After almost a year of postponements and postponed postponements, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the most anticipated superhero musical in the history of humankind, had its first preview this week in New York.
Things did not entirely go 100-per-cent according to plan. At one point, when yet another of director Julie Taymor's flying innovations failed, Spider-Man was stuck dangling over the audience while crew members tried to grab him by the foot for 45 seconds. (This according to a New York Times reporter who apparently brought along a stopwatch.)
With a score by U2's Bono and the Edge, Toronto's Michael Cohl as lead producer, and a Broadway budget estimated to be as high as $65-million (U.S.), there is a flood of interest in this production - and plenty of questions about it.
Time then to dig into the imaginary ol' mailbag and turn on the house lights for a few (fictional) readers.
Dear Theatre Critic,
Twitter was flooded with reactions from the first performance of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark last Sunday, but there were only a couple of newspaper reviews. Why aren't critics weighing in?
G. Stacy
Dear Ms. Stacy,
Almost every theatre production will have a number of "preview" performances in front of paying audiences before officially opening. Theatre isn't theatre without an audience - and the director, cast and creators need live, human bums in seats to work out the final kinks in a production.
It's not actually that unusual for technical effects to break down during previews, either, despite the apocalyptic reports about Spider-Man. At one preview in New York, Billy Elliot's machinery broke down five times - the same as last Sunday's Spidey preview - and that was after it had been running in the West End for several years. Spider-Man hasn't even had an out-of-town tryout.
Professional critics won't be invited to review Spider-Man until a few days before its official opening, currently scheduled for Jan. 11 (though I wouldn't mark that down in pen on the calendar). As for the "reviews" that have appeared in reputable publications, they were actually "reports" on the first preview - a nuance that eluded at least one Canadian newspaper website this week, which carried the headline " Spider-Man opens on Broadway to mixed reviews."
Whether these "reports" were journalistically kosher, particularly the one from a certain cackling Broadway supervillain columnist that was essentially a review with every sentence ending with "theatregoers griped" or "some said," I'll leave to the Theatre Criticism Ethicist.
Dear Theatre Critic,
Was it fair for audience members to blog or tweet reviews despite Spider-Man still being in previews? Is the Web going to bring down Spider-Man this time around, instead of vice versa?
M-J Watson
Dear Ms. Watson,
As far as I'm concerned, if you've paid money for your ticket, you are entitled to tell your friends what you thought of the show afterward. If that conversation happens to be over Twitter rather than at the bar, no matter.
Tweeting during a preview - or any performance - however is just plain wrong and should, in my opinion, be classified as an act of theatrical terrorism. I can see your damn glowing screen and there's no reason you can't wait until intermission to WikiLeak your thoughts on Spider-Man's warbling to your 54 followers.
As for whether the online drubbings have hurt Spider-Man, the producing team boasted this week that it sold $1-million dollars (U.S.) of tickets the day after the reportedly disastrous first preview. That was also the day after a 60 Minutes piece on the show was aired, but still, not half bad …
Dear Theatre Critic,
Level with me here: Is Spider-Man going to be the most expensive flop in theatre history? It would be great if a certain Canadian city could finally rid itself of the stigma over The You-Know-What of the Rhymes-With-Stings.
D. Virmish
Dear Mr. Virmish,
Frankly, the odds are that Spider-Man will be a financial fiasco that will make The Lord of the Rings look like a fringe-festival flop. It doesn't really seem to be coming at the right moment. These days, people seem to want to take their superheroes seriously for some reason, which would seem to preclude them singing and dancing. Apparently, the critical consensus is that Christopher Nolan's dreary, supposedly "realistic" Batman reboot is somehow better than the fantastical Tim Burton films of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But I wouldn't count out the little guy with the radioactive blood, especially with Taymor at the reins. Spider-Man is coming out swinging with a decent advance and that first preview alone pulled in more than $200,000 at the box office. That's almost what Pulitzer-winning musicals like Next to Normal gross in an entire week on Broadway.
Will Cohl's investors ever earn back their investment even if the show sells? There's the rub. The tech-heavy show costs an estimated $1-million a week to run. If Spider-Man is going to be a hit, it'll have to be a giant one, because I can't see this property making its money back off royalties from high-school productions down the road.
J. Kelly Nestruck