses the real story. Julie Taymor took music from one of the most famous bands in the world, a beloved character cemented in the popular imagination, and, working in the most collaborative, homogenous form in American theater, created a deeply personal story that is defiantly her own. Actually, what she's done is even bolder than that. Taymor, who directed, co-wrote the book, and designed the masks, has made a comic book musical that seems to have no affection for comic books or musicals. Its central theme could be described thusly: Sometimes great power requires great irresponsibility. Steven Spielberg and James Cameron occasionally do auteur work on this scale in film, but in a Broadway landscape dominated by timid, corporate entertainments, Spider-Man  is an anomaly: a mass entertainment that at its heart is one woman's wild ego trip.

The first hint that we're in for something eccentric comes early on, when a quartet of comic book fans referred to in the program as the "Geek Chorus" debate the meaning and story of Spider-Man. This device, one of many meta elements, introduces us to the real villains in this story: the die-hard fans who insist on conservative fidelity to the source material. The free-thinker of this clique is its one girl. She mocks the boys for reading too many comic books and introduces them to the tale of the first spider: a woman named Arachne, whose story of transformation from mortal weaver to immortal spider was told in Ovid's Metamorphoses.  Arachne, dressed darkly with a severe expression, appears from the rafters along with a few sister weavers holding columns of yellow cloth. They swing back and forth toward the audience, while horizontal ribbons emerge from stage right and left. The swinging action weaves the vertical and horizontal fabrics into a tapestry. It's the most stunning, inventive stagecraft of the show, if not the season.

But what in the world does Arachne have to do with Spider-Man? Taymor makes you wait until the second half of the show to find out. The remainder of the first act hews closely to the traditional story of Spider-Man. Humble nerd Peter Parker gains super powers, dedicates his life to fighting bad guys after the death of his uncle, faces off with the Green Goblin and wins. Curtain. With this obligatory material out of the way, Taymor returns to what she really cares about: Arachne, who can often seem like an alter ego for Taymor. She is an outsider in a vulgar world, an artist "weaving worlds," and at times she sounds like a mystical poet who came of age in the 1960s. "I descended from the astral plane," she says.

In the second act, Spider-Man is relegated to a supporting role. He retreats from crime-fighting, though his fame only grows. Spider-Man hot dogs and Spider-Man underwear are sold on the streets; rumors about him spread through the press. The cynical merchandising of Spider-Man is an ironic theme for a show that has its own gift shop in the theater lobby where T-shirts cost $40. So is the cruelty of Internet-age media for a show that has been attacked more ferociously before opening than any other in history. Whether intentional or not, this show continually, crazily draws attention to itself. The spider-woman from Ovid (who, not coincidentally, sings the title song "Turn Off the Dark") is at the center of the media circus, but while others want to use Spider-Man to sell papers and retail, she has other intentions. Backed by new-age music that gives the stage more the feel of a massage parlor than a Stan Lee comic strip, she seduces Peter in what can only be described as a wet dream. Peter floats into the sky and circles Arachne erotically. Parents may have trouble explaining this scene to their kids, in part because they won't understand it themselves.

Arachne doesn't just want Peter Parker's affections—she wants them on her terms. She wants him to come to her as Spider-Man. To convince him to put his spidey suit back on, she invents a vast, preposterous illusion that New York is under attack by a confederation of villains Spider-Man vanquished. She essentially creates her own epic show out of the raw material of a Marvel comic strip. Like Taymor, she darkens it, ruins the plot, and teases you with the idea that there's a disaster in the making.

How does Arachne manage this? Like Glenn Beck, one of the musical's most devoted fans, she masterfully stokes fear, paranoia, and panic, manipulating the press into an obsession with Spider-Man. (Sound familiar?) Whereas the first act is a jumble of comic book designs, the second has a much more assured aesthetic: perversely dark, nightmarish and sexual. "You know how spiders chase their mates?" Arachne asks Spider-Man in a climactic battle. "By attacking."

Julie Taymor isn't out to attack her audience, but she doesn't pander to it, either. In her breakthrough hit The Lion King,  Taymor conquered the musical theater by showing that theater traditions she learned downtown and abroad could beat Broadway razz-ma-tazz at its own game. Now she aims to win over comic book fans not by adapting the story of Spider-Man so much as building her own competing fantasy world to overshadow him. Her chutzpah is staggering. When Peter Parker sings about the power of believing, one of the most clichéd sentiments in musical theater, it has an edge. Believing in this context means being duped by a fake, a simulation of the world as opposed to the real thing. Choosing to believe is a delusion.

And yet, the show doesn't let us forget that this twisted delusion began as an act of love. (Spoiler alert, I suppose.) Arachne, who seems at times like a villain, emerges eventually as a romantic hero. Her stubborn obsession to do whatever it takes to get what she wants including creating an artistic fiction that sends an entire city into chaos is the most interesting thing onstage by far. The problem is that Taymor's theatrical world is not as realized as Arachne's. Spider-Man eventually ends up with Mary Jane, which may mean that he decided to join the real world as opposed to the world of illusion, or more likely, it's a concession to convention. Taymor can take some risks, but she can't have Spider-Man ditch his sweetie for an eight-legged sexpot who has convinced New Yorkers that they are headed for the apocalypse. While Spider-Man passionately kisses Arachne at the end, he must eventually do what all super heroes do and stay faithful to the nice, safe girlfriend. Taymor stops short of giving Spider-Man over completely to Arachne. Trying to fulfill and subvert the expectations of a blockbuster musical competing with Mamma Mia!  and Wicked  may be a hopeless act of hubris.

The Broadway Gods insist that art must eventually make a deal with commerce. A production on as epic a scale as Spider-Man  must draw packed houses of tourists for at least two or three years to earn a profit. Families visiting Times Square aren't paying $150 to see a show. They want an experience. Spider-Man  qualifies, but not for the reasons you expect. When the super hero flies over the orchestra, in one of several high-speed aerial effects, it's a jolt. But Cirque Du Soleil,  whose veterans helped with stunts, has pulled off more impressive acrobatics. Spider-Man  is ultimately not unique as spectacle or a rock musical. But as an act of pure artistic will, it's truly something to behold.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Good grief. I don't think I could ever follow that train wreck of a plot in the theater.

