It was supposed to be the biggest thing ever. Seriously. When you put Bono and The Edge from U2 together with Julie Taymor—the visionary who basically turned The Lion King into a global license to print money—you expect magic. You expect a revolution. What Broadway actually got with Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was a $75 million cautionary tale that involved broken bones, lawsuits, and a villain who was essentially a giant piece of Swiss cheese.
Honest talk? Most people remember the headlines more than the actual music. They remember the technical glitches that left actors dangling over the audience for forty-five minutes while stagehands scrambled with ladders. But if you look past the snarky New York Post covers, there’s a much weirder, more ambitious story about what happens when art and ego collide with the laws of physics.
The $75 Million Price Tag That Changed Everything
Broadway is expensive. Usually, a big musical might cost $15 million or $20 million to get off the ground. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark blew past that before they even finished building the set. By the time it finally opened, the budget had ballooned to roughly $75 million. That is "small Marvel movie" money spent on a single stage in Midtown Manhattan.
Why was it so pricey? It wasn't just the costumes. The Foxwoods Theatre had to be practically gutted and rebuilt to support the massive steel winches and high-speed cables required for the "flying" sequences. Unlike traditional stage flight, where an actor moves slowly on a visible wire, Taymor wanted Peter Parker to zip across the room at 40 miles per hour. This wasn't theater; it was an indoor roller coaster.
The overhead was insane. The show needed to pull in over a million dollars every single week just to break even on operating costs. That is a terrifying math problem for any producer. If the house wasn't packed, the show was bleeding cash. And for a long time, the house was packed mostly because people wanted to see if someone would fall. It was morbid curiosity as a business model.
The Julie Taymor Vision vs. The Marvel Reality
If you’ve seen The Lion King on stage, you know Julie Taymor doesn't do "normal." She uses masks, puppetry, and abstract symbolism. For Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, she didn't want to just tell a comic book story. She wanted to weave in Greek mythology. Specifically, she introduced a character named Arachne—a weaver who was turned into a spider by the goddess Athena.
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In the original version of the show (often called "Version 1.0"), Arachne was basically the main character. She haunted Peter’s dreams. She sang long, haunting ballads. It was deeply "art school." The problem? The audience just wanted to see Spidey punch the Green Goblin.
There was a massive disconnect between Taymor’s high-art ambitions and the expectations of a family from Ohio who paid $200 a ticket to see a superhero. Eventually, the producers fired Taymor. They brought in playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (who later ran Riverdale) to "fix" the script. They cut most of the mythology, simplified the plot, and turned it into a more traditional musical. It became more coherent, sure, but it also lost that strange, fever-dream energy that made the original previews so fascinatingly bizarre.
Accidents, Lawsuits, and the "Cursed" Reputation
You can't talk about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark without talking about the injuries. It’s the elephant in the room.
The most famous incident involved Christopher Tierney, a stunt performer who fell 30 feet into the orchestra pit during a preview. He suffered a fractured skull, broken ribs, and a cracked vertebrae. It was horrifying. And he wasn't the only one. Natalie Mendoza, who played Arachne, suffered a concussion from a stray equipment piece and eventually left the show.
- Kevin Aubin broke both wrists during a presentation for investors.
- The Department of Labor (OSHA) ended up citing the production for multiple safety violations.
- The "flying" system was so complex that it required a team of computer programmers just to keep the sequences synced with the music.
People started calling the show "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Lights" or "Spider-Man: The Hospital Visit." It became a late-night talk show punchline. David Letterman did a "Top Ten" list about it. For a production trying to be a serious piece of musical theater, being the butt of a joke for three years straight is a hard reputation to shake.
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Does the Music Actually Hold Up?
Honestly? It's a mixed bag.
Bono and The Edge wrote the score, and you can definitely hear the U2 DNA in every track. Songs like "Rise Above" and "A Rockland in the Sky" feel like they belong on a stadium tour. They have that soaring, anthemic quality that Bono is famous for. Reeve Carney, who played the original Peter Parker, has this incredible, reedy rock voice that fit the vibe perfectly.
But theater music usually needs to do "heavy lifting"—it has to move the plot forward. Some of the songs in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark felt like they were just... there. They were vibes. "Boy Falls From the Sky" is actually a genuinely great rock song, but when you have a villain like the Green Goblin singing a campy number called "A Freak Like Me Needs Company" while playing a piano, the tonal whiplash is enough to give you permanent neck damage.
Why It Actually Matters for the Future of Entertainment
We shouldn't just laugh at this show. It was a massive swing. In an era where Broadway is mostly just "movie-to-musical" adaptations that play it safe, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was trying to reinvent what a live performance could be.
It proved that there is a limit to tech on stage. You can't just throw money at a physics problem and expect it to go away. It also changed how Broadway handles safety. The protocols in place now for high-flying shows (like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child or King Kong) exist because the Spider-Man production did everything wrong first. They were the crash test dummies for the modern mega-musical.
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The show ultimately ran for over 1,000 performances. That's not a failure! It stayed open for three years and was seen by millions of people. The problem was that the $75 million debt was so huge that even three years of solid ticket sales couldn't pay it back. It closed at a massive loss.
Navigating the Legacy: Lessons for Creators
If you're a writer, a producer, or just a fan of the theater, there are a few things to take away from the Spidey-Musical saga:
- Check your ego at the door. The biggest issue was the clash between Taymor's vision and the reality of the brand. You can't ignore the core audience.
- Tech should serve the story, not the other way around. If your set is so complicated that it breaks the flow of the narrative every night, the narrative is what people will forget.
- Safety isn't a "luxury" cost. Cutting corners on the mechanical side to save time in rehearsals is how people get hurt.
- Know your "break-even" point. If you need 100% capacity every night just to survive, you're not running a business; you're gambling.
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark remains a ghost in the rafters of Broadway. It's a reminder of a time when theater tried to be as big as the movies and learned the hard way that the stage has its own rules. If you want to dive deeper into the chaos, look for Glen Berger’s book Song of Spider-Man. He was the co-writer of the book, and his account of the production's meltdown is one of the most honest, painful, and hilarious looks at the creative process ever written.
Instead of just remembering the accidents, remember the ambition. It’s rare to see something fail that spectacularly while trying that hard to be something new. Sometimes, the most interesting things in culture aren't the perfect hits, but the beautiful, expensive disasters that dared to fall from the sky.
Next Steps for Enthusiasts:
To get the full picture, track down the original "Cast Recording" on Spotify—specifically listen to "Boy Falls From the Sky" and "Rise Above" to hear what U2 was going for. Then, compare those to the "Version 1.0" bootlegs floating around online if you want to see the weird, mythological Arachne scenes that Julie Taymor fought so hard to keep.