Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark Is Doing Great

The Broadway musical directed by Julia Taymor with music by Bono and The Edge staged its first preview performance on Sunday. The production was delayed a year, ballooned to $65 million in costs (the most expensive Broadway show ever), and has running costs of a million dollars a week. Now they've finally previewed it, and it doesn't appear to have gone well. It should be noted the show doesn't officially open until January 11th 2011, so Sunday's show may not be indicative of how badly the finished performances will be six weeks from now. That said, let's laugh at them anyway because we're horrible. Here's a list of things that went wrong in bullet point list form (the cattiest form of lists).

* At the end of first act, Spider-Man (played by Reeve Carney) got stuck midair for about a minute while stagehands ran around jumping, trying to grab his feet. David Ng of the LATimes reports "the glitch prompted hoots and other derisive noises from the audience, according to reports. Once the actor was disentagled, an intermission was called."
* Michael Riedel of the NewYorkPost reports "overhead stage wires dropped on the audience, scenery appeared on stage missing pieces -- and the show's star was even left swaying helplessly over them midair during what was supposed to be the climatic end to the first act."
* Riedel also reports the show had to be stopped four times just during the first act, and, in one scene, an actor remained suspended in mid-air for seven or eight minutes while stagehands attempted to get her down.
* Gina Salamone of the NYDailyNews reports some theater goers walked out after the fifth unplanned stop in the performance.
* Mark Shenton of The Stage Blog reports "A sympathetic, enthusiastic audience was 'on side' for the most part, though a longish pause in the first act drew a small slow handclap, [Ed.- he means clapping slowly in unison as a protest] and the second act breakdown drew one loud heckle that what we were watching was not so much a first preview as a dress rehearsal."
* And besides problems with the aerial stunts, some complained about the plot being hard to follow. The NewYorkTimes interviewed a man (who runs an acting school for kids) who said he couldn't follow the plot, and a commenter at BroadwayWorld wrote, "Plot? What plot? Oh. Plot. Right. That thing that supposedly was there but only Julie Taymor could understand because she wrote it in her alien language on her alien planet."

The show lasted three hours and forty minutes, including a forty minute intermission. I don't think I could watch three hours and forty minutes of anything, except maybe stagehands jumping around on a stage trying to get Spider-Man down.

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