"I descended from the astral plane," she says.

So Arachne is from Philadelphia. We used to have a restaurant here by that name, Astral Plane. 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

 

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPH7vZ3Rev8[/youtube]

[Front-Ranger]

Spiderman has become officially Brokeish for me, thanks to you, John!! Long live Broken Theater!! 

[serious crayons]

Spiderman has become officially Brokeish for me, thanks to you, John!! Long live Broken Theater!! 

Yikes. Takes "brokeback" to a whole new level of meaning.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

“Anyone who creates knows — when it’s not quite there. Where it hasn’t quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. And I am right there.”




http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/theater/spider-man-director-faces-tough-choices-including-her-exit.html?_r=1&hp




Spider-Man’ Director
May Face Her Own Exit
By PATRICK HEALY and KEVIN FLYNN
Published: March 7, 2011


The "Spider-Man" team included, from left, the Edge, Bono, Julie Taymor and Glen Berger, a co-writer of the book.


The producers of Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” were negotiating on Monday with their director, Julie Taymor, for her to work with a newly expanded creative team to fix the critically derided $65 million musical or possibly leave the show, according to people who work on “Spider-Man” or have been briefed on the negotiations.

The artistic direction ahead for “Spider-Man” — twice as expensive as any show in Broadway history — involves more decisions than just Ms. Taymor’s future, according to these people, who spoke anonymously because the producers have insisted that no information be disclosed about the talks.

The producers and Ms. Taymor and her co-creators, Bono and the Edge of U2, are also discussing how extensively to overhaul the script and music; how many outside consultants should be hired, and who; and when to open the show, which set a record at its Sunday matinee for the most preview performances ever, its 98th. (The previous record was set in 1969 by Jackie Mason’s “A Teaspoon Every Four Hours.”)

Ken Sunshine, one of the spokesmen for the production, said in response to several questions on Monday night: “We are not commenting on speculation.”

The opening night for “Spider-Man” has already been delayed five times; the current opening date, March 15, seems all but certain to fall, since by Monday night theater critics had not been invited to review it (normally invitations are sent about two weeks before). All of the people who spoke about the negotiations said that the producers now viewed a March 15 opening as unlikely. Many critics, in fact, issued reviews after the previously scheduled opening night of Feb. 7. Ben Brantley, the chief theater critic of The New York Times,  wrote that “Spider-Man” may “rank among the worst” musicals in history.

For all the decisions to be made, the role of Ms. Taymor is the most freighted one. A Tony Award winner for the musical blockbuster “The Lion King" and regarded in some quarters as a visually creative genius, Ms. Taymor was recruited in 2002 as director by Bono and the Edge. The three have stuck together through the thrills of giving fresh life to the Spider-Man story in their dialogue-writing sessions, the near-bankruptcy of the show in 2009, and through the long preview period, which was marred by serious injuries to two actors during performances in December.

The people who spoke about the negotiations said that, throughout Monday, they were not sure if Ms. Taymor would stay or go as director. One person briefed on the negotiations said that Bono, who has been away for much of the show’s preview period, had taken a direct role in the talks.

What is certain, the people said, was that the producers saw the potential for major changes to the musical, which they hope to mount for years in productions around the world, and that Ms. Taymor either needed to accept help in making those changes or face a different outcome, potentially her exit from the show. The names of multiple directors, choreographers and playwrights have been ricocheting around the Broadway community for days now. It was not clear on Monday who would be hired.

By turns frustrated and determined, exhausted and engaged, Ms. Taymor has also alternated between acknowledging that the production had serious artistic flaws and insisting that she have more of a chance to improve it, the people who spoke in interviews said.

Ms. Taymor, in one of her few public comments about “Spider-Man” since her last stretch of interviews in mid-January, said in a speech on Wednesday that she felt she was “in the crucible and the fire of transformation” with “Spider-Man.” Addressing more than 1,000 people at the TED 2011 conference in Long Beach, Calif., Ms. Taymor indicated that she planned to continue working on the show, describing the creative process as a “trial by fire” for herself and her company. She did not suggest that she might leave the production.

Of “Spider-Man,” she said in her speech: “Anyone who creates knows — when it’s not quite there. Where it hasn’t quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. And I am right there.”

[Monika]

They need to give James Franco a call

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

They need to give James Franco a call

 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/theater/09spider.html?hp



‘Spider-Man’
to Postpone
Its Opening
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: March 8, 2011


An official start in June would be the sixth delay to the
opening of "Spider-Man" in the show's long history.


The producers of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” are planning a significant overhaul of the $65 million Broadway musical that would involve shutting down performances for two to three weeks, as well as delaying its scheduled opening on March 15 for about three months, according to people who work on “Spider-Man” or were briefed on the producers’ plans.

The precise dates for the shutdown — needed to give the cast a break and to hold new rehearsals — have not been set, but they are expected to cover late April and early May, the people said. They spoke Tuesday on the condition of anonymity because the producers were working on the details and wanted to disclose the plans themselves. An official announcement was expected this week.

The new opening night was also not clear as of late Tuesday; a shift to a time around the Tony Awards, which are on June 12, could prove controversial among Broadway producers who are bothered by the media and public interest that has focused on “Spider-Man” instead of on their shows. “Spider-Man” has been among the highest-grossing shows on Broadway since beginning preview performances on Nov. 28, taking in $1.28 million last week.

Who would oversee the creative changes has been an open question. The producers on Tuesday continued negotiating with their director, Julie Taymor, and her fellow creators, U2’s Bono and the Edge, about the composition of the artistic team going forward and about whether it would continue to include Ms. Taymor, according to the people briefed on the producers’ planning.

The musical’s press representative, Rick Miramontez, said on Tuesday, “Opening night remains scheduled for March 15.”

