Ah, thanks. Johnny Depp constantly screaming that is coming back to me now (I’ve only seen Ed Wood once and it was a few years ago).
My wife and I were talking about it this morning. We thought it might be open for previews when we were in New York back in October, but it wasn’t. We probably would have seen it if it had been open or in previews. I told her I had heard bad things about the story and she said “How do you have a bad Spider-Man story?” I said “Greek gods.” She said “Yep, that would make a bad Spider-Man story.” After a few more minutes of talking she shook her head and said “Greek gods? Really?”
Glad we went to see A Little Night Music and Promises, Promises instead.
Enjoy,
Steven
The Onion has news of another problem for this cursed production.
Was it Bernadette Peters who was in it when you saw Night Music? I saw it but back in late March with Catherine Zeta Jones. Really enjoyed it. What did you think?
Yes, it was Peters and Stritch. It’s one of the main reasons we chose that show. Two legends in a nice bit of cerebral musical theatre which contrasted nicely with the hamminess of Sean Hayes and Kristen Chenoweth in Promises, Promises.
We enjoyed A Little Night Music very much. It was a very well done production and had a lot of polish. Peters is at that place in her life and career where she can pull off “world weary actress” like no other IMHO. And of course both she and Stritch have a long association with Sondheim’s work and understand it remarkably well. A dream cast would have had Lansbury and Peters. I looked up a recording of Lansbury from her time in the show and she was remarkable. Stritch was good, but Lansbury is great, and I wish I could have seen her.
Enjoy,
Steven
I actually did get to see Angela Lansbury–she was amazing. I think Catherine Zeta Jones was a bit too young to play the part of the world weary actress. When the other characters kept making digs about her age, it was bizarre. Bernadette Peters could have pulled that off. She’s very beautiful, too, but old enough where people making those kinds of remarks would have made a lot more sense.
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Stolen[/del] Copied from Talking Broadway’s All That Chat
Spiderman: Turn Off the 3D
A Review in Five Limericks
The director and playwright named Taymor
Convinced her investors to pay more
But that web of dough
Couldn’t cook up a show
To make this play-goer say “encore”!
For she tangled the yarn of Arachne
into stagecraft so tortured and hackneyed
Not wisdom nor wit
In one bit of it
Which explains how eight legs became slack-kneed
Well you might have a PR tsunami
and a techno assist from the army
Plus a band from a land
Where the roses bloom grand
Will this help if it smells like salami?
But just watch: this will sell out for years!
The Investors may cast off their fears!
The public will eat it
Good taste won’t defeat it
The bulls will outrun the bears!
For if Broadway, like Wall Street, derailed
And producers, like bankers, get bailed
Then Spiderman’s place
Will be just like Chase
Systemically too big to have failed
You know it’s bad when College Humour does a fake commercial about what a wreck the show is…
Or is it a fake?
The cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker shows a bunch of Spider-Men in the hospital. It’s the funniest cover they’ve done in a while.
Link to New Yorker cover, with a link to their article with the best opening line ever: *New Yorkers excel at Schadenfreude. *
Thanks for the heads up, Marley
That is an awesome cover. Thanks for posting it, guys.
Okay, link to the article, which features a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of Julie Taymor trapped in a spider web.
Not only is the show setting a record for the most expenisve, but also for the longest run in previews.
Yesterday’s New York Times review slammed Spiderman:
"This show is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway, but it may also rank among the worst.
The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from “How can $65 million look so cheap?” to “How long before I’m out of here?”"
Wow, how much longer will they keep feeding this turkey wads of money? Time to cut their losses and close. They’ve been tweaking the script for months and it isn’t getting any better.
In terms of lost money, this show may set a record.
Well, technically, it hasn’t even opened yet. They’re still in previews. But the New York Times review was funny.
They are actually still (most likely) making money. They pulled in $1.3 million last week in sales, though they’re only at 85% of capacity. February is a terrible month for Broadway, so those numbers are quite good. I’m not sure how long it’s going to last, if the show is really as bad as the reviewers make it out to be.
BTW, with all the delays and pushing back of Opening Night, the big reviewers all got together with their editors and decided to run their official reviews based on the last opening date. They figured two things. First, if you’re selling a full price ticket, for months on end, you don’t get the benefit of calling yourself a work in progress. You’re selling a product, and people have the right to know what they’re buying. Second, if they’re going to put out reviews, they shouldn’t give the producer the benefit of trickling out the reviews at random times, you have to have all the reviews out at once to have an impact.
I have no idea if any of the reviewers will give the producers a re-review after the official opening.
Since the show is (technically) still in previews, the media is not supposed to be reviewing it. But that hasn’t stopped the Times and others from critiquing it.
Tonight’s preview has been canceled, by the way. I don’t know if that is related to the Times saying the show sucks.
If they’re making $1.3 million a week and the show costs $1 million a week to produce, they may be making money. And I think there’s a sense that the producers have extended the previews so they can take advantage of the bad publicity. Once the show opens and the news stories about accidents and disasters go away, the show is going to sink or swim on its own merits (if any). Some people are coming to the previews expecting something crazy or awful to happen. Maybe a lot of them. Once the show’s open, most of the audience is going to expect a good show. It sounds like they don’t have one.
There really isn’t any “supposed to” about it, it’s just tradition. Since bad reviews can hurt a show, the critics agree not to review one before it’s ready. But there have been a bunch of reviews of this show. Previews don’t usually last for three months and tickets for this show start at $76.50 and go up to around $300, so the money doesn’t refelct the fact that it’s in previews. Between that and the fact that the show was getting free “trainwreck” publicity, I think most of the critics have decided it’s fair game.
Cheesesteak explained this above and the explanation in the New York Times was, “A much-delayed opening night had been set for Monday, but it was pushed to March 15; the critics each decided to publish around Monday, explaining in their reviews that the show had been running long enough to paying audiences for judgment to be rendered.”