The Spider-Man Broadway catastrophe musical , Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark opened it’s doors to critics yesterday . . . and it wasn’t pretty. I’m not familiar with Broadway reviews, but I would feel comfortable calling it a blood-bath.
This production has been wrought with delays, injuries, and a bloated budget and has been postponed more times than I care to recall. From day one I have had zero interest in making a trip to NYC to check out a Broadway musical about my favorite web-slinger, and I can say with 100% certainty now that any miniscule part of curiosity I had to maybe check this out is now gone. Yesterday (Feb. 7) was the date the musical was originally supposed to open, it has since been moved back to March 15, but it was the date critics were allowed to come in and see what is supposed to be the final product. Let’s take a look at what the critics had to say:
The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney called the show, directed by Julie Taymor and featuring songs by U2’s Bono and The Edge, “chaotic, dull and a little silly.”
“When this amount of time and money is tossed at a show, even demanding theatergoers should be awed, not bored,” he asserted.
New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote, “Spider-Man is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.”
“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?” he added.
Gawker’s Richard Lawson thinks the show can’t be saved, calling it, “really, truly horrendously and unfixably bad down to its bones.”
“The book is a travesty, the music is lazy and awful—it’s like listening to the scraps left on the floor after U2 recorded “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”—and the actors, including the voice-cracking lead Reeve Carney, are just not up to the vague, sloppy task set before them. If every flying element worked pretty much perfectly, as it did when I saw it, the show is still one of the worst things, if not the worst, I’ve ever seen on Broadway,” he added.
The Los Angeles Times’ Charles McNutly blames Taymor’s “run-amok direction” for the show’s downfalls.
“This is, after all, her vision, and it’s a vision that has been indulged with too many resources, artistic and financial… The investors of Spider-Man have inadvertently bankrolled an artistic form of megalomania. The book, by Taymor and Glen Berger, is an absolute farrago, setting up layers and subplots before the main narrative line has been established,” he wrote.
[Source: THR]
So, there you have it. What a lot of us were expecting seems to be proving to be true and this may turn out to be far and away the biggest bomb in Broadway history – taking a beloved superhero down with it.
If any of you readers out there have seen any of the preview shows and wish to share your point of view, drop me a line at tyson@bigshinyrobot.com and I’ll be happy to post your thoughts!
Do you have any desire to see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark? Anyone out there surprised by these reviews?