You might have heard of a little $70 million musical called Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. It’s only the most expensive Broadway musical ever produced, as well as a critical failure which has resulted in the hospitalization of several actors.
Well, as it turns out, the old guard is out and the new guard is in, completely redoing the show and in turn creating a show that is – supposedly – actually pretty good. Supposedly the play is now more about Spider-Man and the myth of Spider-Man as opposed to the bonkers mythos that Taymor designed for the musical which in turn lead to some of the insanity and ridicule. The character Taymor created, Arachne, has been reduced to a minor role in the production, and Green Goblin’s role has been reworked to be the major villain of the production with a brand new song to boot. So it looks like bringing in Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa to clean up shop paid off (in the form of $5 million extra dollars in production costs).
Preview performances begin June 9th, and hopefully this will end up turning around for Marvel. The production has sort of become a money pit at this point, costing almost as much as a film does without even sharing the casual audience the films can gain from. Then again, Broadway tickets are expensive, and between those and merch hopefully the show will see a profit. If the changes really have improved the show much more to the point that it now actively resembles Spider-Man as opposed to Julie Taymor’s crazypants Spider-Man with goosestepping and oddball scissorhands (note: those comments are all based on reading several reviews of the previews), then hopefully it will only mean good things.
(via source)
