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Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has delayed its February 7 opening, yet again. This time, opening night will be March 15 as Julie Taymor and her creative collaborators including U2′s Bono and The Edge try to work more bugs out of the musical’s system. This one’s not going to sit well in places like The New York Times. Critic Charles Isherwood, clearly gritting his teeth, recently ran an article saying the paper would hold its tongue, despite “reviews” written for Bloomberg News by Jeremy Gerard (who paid $292 for his orchestra seat) and another in Newsday by critic Linda Winer. It’s getting to the point now where reviewers will be hard-pressed to hold off any longer. Spider-Man is packing the house in preview performances (Glenn Beck just issued the musical’s first full fledged rave), and the musical might be better off selling tickets in an endless run of previews, without ever having an official opening. That might be the $65 million musical’s best hope of recouping. The postponement comes as The New Yorker Magazine unveils a cover that makes light of the litany of accidents suffered during the aerial portion of the show. Here’s the official word:
New York, NY – Lead producers Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris announced tonight that SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark has delayed its opening night (previously set for February 7, 2011) to Tuesday, March 15th to allow for more time to fine-tune aspects of the show, including the new ending. Also to that end, the scheduled performances on Tuesday, January 18 and Tuesday, January 25 have been cancelled, and all ticketholders for those performances will be offered refunds or exchanges. All other preview performances will go on as scheduled. Directed by Julie Taymor and featuring a book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger, and new music and lyrics by U2’s Bono and The Edge, SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark is now in previews at Broadway’s Foxwoods Theatre (213 West 42nd Street). Last week, SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark was the number one box office grossing show on Broadway.
Producer Cohl commented, “SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark is ten-times more complicated to tech than anything else, and the preview schedule allows for only very limited rehearsal time (twelve hours per week). We simply need more time to fully execute the creative team’s vision before freezing the show. I picked a date in March that allows me to ensure that this will be the final postponement.”
In a statement, Ms. Taymor said, “We are so grateful for the enthusiastic audiences who have been coming to see SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark and we are dedicated to giving them the very best show we can.”
Bono and The Edge added, “Working on this show has been one of the great thrills of our lives, we’ll continue working as long as they let us. We are looking for the extraordinary here and we are nearly there.”
Featuring direction by Tony® Award-winner Julie Taymor (The Tempest, Across The Universe, The Lion King), music and lyrics by 22-time Grammy® Award-winners Bono and The Edge, a book co-written by Taymor and Glen Berger (Underneath The Lintel) and one of the most iconic title characters of all time, SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark is the most ambitious production ever undertaken on Broadway and finds astonishingly fresh ways to tell a story inspired by over 40 years of Marvel comic books. The show follows the story of teenager Peter Parker, whose unremarkable life is turned upside-down when he’s bitten by a genetically altered spider and wakes up the next morning clinging to his bedroom ceiling. This bullied science-geek suddenly endowed with incredible powers soon learns, however, that with great power comes great responsibility as villains put both his physical strength and strength of character to the test. SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark will thrill audiences through a unique entertainment experience in ways never-before-dreamed-possible in live theater.
Tickets are priced from $67.50 – $135 for weekday performances and $67.50 – $140 for weekend performances and can be purchased at Ticketmaster.com or by calling (877) 250-2929 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (877) 250-2929 end_of_the_skype_highlighting. Tickets are also available at the Foxwoods Theatre box office Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, 12:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Syfy, the premier cable destination for imagination-based entertainment, is a lead media partner for SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark.
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with all of the issues surrounding this show, do they really think it’s a good idea to open on the ides of march????
I’m beginning to think this is a strategy… get as many people as possible to to shell out top dollar for a “preview,” make some changes, and then get them to come back. You get two bites at the apple. This “perpetual preview” model could quickly become an industry standard.
Spider-man, Turn Off The Drek
Cut your losses, people! Nothing about this show bodes well.
Based on feedback from preview audiences I read this as good news. Taymor, et al, have proven track records and I trust that now that they apparently have the acrobatics of it mastered, they can work on the book & music.
Its important to remember that shows like this are made to last a long, long time. And there’s a reason a show has ‘previews’…to allow the creative team to see it with an audience. Anyone that attends a preview and is upset that the show changes has no one to blame but themselves.
I’d much rather have them delay the opening than open a bad show. There are way too many of them already on Broadway….
They really need that time. There’s going to be an entirely revamped 2nd act.
the 2nd act was a killer. and it had no ending- it just stopped. They have a lot of work to do. and how about adding a score people would want to buy ? As it is , I doubt they would sell 1 copy
Do they ever intend to open this or is this musical in actuality a Produceresque attempt to produce a flop and skip to South America with the cash?
If they can just get this show into halfway decent shape (and maybe not even that), they’ll run for years. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and this one is going to prove it. The amount of press they’ve gotten is incredible, and it’s all going to be to their benefit in the end.
Having seen the show, a reworked ending is badly needed, and could be the difference between a pretty good show and a total dud. The needed changes to the second act are huge – as it stands, Act II is a train wreck. So the delay gives me some hope, as I saw no way they could fix it by February 7th.
It’s not just the 2nd act (which you are very right about). It is that the music by Bono and the Edge is in desperate need of work. The tragic thing, and mark my words, is that this is the one thing that they appear not to be touching. Taymor will cut the 2nd act by 15 minutes and make it closer to Act 1′s slight miss but unless the music is overhauled it has no long term chances.
Even Sondheim is there to work on the music throughout the preview process making all sorts of overhauls and adjustments but Bono and the Edge have been touring. This is the biggest mistake and will be what ultimately brings this needlessly down. These are great rock musicians but this is a different venue. The actor/singers do the best they can with material that does not work.
This is unheard of, a show being in previews for 4 months. I’m pretty sure this is a record.
At this rate, the new Spider-Man movie will open before this thing.
Agreed that there’s no such thing as bad publucity but this mess is becoming so high profile that it’s actually doing DAMAGE to the Spider-Man brand/ip… sorta the way the last Schumacher Batman movie had a stench so bad it affected the entire brand.
Euthanize it.
just saw the show. It’s fun to see the aerial work and the cast and crew are working awfully hard, but boy, it’s a narrative mess.
Julie chose to complicate and add gravitas to the story by adding a mythological angle with the character Arachne (a mortal woman cursed to live forever in the shadow of man as a spider for darign to outweave Athena) and it doesn’t work. At all.
Making matters worse, there is a “chorus” of teenagers commenting on and supposedly somehow influencing the action by writing a comic book about spiderman that interrupts the action many times. Now, I get it, the break in the action is to set up stunts, but the device adds monotony and distraction to an already tedious retelling of the popular myth.
You know you’re in trouble when the hi-lite is a campy Goblin singing at a piano, “I’ll crush manhattan, then I’ll flatten, the bronx.” Like some maniacal barry manilow. It’s silly fun but clashes with the otherwise earnest and desperate to be important story telling.
In the end, the real problem is that the spectacle is the show and the story telling has no heart or resonance. I’m glad to hear they are revamping the ending–there is a twist that falls completely flat in the current version, but no spoilers from me! SO hopefully, they’ll try and make the ending have a little more emotional whallop. But I fear that julie doesn’t understand that you can’t add a satisfying ending if you don’t have a satisfying set up. So I’m not too hopeful.
I will admit, the stunts impressed the less jaded as the show I attended did receive a standing ovation.