An official start in June would be the sixth delay to the opening of “Spider-Man” in the show’s long history, which began in 2002, when Marvel Entertainment reached out to the Broadway producer Tony Adams (“Victor/Victoria”) about developing a musical. The endeavor has survived Mr. Adams’s death in 2005, a near-bankruptcy in 2009 and a number of technical challenges involving its aerial stunts, which contributed to injuries involving four performers during the fall and winter and led to several findings of state and federal safety code violations.

“Spider-Man” completed its 99th preview performance on Tuesday night, more than any other show in history; it is also twice as expensive as the next big-budget Broadway show, “Shrek the Musical.”

No one has worked on “Spider-Man” more intensely than Ms. Taymor, who is also one of its script writers, its mask designer and far and away its chief creative force. But the producers have concluded that the show needs fresh eyes and ideas to improve in light of sharply negative reviews from most of the nation’s theater critics last month. The producers have asked Ms. Taymor to work with new collaborators or face another resolution, possibly even leaving.

The producers have contacted at least two Broadway musical directors, Christopher Ashley (a Tony Award nominee for “Memphis” and “The Rocky Horror Show”) and Philip William McKinley (“The Boy From Oz”), about coming aboard, the people said.

[Meryl]

This is getting ridiculouser by the minute.  They need to face the music, so to speak, and realize it is what it is.  What's that old proverb about a sow's ear....

[Jeff Wrangler]

I wasn't paying close attention, but I believe I heard on the news this morning that Julie Taymor is definitely out of the show.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

This is getting ridiculouser by the minute.  They need to face the music, so to speak, and realize it is what it is.  What's that old proverb about a sow's ear....

I wasn't paying close attention, but I believe I heard on the news this morning that Julie Taymor is definitely out of the show.

Yup, you got it quite correct.



http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/03/spider-man_delayed_another_thr.html

Taymor Out, Spider-Man Delayed
Another Three Months
By: Julie Gerstein
3/8/11 at 9:01 PM

The producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  have decided to fire director Julie Taymor and delay the show's opening for another three months in order to perform a "significant" overhaul, sources close to the musical told the Daily News.

"Taymor is out. She's left the building," a source told the Daily News.

The show has been hit with endless production delays, budget overruns, cast injuries, and largely negative reviews. New York' s Scott Brown wrote that the play is "by turns hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar. But never, ever boring."

The Times  noted "no one has worked on 'Spider-Man' more intensely than Ms. Taymor, who is its director, one of its script writers, its mask designer and far and away its chief creative force." She told the TED conference this week that "anyone who creates knows — when it’s not quite there ... Where it hasn’t quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. And I am right there ... It is my trial by fire. It’s my company’s trial by fire. We have survived because our theme song is 'Rise Above.'"

The Daily News  also said the production would temporarily shut down for two to three weeks to retool yet again, driving up the the price tag of what is already by far the most expensive production in Broadway history. There was no word as to who might replace Taymor, although press reports in February said that Phil McKinley, director of the Tony-winning play The Boy From Oz,  might be brought on as a co-director.

On Tuesday, show press representative Rick Miramontez said: "Opening night remains scheduled for March 15.” This week it completed its 99th performance in previews, more than any other show in history. At least they broke one record, right?

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

They need to give James Franco a call

Monika--!    

[Front-Ranger]

If you can't stand the sticky, stay out of the spideweb!!

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/03/spider-man_adds_director_as_ju.html

Spider-Man  Adds Director
as Julie Taymor Steps Back
By: Kyle Buchanan
3/9/11 at 9:40 PM

It's official: The beleaguered Broadway production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  has announced its long-rumored opening night delay (it's now rescheduled for "early summer") and the hiring of Broadway vet Phil McKinley, director of the Tony-winning play The Boy From Oz.  Contrary to the producer's previous statement, [Julie] Taymor has been removed as director and McKinley is in. In a meeting with the cast, co-creator Bono said that Taymor would still be a part of the show, but would not be there from day to day.

Said the producers in a statement:


"Julie Taymor is not leaving the creative team. Her vision has been at the heart of this production since its inception and will continue to be so. Julie's previous commitments mean that past March 15th, she cannot work the 24/7 necessary to make the changes in the production in order to be ready for our opening. We cannot exaggerate how technically difficult it is to make such changes to a show of this complexity, so it's with great pride that we announce that Phil McKinley is joining the creative team."


Those familiar with Taymor and the show say that problems have been long-simmering, and stem from her unwillingness to accept outside criticism and changes. According to four of her colleagues, Taymor refused to meet with outside collaborators; did not act on suggestions for improvements; and disagreed with cast and crew about changes to the musical's story. The show's producers and Taymor's co-creators Bono and The Edge also expected she would make more changes to the show's problematic second act. In the end, they decided she lacked the objectivity to make the necessary changes to the show.

Eventually producers Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris lost patience with Taymor. And on Monday, Cohl told Taymor she had to leave.

“Julie’s an extremely sensitive person, and she has always felt like a mother to her plays, a mother to her characters,” said Jeffrey Horowitz, a friend and artistic director of New York’s Theater for a New Audience, and one of the few people who has gone on record about the Taymor and the production. “This is like a mother being taken away from her family. She loves that family. She wants that family.”

Good luck with this one, Bono!

[Jeff Wrangler]

This is all getting just a little too ridiculous. For a show that hasn't "opened" it's taken in how many gazillions in ticket sales?

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

I want to see the lady-spiders trying on shoes and the supervillain fashion show. 

You better go fast, Jeff--the lady-spiders and their shoes are getting the heave-ho!




http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/theater/changing-julie-taymors-vision-in-spider-man.html?_r=1&ref=theater


‘Spider-Man’: Turn On the Changes
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: March 10, 2011


Many of Julie Taymor’s signature touches in Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” would be cut or altered in the producers’ new creative plan, which includes scaling back the villainess Arachne, dropping the “Deeply Furious” number of shoe-wearing spider-ladies, and reshaping the Geek Chorus of narrators, according to three people who work on the show and were briefed Thursday on plans.

