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March 14, 2011
Stage Dive: Turning Off Julie Taymor’s Dark Spider-Man for Good
NYMag.com
by Scott Brown
Atlantic Yards: now a metaphor for the biggest Broadway debacle since The Capeman.
Last Thursday, I returned to the scene of the crime. I was honoring a ticket I'd booked to Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark weeks ago, back when I'd believed that the show's March 15 opening date would stick. It was a bittersweet reunion. On one hand, SM:TODT was — is — still riotously loony, never at home in its subject matter unless Spidey's in flight. On the other, I realized I was witnessing the end of something. It was the last time I'll see director Julie Taymor's pure, uncut vision of the Web Slinger, with its self-referential fussiness, goddess worship, and vinegary scent of mounting desperation intact. (It will continue to preview through April 19, then close till May 12, then return for another month of previews, opening June 14. Probably.) When next I make the forced march to the Foxwoods, Spider-man will have become the Broadway equivalent of the Barclay Center at Atlantic Yards: Having begun life as a much-criticized Frank Gehry white elephant, it seems doomed to end as a plain old much-criticized gray elephant.
Posted by eric at March 14, 2011 11:26 AM