There hasn’t been much to say about the now-legendary Broadway train wreck SPIDER-MAN Turn Off The Dark for the last month. That’s because they stopped their previews to bring in a new creative team and, as the official show blog puts it, “make significant and exciting revisions to the production.” Which is a very fancy way of saying, “we’ve got to fix the show because audiences keep laughing at it and performers keep plummeting off wires and nearly killing themselves.” Well, it looks like as fixed as they can make it, because shows will be resuming on May 12th.
So, the question is…how much of the show has been changed? It’s hard to say. But they have brought in a bunch of new people to rework the show, including new director Philip William McKinley (The Boy from Oz), new musical director Paul Bogaev (Tarzan, Bombay Dreams, Aida, Sunset Boulevard) and new sound designer Peter Hylenski (Elf, Scottsboro Boys, Rock of Ages, Shrek).
They’ve also brought in playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa to help rewrite the book, which is probably the best news so far. Apart from being an accomplished playwright, Aguirre-Sacasa has real comic book cred, having written a bunch of Marvel books including Marvel Knights 4, Nightcrawler and, most hopeful of all, Spectacular Spider-Man. Maybe if they’d had an actual comic fan writing the show, it wouldn’t have had a song where a giant spider goddess sings about shoe shopping. (Man, we wish that was a joke.)
[via Topless Robot]