Arts News

After long, troubled preview, Spider-Man officially opens

Jun 19, 2011, 10:24 GMT

New York - One of the longest waits in the history of Broadway is finally over.

The widely-panned Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark officially opened Tuesday night after a seven month preview run which saw it change the music, the plot and the director.

But though former president Bill Clinton called the re-worked version 'fabulous,' most theatre critics reflected the opinion of the New York Times' Ben Brantley.

'This singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February,' he wrote in Wednesday's paper. 'It's just a bore.'

The rock musical features music by U2's Bono and The Edge and is reported to have cost over 70 million dollars to stage - a Broadway record. The play was also plagued by cast injuries, the withdrawals of leading actors and by script and plot problems that left many in the audience confused.

'The hours and weeks and months - if we thought it would take this long (to complete), there is not a chance on earth we'd have done it,' Bono told the paper.

While critics noted that the reworked script simplified what had been a needlessly complex story, they noted that the new version was flat and predictable.

'How weird that this is an extravaganza without a single genuine showstopper,' said Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post.

'The show's reboot is clearly just enough of an improvement to lose its tragic glory,' concluded Evie Nagy in Rolling Stone.

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