Broadway show plagued by technical faults and poor reviews delays official preview for a sixth time
The bugs are still getting the better of Spider-Man. The producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark are considering yet another delay – their sixth – for Broadway's ill-starred musical.
The official opening has been delayed by a series of disasters that have sent cast members to hospital and seen its producers mocked by every late night comedian in America. The $65m (£40m) show, the most expensive in Broadway history, held its 90th preview last weekend, three times the number most new musicals hold.
Officially, the show is set to open on 15 March. Last month, US critics, who had held off their judgment for an official opening, grew impatient and delivered their verdict. It was damning. Ben Brantley, the New York Times's chief theatre critic, wrote that the musical may "rank among the worst" in Broadway history. The Guardian called it "baffling in its ineptitude".
The show's producers are now believed to be considering holding back the official opening until June in the hope of untangling the show's technical flaws and fixing the holes in its plot, which attracted the fiercest comments from critics.
The musical, nine years in the making, was conceived by Julie Taymor, whose production of The Lion King is one of the most successful musicals of all time. The show was scored by U2's Bono and The Edge. "We're wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, Wings of Desire, Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones — the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you're separate from others," Bono said last year.
But as the disasters piled up and negative reviews emerged, the show's star creators have been fighting to rewrite the script and the score. Earlier this month the producers hired Broadway musical veteran Paul Bogaev to help fix the show. Bogaev helped turn Chicago into an Oscar-winning film.
The negative publicity has made Spider-Man one of the bestselling shows on Broadway – but ticket receipts are believed to be only slightly ahead of the show's $1m-a-week running costs.