Trivia / Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: The joke that Mary Jane ends up in a Broadway show based on The Fly may be this, as there really is an opera based on the 1986 film which was first staged in 2008.
• Acting for Two: The ensemble plays multiple roles depending on the scene, with every actor except the mains having multiple parts.
• Author's Saving Throw: A complete overhaul of the play was made after weeks of being torn to shreds by critics, which excised the Geek Chorus, placed more focus on the supporting cast, and made the Green Goblin the main villain instead of Arachne. While it received far better reviews than the original version, it did not save the play from being a commercial and critical failure.
• Box Office Bomb: The show ended up being a massive financial loss (estimated at around $60 million). The sheer expense of the whole endeavor meant that they needed to sell out every seat for years to have a hope of breaking even.
• Colbert Bump: Glenn Beck promoted the musical on his radio show, giving it some extra attention. And then there was the "Spider-Monster" skit on Sesame Street which mocked its Troubled Production.
• Creator Backlash: Bono and the Edge ended up agreeing with the negative comments regarding the show and Julie Taymor's direction.
• Creator Killer:
  • Director Julie Taymor, once one of the hottest directors on Broadway, was fired from the production, and has done little since.
  • David Garfinkle's producing career began and ended with this show.^note He was supposed to be learning the ins and outs of producing under the tutelage of Tony Adams, the original lead producer. Then Adams died of a sudden stroke and Garfinkle ended up having to figure things out for himself, to disastrous results.
• Cut Song: Many songs from 1.0 were altered or cut, such as the opening number "Splash Page". Arachne's songs got hit hardest; she lost "Deeply Furious," "Think Again," and "Love Me or Kill Me."
• Deleted Role: The Geek Chorus were completely cut in the second version.
• Drawing Board Hiatus: Came with the Troubled Production. The script underwent several reworks, Bono and The Edge from U2 were brought in to write new music, original director Julie Taymor either quit or was fired after rejecting the changes from said reworks and the musical had the longest preview period in Broadway history with an astonishing 182 performances before the official premiere.
• Inspiration for the Work: According to Glen Berger's book Song of Spider-Man, Julie Taymor became committed to the project after seeing the first page of Ultimate Spider-Man's first issue, where Norman Osborn relates the myth of Arachne to his coworker. This led to Arachne's large presence in the first version of the show.
• Lying Creator: Videos and statements before previews began claimed that the musical was "based on the comics, not the movies." It's actually a composite adaptation of Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2.
• On-Set Injury: The show was such a Troubled Production that the play's page in The Other Wiki has a subsection dedicated exclusively to cast injuries:
  • Natalie Mendoza was struck in the head by equipment on November 28, 2010 which left her with a concussion. Against medical advice, she went back a couple of days later, even though her role of Arachne entailed flying sequences. She felt sick and her understudy had to take over her part for about two weeks. Mendoza ended up withdrawing from the show on December 30, 2010.
  • Stunt performer Christopher Tierney fell 21 feet (6.4 m) off a piece of scenery, through the stage and into the orchestra pit. His harness was not connected to the safety cord.
  • Actor and stunt performer Daniel Curry was pinned under a piece of equipment, injuring his leg.
• Orphaned Reference: In 1.0, "If the World Should End" was sung by MJ to Peter during a blackout while the Sinister Six wrought havoc to the city, hence the title. In 2.0, there is no blackout, and the song takes place before the Six's attack, in a regular date between MJ and Peter, removing the context and making it a bit more of a broadly generic love song.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: It's long been rumored that the band Imagine Dragons was originally going to write the songs for the play only for them to decide to make the songs part of their first album; Radioactive and Demons are commonly sighted as examples. In actuality the band hadn't even been formed at the time the demos were being written.
• Recycled Script:
  • The first version had quite a bit of dialogue from the first movie in it. The second got rid of most of it, but scenes like Spider-Man saving a baby from a fire still seem directly lifted.
  • The Green Goblin is given the general motivation of Dr. Octopus from the second film, with Harry Osborn not existing at all.
• Troubled Production: Quite possibly the most infamous, noteworthy, and widely mocked example in Broadway history. Wikipedia, this blog post, and co-writer Glen Berger's memoir Song of Spider-Man weave a heckuva tale.
  • At first, back in 2002, Spider-Man seemed like it was gelling uncommonly well. Despite minimal experience in theatrical production, Tony Adams secured provisional rights from Marvel to make a stage musical out of the comics. From there, he got in contact with Paul McGuinness, whom he knew from the days when both of them worked for director John Boorman. McGuinness had since turned to music management, and U2 was one of his acts, which is how Adams was able to court Bono and The Edge to write songs. Screenwriter Neil Jordan just happened to be a neighbor of the bandmates, which is how he got involved writing the script. And two of Jordan's films were scored by Elliot Goldenthal, artistic and domestic partner of Julie Taymor, which is how they were able to court her to direct.
  • Despite her alleged claim that she "could stage anything," Jordan turned in a treatment that, however vividly written, struck Taymor as too cinematic, so he was let go. Taymor decided to take a firmer hand in crafting the story, and she recruited Glen Berger to join her as co-writer. (Whether theirs was an equal collaboration or if he was just "the words guy" was a question that would plague Berger years later.)
