The lead producers of the new Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” have decided again to delay its opening night, now scheduled for Jan. 11, until sometime in February, two people involved with the musical said on Thursday. With preview performances now under way the delay is intended to provide more time for the creators to stage a new final number, make further rewrites to the dialogue and consider adding and cutting scenes and perhaps inserting new music from the composers, U2’s Bono and the Edge, who will resume working full-time on the show in late December.
The producers and creators are still weighing the extent of the changes that they believe the musical needs before theater critics see it during the week before opening night, according to the two people involved with the show, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the producers and their spokesman are supposed to make the only public comments. The spokesman, Rick Miramontez, declined to comment on Thursday.
Michael Cohl, one of the lead producers, is expected to announce the new date for opening night on Thursday or Friday, the two people said. It will be the fourth major delay in performances since January 2010, when previews were originally supposed to begin; the first two delays were due to problems raising money to mount the $65 million show, while a two-week delay in November, caused by the need for more rehearsal time, also pushed back the opening, which had been set for Dec. 21.
“Spider-Man” is one of the most highly anticipated shows on Broadway in years, given the talents of the director, Julie Taymor (a Tony Award winner for “The Lion King”), and Bono and the Edge, who are making their Broadway debuts, as well as the potential for a live musical about the popular comic-book superhero. Adding to the expectations is the show’s price tag, more than twice as much as “Shrek the Musical,” previously the most expensive musical ever.
Reflecting the view of some audience members who have criticized the show on blogs, Twitter and Facebook, Ms. Taymor and the producers have concluded that Act II has storytelling problems that need to be fixed. While Act I is a familiar rendition of Peter Parker turning into Spider-Man, Act II is largely the invention of Ms. Taymor and Bono, and includes some major reversals that can be hard to understand in the fast-moving show.
Bono and the Edge have been on tour with U2 in New Zealand and Australia since Thanksgiving; they have yet to see a performance of the musical, which they began working on nine years ago. They will be returning to New York before Christmas and are expected to become regular presences at the Foxwoods Theater through mid-to-late January, when they have to prepare for February concerts in South Africa. Bono and the Edge are not believed to be at work on any new numbers for the show, but the two people said that they might write some once they assess the show and huddle with Ms. Taymor.
Ms. Taymor and the playwright Glen Berger, who wrote the book together, have been inserting revised dialogue at almost every performance to clarify the action, with special focus given to Act II as well as the four characters who serve as a so-called Geek Chorus, comic-book devotees who serve as narrators. The two people involved with the show said that no decision has been made about hiring a script doctor to work on the dialogue and plot; some executives close to Mr. Cohl, the producer, have been urging him to bring in an outside set of eyes to work on the story. But the two people said that Ms. Taymor was fully aware that the musical has problems and had not been defensive about the criticisms of the storytelling.
Snags in the ambitious technical production have been largely smoothed out since the first preview performance on Nov. 28, when the show had to stop five times. Still, new elements are being added. At Wednesday night’s performance, for a scene toward the end of the show, a large net deployed to serve as a web where the villainous spider-woman Arachne and Peter Parker have their final confrontation.
Just pulling off that moment with the deployed net took a significant amount of time to plan, design and rehearse, the two people said; still to come is inserting a major final number, which is now in the works, but the two people said they could not guess how long it would take to perfect — one of the reasons for delaying the opening night.
The actress who plays Arachne, Natalie Mendoza, returned to the production on Wednesday night after a nearly two-week absence to recover from a concussion that she suffered backstage at the first preview performance, when a rope struck her in the head.
source : http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/ by Patrick Healey
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