Out for Blood?

They say that people go to car races hoping to see spectacular crashes, Hockey games to see fights, and and trapeze acts secretly hoping that an artillerist will fall. We all know that whenever we are driving and see a car accident we slow down to see "what happened," so it should come as no surprise that, these days, there are many New Yorkers who are going to see technical preview performances of the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark in the hopes that they will witness an accident.

At least that's according to a new article in New Yorker Magazine.

Through it all, ticket sales have soared, which raises an uncomfortable question: are people paying to see calamity? At a preview last Tuesday, members of the audience seemed conflicted. Outside the theatre, Alaina Schwartz, aged twelve, who had come from Long Island with her family, was asked if she hoped to see someone fall. “Yes! Yes!” she said. “I’m weird about that stuff. Like, there was a roller coaster and it kind of fell backwards, and I was kind of wishing that I was on that roller coaster at the time that it fell.” Her father, Steven, looked concerned.

“I hope somebody falls but they’re O.K.,” her sister Alexa, fourteen, said.

A third sister, Stephanie, nine, objected: “If something goes wrong, that’s bad luck for us!”

In the lobby, Allie Bauer, a Yale junior, said, “There’s a certain allure to this being a very dangerous performance.”

“You’re more evil than I am,” her classmate Will Moritz said, eating a Twizzler. After thinking it over, he added, “If I could see someone fall from the rafters but not go to the hospital—just magically get up—then I’d be down.” (He’s majoring in psychology.)

Matt Clements, a cameraman from midtown, had come to the show with his girlfriend. “She wants to see blood,” he explained.

The rest of that New Yorker can be found here

Tickets for the show can be purchased here