The worst named musical in history, Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, a counter-intuitive nonsense name for one of the worst shows in Broadway history, is being put out of its bone breaking, ear numbing, wildly terrible misery on January 3TH 2014, when it turns off the lights once and for all before attempting to pad its balance sheet and get some crumbs back from the poor suckers who invested in the $80,000,000 loss and counting titantic by taking it to Vegas.
I saw it twice here the director Julie Taymor version and here the lame-o current incarnation. Of the Julie I wrote: “No messing: the end of the first act, when Spiderman battles Green Lantern, every promise Julie Taymor has made as a savant of the theatre is potentially answered. To say it is eye popping is to understate: Lantern and Spidey literally swing from the rafters and while the wire are visible, it is beautiful in ways Cirque De Soleil never ever is.” On the latter I wrote nothing of the sort. But they did have this in common: Bono and The Edge’s worst work to date, one terrible terrible song, litters the soundscape. A great music for the book might not have saved it, but then again, maybe it would have.
Julie should have been put on a short leash early and not let off it. What moron gave this creative nitcase a free reign. And what was with the Spider woman God thingy: did she forget what she was up to entirely? Me, I blame a lot on that crappy book as well. Why so glum, chum. You’re spiderman, go for it.
But all of that wasn’t the problem. The show cost $1.3M a week to produce, they needed to sell out all night every night and it wasn’t good enough, it couldn’t do it.
Still, I don’t regret going to that Julie Taymor show.