Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

Foxwoods Theatre, New York

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Even the deck chairs on the Titanic couldn’t be “rearranged forever,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Months after it first began previews, the most expensive musical in Broadway history has been given enough time to work out its flaws without having to confront critics’ reviews. So here’s mine: No amount of tinkering with the show before its official March 15 opening can fix “what should have been solved long before any human performer safely left the ground.” This $65 million spectacle is sunk by “an incoherent story”: The marquee says it’s supposed to be about Spider-Man, but director Julie Taymor and her team somehow lost the plot. They’re as terrified of the superhero genre “as a 1960s mother worried about the eyesight of kids devouring comics under the sheets.”

Taymor’s innovations prove deathly efficient at “mucking up the traditional Marvel tale,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. Instead of a simple story about a shy teen who develops superpowers, we get a murky Freudian struggle centered on Spidey’s relationship to Arachne—a female spider figure plucked from classical mythology. If that weren’t tedious enough, we also have to endure a so-called Geek Chorus of comic-book fans who keep interrupting the action to offer explanations. You want to root for Reeve Carney in the lead role and Jennifer Damiano as Mary Jane, his would-be girlfriend: They’re both “utterly captivating.” But don’t let that encourage you to shell out $100 a ticket: “Nothing cures the curiosity about Spider-Man quite like seeing it.”

Even the show’s “sheer ineptitude loses its shock value early,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. For a while, you wonder, “How can $65 million look so cheap?” There are “lots of flat, cardboardish sets” that “could easily be recycled for high school productions of Grease.” The show’s notorious aerial stunts look like something out of a 1960s Mary Poppins production. Even the songs provided by Bono and the Edge mostly just add an electronic drone to the proceedings, like “a persistent headache.” It’s only when things go wrong with the stunts that the show evokes anything resembling “genuine pleasure.” Spider-Man won’t just go down as Broadway’s most expensive musical ever. “It may also rank among the worst.”