The producers announced Wednesday that Ms. Taymor was stepping aside from the $65 million production because of schedule conflicts, though she will still be billed as its director and a script writer. Taking over to reshape the show will be the theater and circus director Philip William McKinley (Broadway’s “Boy From Oz”) and the playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.

Friends and colleagues of Ms. Taymor have said she was forced out because she would not make extensive changes that the producers wanted.

The producers have now decided that they will shut down the show sometime this spring, but only for a short period, and they want artists with fresh perspectives to oversee the changes.

According to the three people aware of the producers’ plan, who spoke anonymously because it is confidential, the central love story of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson will be enhanced, and Arachne — who now dominates Act II — will have her stage time reduced.

The producers also want to cut “Deeply Furious,” which has been widely denounced by theater critics. The show’s composers, Bono and the Edge of U2, are writing at least two new songs, one of which will be for the start of Act II; the second may replace “Deeply Furious.”

Additional flying sequences are being considered, and the story arc of the villain Green Goblin is also expected to be clarified. What happens to him in Act II is among several confusing plot points.

Lawyers for Ms. Taymor and the production continued negotiations on Thursday about her contract, which gives her broad creative control over the musical. A spokeswoman for Ms. Taymor declined to comment.

Broadway group sales offices were being inundated Thursday with complaints and concerns from organizers who had planned trips to New York to see “Spider-Man” after its previously scheduled March 15 opening. “Buyers want answers now, and most want to protect themselves with other shows and many want refunds,” said Stephanie Lee, president of Group Sales Box Office.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Uh oh.




Members of the current production, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements at the producers’ request, said that the goal of the new creative team was to strip away some of the musical’s darker elements to make it more family-friendly. While audiences now regularly include children accompanied by grown-ups, the new team wants parents to know that the show will be a pleasurable, thrilling experience for young audiences, rather than the more serious, adult-minded fare that Ms. Taymor had in mind.





http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/theater/julie-taymors-vision-for-spider-man-takes-its-final-bows.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1302955700-BKCj9Hguvuw/+ASUfRmbXA



One Show Spins Its Last,
As Another Takes Shape
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: April 15, 2011


Backstage at "Spider-Man" recently, the show's lead actor, Reeve Carney, and Julie Taymor, who was
ousted by the producers last month over creative conflicts.



Julie Taymor with Bono.


History is being made on Broadway this weekend: The $70 million museum piece that is Julie Taymor’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the most expensive musical of all time, is on display in its final performances through Sunday afternoon, then disassembled out of existence.

Gone, when the show resumes performances on May 12 after a three-week overhaul, will be the Geek Chorus of narrators who were stand-ins for the show’s creators: Bono and the Edge of U2, the playwright Glen Berger and Ms. Taymor, whom the producers ousted as director last month over creative conflicts.

Gone will be Ms. Taymor’s vision of the spider villainess Arachne, now a central role inspired by Greek mythology. The part will be reduced to a guardian angel character during the hiatus, according to members of the cast and the production.



The Arachne character, which will have a reduced role in the new
production.


Gone, too, will be some of Ms. Taymor’s head-spinning numbers, like “Deeply Furious,” in which Arachne and her spider ladies-in-waiting become all-powerful by slipping shoes onto their many legs. Gone will be the Act I death of another villain, the Green Goblin, who will become an even bigger character when performances resume, reflecting the wishes of focus groups that “Spider-Man” producers convened this winter. And gone will be the Act II climax, a confrontation between Arachne and Peter Parker.



With Julie Taymor out as director, "Spider-Man:
Turn Off the Dark" will have a bigger role for the
Green Goblin, above, battling with Spider-Man.


For some members of the “Spider-Man” cast and crew, the weeks since Ms. Taymor’s firing on March 9 have been a painful limbo: eight performances a week of a show marked for extinction. Once again, “Spider-Man” is without historical precedent: no other Broadway show has run for months without opening and then shut down temporarily to excise much of the original director’s concept.

“I’m greatly saddened that the world won’t get to see Julie’s vision after the end of this week,” said Gideon Glick, who played one of the geeks, Jimmy-6 (with qualities inspired by Bono), who will leave the production after Sunday. “She aspired to show the world that comic books were part of a larger mythos that’s been around since even before the Greeks. She elevated the story of ‘Spider-Man’ to a cosmic level.”



When the revamped "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" resumes performances on May 12, a major
missing element will be the Geek Chorus of narrators, played here, from left, by Jonathan Schwartz,
Gideon Glick, T. V. Carpio and Mat Devine.


In a statement, Ms. Taymor’s spokesman said: “Julie feels that the early reviews that published before the show was ready to open sadly do not reflect the show that is closing this weekend.  Most critics, in fact, will have never seen this latest version before they see one that greatly changes major threads of the story, choreography and songs.”

As some actors have prepared to depart, others have been rehearsing the new script written by Mr. Berger and his new collaborator, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a playwright and comic-book author. But even some of those who are staying said they were still struggling over the loss of Ms. Taymor. T. V. Carpio, who will remain in the cast as Arachne, described Ms. Taymor in a statement as “at the heart of this project.”

“Julie takes risks and that is what makes her amazing,” Ms. Carpio wrote. Regarding Ms. Taymor’s ideas for “Spider-Man,” she added, “I’m sure you can always find flaws in things, but the fact is she took that risk and she should be commended for it.”

The reconfigured creative team — the theater and circus director Philip William McKinley (Broadway’s “Boy From Oz”), Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa and Mr. Berger — also declined to be interviewed through a spokesman for the production.

More than 245,000 people have seen “Spider-Man” since Nov. 28, when the first of about 140 previews so far took place — the most ever for a Broadway show. Its lead producers, Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris, kept delaying opening night in hopes that Ms. Taymor (and now her successors) could make improvements. Theater critics roundly thrashed the show in reviews in early February; the producers have said they hope the overhaul will yield a better production that will win praise from critics who come to review it just before June 14, the latest opening-night date.

