The Amazing, Spectacular Story Behind The Spider-Man Musical

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You’d be forgiven for thinking, at various times over the last year or so, that the Marvel Comics/Sony musical Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was some kind of strange urban myth instead of a real thing. Directed by The Lion King‘s Julie Taymor, music by U2 and so dangerous that a stuntman broke his wrists during rehearsals? It really does sound too surreal to be true, and that’s before you see the very, very odd Annie Leibovitz photos from Vogue magazine. But, no – it’s very, very real, and opening for previews this weekend (Pushed back multiple times; it was originally supposed to open for previews January this year) after a long and, at times, painful creation.

If the show’s own mythology is to be believed, the idea behind the musical started almost nine years ago, when U2’s more visible members, Bono and the Edge, were at a dinner celebrating the career of Andrew Lloyd Webber where the king of musical theater joked “I’d like to thank rock musicians for leaving me alone for 25 years.” Taking that as a challenge – Well, wouldn’t you? – the pair agreed to a proposal from producer Tony Adams to write the music for a proposed musical that would bring Marvel Comics’ webcrawler to the Broadway stage. The two didn’t just bring music and celebrity to the production; they were also responsible for getting Julie Taymor involved (“We were only going to do it if we could do it with Julie,” Bono is on the record as saying).

After Adams’ death in 2005, his business partner David Garfinkle took over control of the pre-production and by summer of 2007, rehearsals were being scheduled to take place, and the process of casting was beginning. Details of the show’s plot and characters were beginning to leak out – although Swiss Miss, the show’s new villain, was still thankfully unknown at the time – and by 2009, the show’s central cast was set, with movie stars Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming playing lead roles Mary Jane Watson and the Green Goblin, while newcomer Reeve Carney would take on Peter Parker. And then everyone found out that the production was already bankrupt.

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The amount of debt the production was in has never been fully revealed, although $25 million is the number most often batted around (The show’s budget had been estimated to be in the hundreds of millions at one point, but a slightly more sober $65-70 million seems to be closer to the truth). Garfinkle was the one blamed for the cost overrun, and as all work on the musical was suspended while new backing and a new producer were found – Michael Cohl, a rock promoter with a history with U2, became the show’s new promoter and secured millions in additional funding – the show lost both Rachel Wood and Cumming to “scheduling conflicts.” By February 2010, however – the month of the show’s original official opening – everyone felt confident enough to restart production, and by August, a new official cast was announced and rehearsals began. And then there was the accident.

At the end of October, it was revealed that not one but two actors had been injured during stunt rehearsals for the show; Kevin Aubin broke both his wrists after being catapulted into the air, and an anonymous second actor confirmed that he’d broken his feet performing the same stunt earlier. The news shut down production again, as New York state Department of Labor officials stepped in to investigate the safety of the show, pushing the show’s November 14th preview opening back two weeks after deciding that the show was so physically demanding that Carney would require a stand-in for two performances a week for his own good.

By this point, it seems as if the show could be cursed – or, perhaps, just a victim of Taymor’s ambition; the show is supposed to include not only wristbreak-defying stunts, but also a mix of live performance, animation and video, not to mention some of the craziest-looking outfits ever seen on the Broadway stage. If nothing else, the show’s troubled birth has given it the kind of buzz – admittedly, a lot of it based around the idea “This is going to be a disaster,” but still – that money can’t buy… not even $65-70 million. I’m already looking forward to reading the reviews on Monday morning – if the show isn’t delayed again before then.

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