According to the New York Times, after almost a decade in production, the moment of truth came for Marvel's iconic superhero, Spider-Man came this past Saturday as the cast attempted to run through the first act of the new Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark without stopping. Everyone's expectations were high as the band struck up an ominous tune which wailed through the theater like an ambulance siren, then the enormous stage curtain rose to reveal a young woman dangling under a mock-up of the Brooklyn Bridge. high above her a masked man appeared, clad in the familiar skin-hugging , red and blue spandex. The show had begun.
Expectations were high, but reality soon settled in as four minutes into the first act, a crew member announced that they had to hold. It was the first of numerous pauses the crew had to take in order to deal with technical glitches in the staging. Most of them revolving around the transitions between scenes. By the dinner break, only 15 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour performance had actually unfolded.
The first scheduled performance (Sunday at 6:30 p.m.) was just eight days away.
In the last week, the nervous creators of the show, the most expensive in Broadway history, have begun to see the hand-drawn sketches, the digitally animated videos, the comic-book-inspired costumes come to life — to see “Spider-Man” “Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning,” said Bono, leaning forward in Row A on the aisle, as Reeve Carney, playing Spidey, rehearsed onstage. “This feels like it.”
Needless to say, there are many skeptics who feel that the massively expensive play will never open, and even if it does, it would have to play to packed houses (with no discounted tickets) for the next four-to five years just to begin to break even.