At least four performers were injured doing the technically demanding stunts. Opening night had to be delayed repeatedly as the show was being worked on. The critics slammed the show even before it was finished. Finally, most ignominiously, director Julie Taymor was ousted in March, as a new creative team was brought in to make major revisions in the Broadway musical that had become a late-night TV punch line.
When Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark finally opened officially on Tuesday night, after the longest and most troubled preview period in Broadway history, the show itself seemed almost an anticlimax. The red-carpet crush was so chaotic that the curtain had to be delayed — naturally — by 45 minutes. During the long wait, a woman walking up the aisle next to me tripped on a step, and had to be carted off with her wrist in a splint. At least this is one show where you don’t have to wait long for the medics to show up.
Not all the cuts were good ideas. Gone, for example, are Arachne’s eight-legged, high-heeled henchwomen, one of Taymor’s more inspired stage creations. Still around, however, are the “Sinister Six,” a band of supervillains dressed up in bad Halloween costumes, who get dispatched so quickly that they seem merely to be time fillers.
But there are compensations for the eye and ear. The set design — a mix of comic-book pop-ups and dark, Tim Burton-ish cityscapes — is as striking as ever. The Bono-Edge score, moreover, is no disappointment. It really rocks, and the repeated five- and six-note figures that anchor the anthemic “Rise Above” and the sweetly melancholy duet “No More” have stayed with me. There’s more humor now