Through the months “Spider-Man” has remained one of the top-grossing shows on Broadway, earning more than $25 million so far, persisting as an object of fascination for fans of Spider-Man, U2, Ms. Taymor and problem-plagued entertainment. Yet the musical’s typical weekly gross of $1.3 million is barely enough to cover the unusually high running costs of this technically ambitious show.

Positive reviews from critics and improved word of mouth among theatergoers will be essential to increasing grosses by a few hundred thousand dollars a week, which will give the show a better chance of someday paying back its investors.

Members of the current production, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements at the producers’ request, said that the goal of the new creative team was to strip away some of the musical’s darker elements to make it more family-friendly. While audiences now regularly include children accompanied by grown-ups, the new team wants parents to know that the show will be a pleasurable, thrilling experience for young audiences, rather than the more serious, adult-minded fare that Ms. Taymor had in mind.

The producers also reportedly believe that a successful Broadway reception for “Spider-Man” is critical to mounting future, profitable versions of the show in cities like Las Vegas and London.

Still, the musical’s weekly grosses indicate that there has been an audience for Ms. Taymor’s original vision, said Danel Ezralow, the “Spider-Man” dance and aerial choreographer and a longtime Taymor collaborator who was replaced after she was. He said in an interview that he was still rooting for the show, and noted — with a touch of bewilderment — that the producers told him they were pleased with his contributions even as they chose a new choreographer, Chase Brock.

“The musical is doing great, and I hope that it does much better — I really wish the best for the show,” Mr. Ezralow said. “I did hear from everybody that they loved my work, the producers included. But typically with a changeover of government, you also get a new secretary of state,” he said, referring to the addition of Mr. Brock after Mr. McKinley was hired to direct.

In recent weeks actors and producers who have worked with Ms. Taymor on other projects have begun mounting a defense of her work on “Spider-Man.” Mr. Glick echoed them in an interview, recalling that he initially scoffed when his mother alerted him to auditions for “Spider-Man.” But when he heard that the director would be Ms. Taymor, whose film work (“Across the Universe,” “Frida”) he admired, Mr. Glick said he decided to try out for the musical.

“I have always been excited by Julie’s visceral style,” said Mr. Glick, who appeared on Broadway in the original cast of the Tony Award-winning musical “Spring Awakening” and Off Broadway in the critically praised play “Speech & Debate.” “Sometimes style can alienate audiences from the material. But Julie is a rare artist whose distinct images are imbued with emotion, evoking awe and tears.”

While seats at the final performances through Sunday had been selling briskly, it was unclear if Ms. Taymor would be sitting in one, friends of hers said this week. She, Mr. Cohl and Mr. Harris still have not signed a final agreement spelling out her creative rights over the show going forward, despite weeks of negotiations. Bad blood remains between Ms. Taymor, as the former director, and the producers and Bono and the Edge, who helped push her out after nine years of working together.

Ms. Taymor has taken the view that this “Spider-Man” is not what some are calling “the director’s cut”: she was not, after all, given the chance to make all the improvements to the show she wanted, her friends say.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Gone, too, will be some of Ms. Taymor’s head-spinning numbers, like “Deeply Furious,” in which Arachne and her spider ladies-in-waiting become all-powerful by slipping shoes onto their many legs.

That idea is just deeply bizarre.

And deeply funny (at least in my imagination).

What was Julie Taymor thinking?

And what's going to become of her career after this fiasco?

I wonder what sort of shoes they were? Jimmy Choo's? Manolo Blahnik's? What's-his-name, the guy with the red soles, who was just profiled in The New Yorker?

Cue Carrie Bradshaw! 

[Front-Ranger]

This reminds me of some of the things that were said about Ang Lee after The Hulk, and look what he did afterwards!

[Jeff Wrangler]

This reminds me of some of the things that were said about Ang Lee after The Hulk, and look what he did afterwards!

Yes, but the movie industry is a bigger universe than Broadway.

[Front-Ranger]

I wonder if the original play was recorded for us purists? Question for you, Mr. Gleek, will you be sorry to see the Geek Chorus go? I certainly will, as well as Ariachne and her shoes.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/theater/bono-and-the-edge-explain-spider-man-back-story.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1308004456-yZMkacPZ1VRMz7U1pTlmXA&pagewanted=all





Superstars Never Guessed the Size
of ‘Spider-Man’ Challenges
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: June 13, 2011


Bono, left, and the Edge on the set of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” at the Foxwoods Theater.


In their fullest comments yet about the creative clashes this winter inside “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” Bono and the Edge, of U2 — first-time Broadway composers — said they originally embraced Julie Taymor’s script and characters for the show but were wholly ill-prepared for putting her ambitious ideas onstage. They ultimately lost faith in her and quietly maneuvered to overhaul “Spider-Man,” before finally shocking Ms. Taymor, their longtime collaborator, with her ouster in March.

During an interview on the cusp of the show’s long-awaited Broadway opening on Tuesday night, Bono also disclosed that he had not put any of his own money into the $70 million musical, the most expensive in Broadway history, while the Edge said he put in an undisclosed sum to underscore his commitment. The two rock musicians said they never would have tried to make “Spider-Man” if they had known it would take a decade to bring to life. For all that work, Bono added, he felt artistically “impotent” at times and did not love the show until a preview performance late last month.

Bono and the Edge expressed regret at not being on site during previews in December, saying they were locked into a U2 tour of New Zealand and Australia. Most Broadway composers, both veterans and especially newcomers, are in their theaters virtually every night during previews, watching and taking notes. The Edge said they watched videos of performances from Australia yet were not in the theater again until early January, by which time the musical had become a late-night TV punch line.

They then went to work on sound design and new lyrics; despite hints and promises of new music, however, there is only one fully new song in the show, a version of which had been pitched to Ms. Taymor.

Even now, Bono and the Edge said, the musical is just 90 percent complete, with a final 10 percent of work — in their view, chiefly involving the relationship between Peter Parker and the villain, the Green Goblin — to be done this summer.

