By now, most people already know at least a bit about the new Spider-Man’s “long and torturous history of revision, cancellation, and injury,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. To put it in numbers, there were three creators fired, five actors maimed, a record 183 previews, and six opening-night postponements (which didn’t stop critics from scrambling to outdo one another’s slams in February, when many broke the embargo on pre-opening reviews). So what is there to say about this extensively revamped, $75 million behemoth after last week’s opening? The good news is that it’s no longer like “watching the Hindenburg burn and crash.” The bad: Now “it’s just a bore.”
Several changes have made the show better, albeit still “a wide canyon’s distance from good,” said Peter Marks in The Washington Post. After Julie Taymor was fired in March, writers Philip William McKinley and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa excised her mythology-based abstractions while sharpening the focus on Peter Parker, the Queens, N.Y., teen who gains superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider. Dropping a few extra villains also allows for an enjoyable performance from Patrick Page, as the Green Goblin: He “appears to be having a ball” onstage as he fills the theater with “mad-doctor guffaws” and obsesses over how to foil the hero.
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