The Playgoer: The Myth of Spiderman's Success

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Friday, February 11, 2011

The Myth of Spiderman's Success

Riedel pulls back the curtain on the real story behind Spider-Man's reputedly "critic-proof" invincibility. (Sounds like a super-power, doesn't it?)

“The show is dead,” says a source privy to its finances. The hard-cash advance is barely $10 million, not enough to prop up a $65 million production with a weekly overhead of $1.2 million.
You can buy acres of orchestra seats weeknights this month and next. The ticket brokers who drive business are sitting on stacks of unsold seats through April. If you know where to look, you can get discounts pretty much every night.
What's more, he reminds us of yet another sign that something was going really, really wrong in rehearsals for this show. They never got through a full run-through, with tech, in one stretch, until the first performance.

Isn't that something we associate with high school?

Riedel rightly lays the blame, though, at the feet of the novice producer: "She rehearsed 15 weeks and never got through the show. She had nearly three months of previews and fixed nothing. And nobody challenged her."

There's a question so glaringly obvious about Spider-Man that I'm surprised no one's asking it when the creative team whines about their "mere" 60 previews.  And that is... what the hell have you been doing all this time???

I mean, it's only Spider-Man for chrissakes.

1 comment:

Rising Sun Performance Company said...

That's extraordinary and shocking! But it just goes to show, just because a show has a huge budget doesn't mean it'll be any good. Amazing things are happening in the off off Broadway community on very low budgets!

~Andrea
Rising Sun Performance Company
www.risingsunnyc.com