Spider-Man Down!

So they have shut down the previews of the musical "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark." Who didn't see this coming?

This was the latest "Most Expensive Musical in Broadway History." It's production was suspended before it even had its first preview. It was figured that it would have to have something like five years of sellouts to break even. Its out-of-town previews were plagued with accidents and technical nightmares.

Sure with such a confluence of talent, Bono, Julie Taymor, et al, you might expect to have something spectacular, but somehow it just never seemed to gel. Perhaps it was overambitious. It seems that everything today, especially when it's an adaptation of a comic book superhero, has to be bigger, grander, and groundbreaking in it's scope and interpretation of the source material. But that is a big risk.

Motion pictures made the same mistake. Each Batman movie got bigger and grander until the collapsed under their own weight. It was then up to the smaller pictures of the lesser-know n comics properties, like Blade, The Mask, and Barb Wire, to show how a comic book movie could be successful.

On Broadway a smaller-budget musical "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman" was a success in 1966. I was adapted into a TV movie in 1975...



But the risk there is that the small scale will inappropriately understate the material. Movies like "Captain America" and the Cathy Lee Gifford "Wonder Woman" showed us that...




But big budget or small, traditional or groundbreaking, whether on stage or screen, there must be a solid story and engaging characters. Through all the hype, sound, and fury surrounding "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark," nobody accused the show of having either.