You can never, ever, count Spidey out, least of all when he’s on Broadway. The big budget musical starring the wall-crawler TURN OFF THE DARK has been dogged by delays for a long time, now.  Marvel’s just extended their license for the production and Variety’s saying it’s now on track to start running this fall. The techies behind the show are currently shooting footage of New York’s sprawling megalopis for some green-screen compositing and, last week, they held a “flying workshop” in Las Vegas. I’m not quite sure what such a workshop entails, but I’ll hazard a guess it was a demo of the wirework they’ll presumably be using to make the goblin glider fly and the Spidey webs swing.

At one point, the show was slated to start running this year at the Hilton theater (as the poster above evidences.) However, the producers apparently ran into cash-flow problems relating to the show’s already-impressive $50 million budget that caused some significant delays. While its lead actor, Reeves Carney remains attached to play Peter Parker, his co-stars, Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming, had to pull out of playing Mary Jane and the Green Goblin, respectively, on account of scheduling conflicts resulting from these delays. Broadway actors Jennifer Damiano and Patrick Page have been reportedly lined up to replace them. == TEASER ==

For those of who hadn’t heard of TURN OFF THE DARK before, it’s intended to be a retelling of Spidey’s origin in the vein of big-budget musicals like WICKED. It’s set to be directed by Julie Taymor, who also directed the stage version of the LION KING as well as movies like ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.  Real-life super-people Bono and the Edge, of U2, have already composed song and written lyrics for the project’s show tunes.

You know, a lot of fans have been poo-pooing this as being too silly for Spider-Man, but c’mon… lighten up. I think this would be quite the lavish spectacle to witness and certainly a unique meeting of talents. Although, I have doubts that you'll see Carnage or Venom anywhere on stage if this does ever get off the ground.

-- Tom Pinchuk is the writer of UNIMAGINABLE for Arcana Studios and HYBRID BASTARDS! for Archaia. HYBRID BASTARDS! is available  here and UNIMAGINABLE is available here for pre-order on Amazon.com.  

I'll see it if the reviews are decent. That is, if it actually makes it to opening night.

@Big
I believe that Broadway is actually starting to move forward a bit. An example would be the American Idiot musical that's come out. This brand of 'punk' is a different thing for Broadway and it's actually quite good. Hopefully it will inspire new playwrights to create something completely original. So while original work is slowly coming, different works will have to do.

Let's just make this thing already

You never know how this will work