Bono and the Edge have been opening up recently about their experience with the show in hopes of promoting the much-altered post-Taymor version before theater critics weigh in this week. Critics largely savaged the earlier production of “Spider-Man” as its oft-extended preview period dragged on in February; Ms. Taymor, an acclaimed director of experimental theater and a Tony Award winner for “The Lion King,” defended the version they reviewed as unfinished.

A month later the producers fired Ms. Taymor with the blessing of Bono and the Edge, and she has said virtually nothing publicly since. She was not available for comment on Monday, her spokeswoman said. Ms. Taymor is expected at least to touch on “Spider-Man” in a speech at a theater conference in Los Angeles on Saturday.

For the two leaders of U2, one of the top-selling and most-honored bands of all time, a conversation that delved into the demise of their relationship with Ms. Taymor seemed at once bittersweet and cathartic. After all, Bono said, they had “some of the best days of our lives daydreaming about what you could do on a stage” with Ms. Taymor and their fourth collaborator, the playwright Glen Berger.

But they had no idea how much time it would consume.

“The hours and weeks and months,” Bono said with a distinct melancholy flattening his voice, in an otherwise empty private room at the Spotted Pig restaurant in the West Village, in which he is an investor. “If we thought it would take this long, there is not a chance on earth we’d have done it.”

Ms. Taymor was the only one of the original foursome to be purged on March 9 — after she resisted a so-called Plan X, a new, simplified plot written largely by Mr. Berger, the two musicians said. Ms. Taymor had brought in Mr. Berger, a respected author of highbrow plays, as her writing partner in 2005 on the “Spider-Man” script.

The Edge, who was more present and hands-on this winter than Bono, said he had urged Ms. Taymor to accept the radical overhaul. She, in turn, was pushing to suspend performances in midwinter to make her own changes.

“When Plan X was presented, she said: ‘That could never be achieved in a three-week period. You’d need months to do that, and it probably won’t work anyway for X, Y, and Z reasons,’ ” the Edge recounted. “At that moment, when that was her response, the producers felt that whatever Julie would do with a hiatus was more of a polishing job than a top-to-bottom rethink of the show.”

Asked whether he and Bono plotted against Ms. Taymor, the Edge replied: “Julie was clearly exhausted, overwrought, and we all thought that if we don’t tread carefully, she’s going to walk. We were tip-toeing around her, and I think that probably meant that people were careful in what they said or told her. I certainly didn’t feel I could be 100 percent frank with Julie, and that was because I felt she was carrying so much of the weight.”

In hindsight, Bono said, starting preview performances of “Spider-Man” on Broadway in November without an out-of-town tryout was “a terrible decision” that put enormous pressure on Ms. Taymor. But such a test run was impossible, Bono added, because the show’s aerial technology and massive, pop-up sets were built to fit its New York home, the Foxwoods Theater.

“Looking back,” Bono said, “we, through inexperience, had no sense of the implications of that decision. That the first time anyone saw a full run-through of the story, songs, staging, and show was the first night of previews. Can you imagine that? No one had seen the whole thing before everyone saw it.”

But the composers acknowledged that they were hardly in the dark about Ms. Taymor’s vision of “Spider-Man.”

“We read her script, we were part of developing that script, we thought it was great,” Bono said of the version that critics ripped to shreds in February.

The two men attended developmental workshops over the last three years where the dialogue was read, characters fleshed out. It was not until they took a month off from U2 last fall to work on the musical that, they said, they realized the magnitude of turning the script into a full-blooded show. “Julie was trying to wrestle with the logistics as well as the art, and that’s when I felt fairly impotent,” Bono said.

Bono and the Edge left for a U2 tour in New Zealand in late November without seeing that first of the record-setting 183 preview performances of the show, the final one on Monday night. They said they were aghast at what they saw on the videos: the plot was muddled, as was the music, and “Spider-Man” still lacked an ending.

Ms. Taymor encouraged them to come back to New York and help her, particularly with the refining of lyrics and of the sound. The Edge said they could not cancel U2’s tour of Australia because the concerts were booked.

Once they returned, they initially agreed with Ms. Taymor to focus on “clarifying the story,” the Edge said. Some cast members, though, began suggesting radical changes, like moving the spectacular aerial battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin from the end of Act I to the climax of Act II — an idea that had occurred to the Edge too. Mr. Berger, the playwright, began developing new script ideas.

“Glen was one of the early believers that there was possibly a more simple version,” the Edge said. “Reluctantly I think most of us came to believe that he was right.” Those outlines of a new show are now apparent in the 2.0 version of “Spider-Man” that will open on Tuesday. A new creative team was recruited in late winter, with Philip William McKinley taking over direction.

But Bono said he felt the show was finally greater than the sum of its parts — parts, though, that did gave him frissons of excitement way back when.

“The first time I loved ‘Spider-Man’ was two and a half weeks ago,” he admitted, but added, “Even when I was really angry about its obtuse story and some of the awful readings of the music — even then I was still saying, it was kind of magical.”

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/theater/reviews/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-opens-after-changes-review.html?pagewanted=all




Theater Review
'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark'
1 Radioactive Bite, 8 Legs
and 183 Previews
The mega-expensive musical is no longer the ungodly,
indecipherable mess it was in February. It’s just a bore.

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 14, 2011


Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
Reeve Carney in the title role and Patrick Page as
the Green Goblin in this reworking, which finally opened
Tuesday at the Foxwoods Theater.


There is something to be said for those dangerous flying objects — excuse me, I mean actors — that keep whizzing around the Foxwoods Theater, where the mega-expensive musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” has entered the latest chapter of its fraught and anxious existence. After all, if you’re worried that somebody might fall on top of you from a great height, the odds are that you won’t nod off.

Those adrenaline-raising acrobatics are a necessary part of the lumpy package that is “Spider-Man,” which had its long-delayed official opening on Tuesday night, after 180-some preview performances. First seen and deplored by critics several months ago — when impatient journalists (including me) broke the media embargo for reviews as the show’s opening date kept sliding into a misty future — this singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February. It’s just a bore.