  • Taymor and Berger's subsequent treatment was a non-starter with Marvel for many years. In their words, the writers' concept was "entirely wrong and the tone...which is quite dark, is not what Marvel anticipated receiving at all.” Heated conversations on artistic matters ensued into 2005, by which time, legal matters were ironed out and contracts were generated for signature. Adams had secured everyone's signatures except The Edge's, but, while at the latter's Soho townhouse, Adams suffered a massive stroke. He died two days later.
  • Producing responsibilities fell to David Garfinkle, Adams's producing partner, the accountant to Adams's charmer. Garfinkle, acknowledging his own lack of theatrical producing experience, gave Taymor a great deal of creative freedom. Given Taymor had previously delivered a money geyser with her imaginative production of The Lion King, such blue-sky thinking made a certain amount of sense. However, Disney had had a firm hand on that till and was able to curb Taymor's "artsier" instincts. In Spider-Man's case, Taymor's "artsier" instincts manifested in Arachne, a character that the Marvel suits, comic fans, and eventually audiences thought pulled focus from the title character.
  • Even with lingering story concerns following the production's one (and only) workshop presentation, work on the physical production began, and the team secured the largest theatre on Broadway to house it.
  • However, Garfinkle was ultimately only able to secure half the capitalization, then around $37.5 million. Exacerbating matters was the 2008 economic recession, which saw many potential investors shrink away. Despite the brand-name title, Marvel, nor its eventual buyer Disney, put money into the show. In light of this, Garfinkle ceded control to rock impresario Michael Cohl and Jeremiah Harris, the head of the company fabricating Spider-Man's scenery, Production Resource Group.
  • Cohl and Harris's financial resuscitation, on top of the lease payments to retain the theatre and the astronomical cost of all the flying equipment, ballooned the budget to $65 million. (Or, as Berger put it, Spider-Man was now a "thirty-million-dollar show dragging a thirty-million-dollar bag of waste behind it.") At those numbers, it would've had to have sold out every performance for three years to break even.
  • Then came the the cavalcade of injured performers, which opened up the floodgates for public derision. In time, Stephen Colbert would call it "Spider-Man: Notify Next of Kin"; Conan ribbed it; Saturday Night Live ribbed it; even Sesame Street got in on it. Law & Order: Criminal Intent got an episode out of it. It even got mocked during the 65th Tony Awards to enthusiastic applause from the audience.
    Neil Patrick Harris: We've got swarms of Mormons, showgirls, sailors, dancing boys and nuns,/Plus a spider facing death-defying budget overruns!
  • After opening for previews at long last in late November 2010, the planned December opening kept getting pushed back and back. Fed up by the delays, theatre critics went rogue and reviewed the February 7, 2011 preview performance, which was particularly catastrophic. Most reviews were scathing.
  • In response, the producers brought in Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa to overhaul the script, and they were able to get Bono and The Edge to write new songs in the middle of their touring commitments. Taymor resisted making changes, particularly those concerning Arachne, and was either fired or quit. She was replaced by Philip William McKinley, who had directed several Barnum & Bailey circus shows. Aguirre-Sacasa and McKinley made a show that was far more conventional and family-friendly than what it had been. This pleased the Marvel suits but none of the original creative team. Spider-Man finally opened in June 2011 to mixed reviews, many of which lamented that the new version, however much an improvement, lacked the original's messy bravado.
  • In March 2012, Taymor filed suit against the producers, Bono and The Edge, and Berger, both for what she claimed was her unjust firing and for unpaid co-writing and directing royalties.
  • In August 2013, yet another performer was seriously injured during a performance.
  • Then it was the ticket sales that fell to their doom. Spider-Man closed January 2014, with $60 million of the producers' investment lost according to New York magazine.
  • The producers initially intended to reopen the show in Las Vegas in 2015, then decided to launch an arena tour in 2015-16 instead. However, nothing came of it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming, both of whom have worked with Taymor before, were cast as Mary Jane and the Green Goblin, but the endless delays the show faced getting to the preview period led to both dropping out.
  • The first treatment of the story, entitled Spider-Man: Caught, was mostly the same as the 1.0 version until its climax, where Arachne attacked Spider-Man, who bit Mary Jane and gave her spider-powers, enabling her to combat Arachne. This treatment had no ending.
  • The 1.0 plot didn't have Arachne function as Peter's Spirit Advisor, but had the actual Arachne from the Greek legend as the Big Bad rather than Green Goblin, with Gobby getting killed off at the end of the first act. Arachne was also the leading lady. She had a song about trying on shoes and a very blatantly Foe Yay Shipping-laden scene where she sneaks into Peter's room and sings Turn Off the Dark. She also had two master plans, either of which she would have been perfectly fine with: either have Peter fall in love with her, or have him kill her. Either way, she's freed from her curse.
  • During the 2.0 run, Patrick Page suggested the Green Goblin kill a reporter to gain back some of the menace lost after "A Freak Like Me Needs Company," but they couldn't get the actor's body offstage without making it look sexual, so it was cut.
  • After its closure on Broadway, there were talks that it would be revived either as a tour or a permanent show in Las Vegas, but nothing came of this.

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