So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”

The first time I saw the show, it was like watching the Hindenburg burn and crash. This time “Spider-Man” — which was originally conceived by the (since departed) visionary director Julie Taymor with the rock musicians Bono and the Edge (of U2) — stirred foggy, not unpleasant childhood memories of second-tier sci-fi TV in the 1960s, with blatantly artificial sets and actors in unconvincing alien masks.

“Spider-Man” may be the only Broadway show of the past half-century to make international headlines regularly, often with the adjective “troubled” attached to its title. So I’m assuming you already know at least a bit of its long and tortuous history of revision, cancellation, indecision and injury (from production-related accidents), and of its true star.

That would be Ms. Taymor (who retains an “original direction by” credit), who in the 1990s was hailed as the new Ziegfeld after reinventing a Disney animated film, “The Lion King,” as a classy, mass-appeal Broadway blockbuster. The prospect of her hooking up with Spidey, the nerdy-cool Marvel Comics crime fighter, seemed like a swell opportunity for another lucrative melding of pageantry, puppetry and culture high and low.

Those elements were certainly in abundance in the “Spider-Man” I saw several months ago. That production, which featured a script by Ms. Taymor and Glen Berger, placed its young superhero in a broader meta-context of Greek mythology and American Pop art, with a “geek chorus” of commentators and a classical goddess named Arachne as the morally ambiguous mentor of Spidey and his awkward alter ego, Peter Parker.

Unfortunately, traditional niceties like a comprehensible plot and characters got lost in the stew. After critics let loose with howls of derision, “Spider-Man” took a three-week performance hiatus to reassemble itself, with tools that included audience focus groups. Exit Ms. Taymor. (Bono, the Edge and Mr. Berger stayed put.)

Enter Philip William McKinley — a director whose credits include several versions of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” — and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a writer of both plays and comic books. Now if you check out the directory of paid theater listings in The New York Times, you’ll see that the title “Spider-Man” is prefaced by the promising (if slightly desperate-sounding) words: “REIMAGINED! New Story! New Music!”

This is not false advertising. “Spider-Man” now bears only a scant resemblance to the muddled fever dream that was. It is instead not unlike one of those perky, tongue-in-cheek genre-spoof musicals (“Dames at Sea,” “Little Shop of Horrors”) that used to sprout like mushrooms in Greenwich Village, with witty cutout scenery and dialogue bristling with arch quotation marks.

Well, that is, if you could imagine such a show being stripped of its irony and supersized by a diabolical mad scientist with an enlarging ray. Though “Spider-Man” has shed its geek chorus and scaled down the role of Arachne (T. V. Carpio), it retains the most spectacular-looking centerpieces from the Taymor version. (George Tsypin is the set designer.) They include a vertiginous vision of Manhattan as seen from the top of the Chrysler Building, judiciously repositioned for plot purposes.

But they do seem out of proportion to what has become a straightforward children’s entertainment with a mildly suspenseful story, two-dimensional characters, unapologetically bad jokes and the kind of melodious rock tunes that those under 12 might be familiar with from listening to their parents’ salad-day favorites of the 1980s and ’90s. The puppet figures and mask-dominated costumes worn by the supporting villains still seem to have wandered in from a theme park. The projection designs by Kyle Cooper continue to suggest vintage MTV videos, as does the unimaginative choreography by Daniel Ezralow and Chase Brock.

The bonus is that anyone can follow the story now. (Boy is bitten by radioactive spider, boy acquires amazing powers, boy fights crime, boy has doubts, boy triumphs.) And the performers no longer seem overwhelmed by what surrounds them. Their characters now register as distinct if one-note personalities.

In the title role Reeve Carney is an appropriately nonthreatening crush object for tweens, an appealingly agitated Everydweeb with great cheekbones and a sanitized, lite version of a concert rocker’s voice. He is well paired with the wryly sincere Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal”) as Mary Jane Watson, Peter’s girlfriend.

Ms. Carpio’s Arachne (now a beneficent fairy godmother rather than an erotically troubling dream spider) provides the most arresting vocal moments with her ululating nasality. Michael Mulheren is suitably blustery and fatuous as the pandering newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. And Patrick Page, as the megalomaniacal scientist who becomes the evil mutant called the Green Goblin, provides the one reason for adults unaccompanied by minors to see the show.

His role has been expanded, and Mr. Page uses the extra time not just to terrorize the audience amiably, as you expect mean green scene stealers to do. (He has charmingly reinvented that staple of melodramatic villains, the sustained insane cackle.) He also has become the show’s entertaining id, channeling and deflecting our own dark thoughts about this lopsided spectacle.

“I’m a $65 million circus tragedy,” he crows at one point. “Well, more like 75 million.”

But even Mr. Page is only a sideshow (not to switch metaphors) to the main event. And that’s the sight of real people — mostly stuntmen — flying over the audience, and the implicit danger therein. (An amplified voice warns the audience not only to turn off their cellphones but also to avoid trying to catch a ride with the professional fliers.)

Unlike the first time I saw “Spider-Man,” the flying (the first instance of which occurs about 45 minutes into the show) went off without a hitch on this occasion. The potential magic is undercut, though, by the very visible wires and harnesses that facilitate these aerodynamics.

Partly because the performers are masked, you experience little of the vicarious wonder and exhilaration that comes from watching Peter Pan or even Mary Poppins ride the air in other musicals. The effect is rather like looking at anonymous daredevils who have been strapped into a breakneck ride at an amusement park. Come to think of it, Coney Island might be a more satisfying choice.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Ouch!

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/06/theater_review_a_critics_final.html

Theater Review:
A Critic's Final Word on
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
By: Scott Brown
6/14/11 at 10:00 PM


Reeve Carney in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

With any luck, this will be the last time you'll run across Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  in this space. I can't say I'm sad to be through with it. The thrill is gone. So is the insanity and the walleyed, aneurysm-in-progress fun of it all. I'm sorry to report that the eight-legged, nine-lived megalomusical—which finally opened tonight, in its newly tamed, scared-straight and heavily Zolofted post-Taymor state—has deteriorated from mindblowingly misbegotten carnival-of-the-damned to merely embarrassing dud. Awash in a garbage-gyre of expository dialogue pumped in by script doctor/comic-book vet Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, its lavish stage pictures turned to colloidal mush by director Philip William McKinley and choreographer Chase Brock, Spidey 2.0 is indeed leaner and more linear, and its story has been brutally clarified: It's now all too clear how very, very little was there in the first place. Spider-Man violates the first rule of pop fantasy: Never lose the distinction between beautiful simplicity and rank simplemindedness.

On the plus side: The flying rigs work now. No hitches, no potential manslaughter charges. Hooray. But don't worry, thrill-seekers: Every airborne actor still provides a fresh opportunity for you to fear for their lives, as well as your own. Spidey's best trick—his habit of arresting an overhead swing at its apex and suddenly thunking down into the orchestra seats—remains intact.

But much of the show's acromegalic Herman Munster charm, its faith in its own grotesque incoherence, its devotion to delusion, has been crudely lobotomized out of it, in order to make way for what studio executives often refer to as (barf) relationships. This means a lot of empty, brow-furrowed cliché-spouting, as couples come together and fall apart. Turn Off the Dark has trimmed its running time, but you'd never guess it, listening to Reeve Carney's Peter Parker and Jennifer Damiano's Mary Jane Watson prattle through their insipid pas de dumb. Carney, free of Taymor's clutches and costume designs, now styles himself the Axe-scented club-stud he resembles in "candid" photos. He's got a strong, shreddy tenor and stage presence to spare, but newly empowered nerd he most certainly ain't. There's no wonder in him, no thrill-of-first-flight, just a cock-rock entitlement amplified by his new choreography, which most amounts to strutting and posing. Meanwhile, Taymor's pet spider-goddess, Arachne (T.V. Carpio), has been reduced to some sort of vague, astral cheerleader-figure.

In this absence of, well, everything that might constitute drama, Patrick Page's Norman Osborn/Green Goblin has been handed the whole show. Pre-rehab, Page was the best thing about the musical; even the technical glitches, which could sometimes take upwards of ten minutes to repair, were made more than palatable by his natural showmanship, easy patter, and sly self-mockery. Now he's been given scene after scene in which to cut up: The Goblin calls the Daily Bugle ... and gets annoyed by one of those irritating voice-mail menus! You know the ones I mean? With the "press one for English," "if you are satisfied with your message," etc., etc.? What's that? You do know them? You've known them since 1990? You don't say! It's the kind of stuff that wouldn't make the cut on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, but Spidey's new handlers spread this soothing poop liberally, over everything, usually to cover the now-choppy set changes and splatter-pattern production numbers. (With no new money to spend, McKinley and Brock usually just clear the enormous stage and let cast-members run amok in the void. The high-school musical rule of "everybody run this way! Okay, now, everybody run that way!" is very much in effect.)

No amount of mulch or manure can cover up the music, which is, by far, the show's greatest weakness. (Which is saying something.) With Taymor in charge, Spider-Man  essentially ignored its score, and invited us to ignore it, too. We happily obliged. Now, the inert echoplay of the Edge's music and the dippy teen-poet vacuousness of Bono's lyrics cannot and will not be denied. (From "And you say rise above / Into the skies above" to "All the weirdos in the world / are here right now in New York City," there's perhaps not a single defensible line—and Edge, in his wisdom, spaces those lines at arid rock distances, making you wait whole seconds for unimaginative rhymes most of us could Mad-Lib in an instant.) "Bullying by Numbers," "DIY World," "A Freak Like Me Needs Company," and the narcotizing ballad "If the World Should End" (the undisputed nadir of last weekend's Tony-awards ceremony) demonstrate, beyond a doubt, that the boys from Dublin never had a damned clue what a musical was or how to dramatize action and emotion in song. Spider-Man  was a bad Julie Taymor musical; it is now, wholeheartedly, a terrible U2 musical, with a governing dramaturgy that owes more to Pop than Achtung Baby.

Spider-Man —to beat my running metaphor into the ground and then leave it for dead—is like that good-and-crazy friend with a highly entertaining substance-abuse problem, the one who went off and got clean, and came back a different and diminished person. With his manias and overmuchness, you realized, after he returned, how very little you ever had to offer one another. With Taymor gone, and the ruins of her monstrous Lovecraftian vision overrun by Lilliputians, there's simply nothing to see here, other than the sort of "stunt spectacular" that wouldn't look out of place amidst a backdrop of roller coasters and toddler-vomit. It's a vast emptiness, void even of its animating madness. It shuffles and smiles and subsides, like a good inmate, its hummingbird heartbeat slowed to a crawl. Put your head to Spidey's chest, and all you'll hear is the dull smack of a damp wad of cash hitting the boards.


Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is at the Foxwoods Theatre, 213 West 42nd Street.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/06/theater_review_a_critics_final.html

Julie Taymor Showed Up to the
Spider-Man Premiere
By: Julie Gerstein
6/15/11 at 12:53 AM

Tuesday night was the official opening of the much-troubled Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and it marked a return of sorts for the show's original director, Julie Taymor, who was seen embracing her former collaborator Bono after the performance. Speaking during the curtain call, Bono praised Taymor's creativity and mentioned that "by the way, you’re looking hot, Julie.” And then Taymor thanked “this cast, this crew, these musicians, and this incredible creative team that I worked with for a long time.”

The show's first official non-preview performance was dripping with celebrity audience members, so many that the performance began 50 minutes late to accommodate Spike Lee, Steve Martin, Liam Neeson, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Bono, by the way, took in the show with his old pal former president Bill Clinton. Clinton attended the performance with daughter Chelsea and a small entourage, and was seen guffawing throughout — especially during a scene in which the Green Goblin becomes frustrated with his overly complicated voice-mail system. Apparently the Green Goblin is a baby boomer, too.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Ouch!

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/06/theater_review_a_critics_final.html

Theater Review:
A Critic's Final Word on
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
By: Scott Brown
6/14/11 at 10:00 PM


Reeve Carney in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

Meeow!

At least Reeve Carney doesn't look too bad in the suit.