NEWS - u2s 'SPIDER-MAN MUSICAL' MAKES BRADWAY HISTORY

U2's Spider-Man Musical Makes Broadway History

 Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark – the drama-packed musical toting a score from U2’s Bono and The Edge – has broken Broadway records to score the title of the highest single-week grossing show of all time.
The Daily Telegraph reports the production took in roughly $3 million over a nine-show period, which breaks the previous single-week grossing record held by the Wizard of Oz-inspired musical Wicked, which grossed $2.2 million over eight shows in 2011.
First impressions are often deceiving, and that’s the case with Spider-Man. The production, which is reportedly the priciest show in history with a projected cost of $70 million, was faced with a number of early hindrances, including serious injuries to cast members, economic problems and poor reviews.
In March of last year, the production’s original director Julie Taymor was let go after the musical garnered tremendously negative reviews from critics and had to shut down for three weeks. New director Philip William McKinley stepped into the sphere and overhauled the show, revamping key parts and having U2 and the Edge rewrite some numbers. Since then, the show has evolved into a blockbuster Broadway hit. When the production re-opened in June, it received an extremely positive response from critics and theatergoers alike. Now, it looks as if nothing can top Spider-Man.

NEWS - U2 CELEBRATE 'SPIDER-MAN ON BROADWAY' SUCESS

irishtimes.com - Last Updated: Thursday, January 5, 2012, 09:34

U2 celebrate Spider-Man success

 

Rock giants U2 are celebrating the success of their Broadway record-breaking hit Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark  which shattered Broadway box office and attendance records during the last week of 2011.
Bono and The Edge wrote the music and lyrics for the show, which was once branded the biggest flop on Broadway but took in $2,941,790 (€2.25m) over nine performances last week.
 “For all the problems, there was magic on the stage," said Bono. "Things did get chaotic and messy after our producer Tony Adams died.
"But this week’s news has us all giddy again and we are raising our glasses to Tony, to our indefatigable cast, crew, creative- and production team.”


The show had had a turbulent start including injuries to actors, delays in opening night and poor reviews.
The Edge added: “It just goes to show that you can’t keep a good superhero down.
“This is a proud day for everyone who has been a part of this show. The Broadway public have voted with their feet.”
Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark  has been seen by more than 700,000 audience members from around the world - including 17,375 people last week in The Foxwoods Theatre.
The previous record was held by Wicked , which grossed 2,228,235 dollars last January.

NEWS - TONY-WINNING DIRECTOR JULIE TAYMOR SUES PRODUCERS OF 'SPIDERMAN'IN FED COURT FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGMENT

 my band cant catch a break with this investment of song writting for this play, saying it one more time, bono...NEVER VENTURE INTO THIS GENRE AGAIN! youve dont it, no need to revisit this again. just saying. MICHELLE

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Tony-winning director Julie Taymor sues producers of 'Spider Man' in fed court for copyright infringement  

 

Producers: We're happy to let courts decide if Taymor wronged

BY Barbara Ross
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

November 8 2011, 7:22 PM

Axed Spidey director Julie Taymor is casting a new web — and in this one the producers who booted her from the now-hit show are the villains.

Taymor filed a million-dollar copyright infringement suit Tuesday, charging the money men behind the comic book musical cheated her out of royalties, and stole her work.

The Tony winner was booted from "Spider Man: Turn off the Dark” after spending years fine-tuning the accident-prone show and writing the book.

After critics savaged it, Taymor was unceremoniously shown the door.

Taymor's lawyer, Charles Spada, said his client, who won a Tony as director of the Broadway version of The Lion King, spent more than seven years creating the musical but was paid just $150,000 for her labor.

Producers Michael Cohl and Jeremiah Harris deny they owe Taymoranything.

“The production has indeed compensated Ms. Taymor for her contribution as a co-book writer,” they said in a statement. “The court system will provide, once and for all, an opportunity to resolve this dispute.”

Taymor’s 71 page lawsuit says the show routinely pulls in more than $1.4 million a week as ticket holders shell out $100 per seat.

Spada said the producers "violated Ms. Taymor's creative rights as an author" of the show.

"Ms. Taymor continues to support the talented and hardworking cast and crew, and she remains proud of her creative work on the production for over seven years, not only as an author, but as the director, mask designer, and collaborator, " Spada said.

Taymor got support last June from her union, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, which filed an arbitration claim against the producers in June to protect Taymor’s rights and compensation.

U2 band mates Bono and the Edge, who created the score for the comic-book musical, recruited Taymor in 2002 to work on the adaptation.

NEWS - 'SPIDERMAN' BROADWAY MUSICAL - OPENS AFTER MONTHS OF TURMOIL

Spider Man - Spider-Man Musical Opens After Months Of Turmoil
14 June 2011

'Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark' is due to open tonight (14.06.11) after months of incidents including injuries to Natalie Mendoza and stuntman Christopher Tierney.

The 'Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark' show is set to open tonight (14.06.11).

The Broadway musical - which U2 frontman Bono and guitarist The Edge have written all the music and lyrics for - has been affected by months of turmoil including cast and crew alterations, story changes and injuries, following the first preview shows in November 2010.

'Spider-Man' - which stars Reeve Carney as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Jennifer Damiano as Mary Jane Watson and Patrick Page as Norman Osborn/Green Goblin - has reportedly cost $65 million to create, making it the most expensive musical in history.

But it has been plagued by incidents, including one that saw stuntman Christopher Tierney end up in a critical condition in hospital after he fell almost 10 metres from a piece of scenery into an orchestra pit during a preview performance in December.

Bono has since referred to Christopher - who will return to the musical tonight - as a "rock star" due to his commitment to the project.

He told the USA Today newspaper: "Some real superheroes have emerged. I always feel like I'm pretending to be a rock star for a living. Chris Tierney is a rock star."

Other problems saw T.V. Carpio - who plays Arachne in the show - hurt her neck during a March performance after she had permanently replaced the original Arachne, Natalie Mendoza, who withdrew from the musical in December after suffering concussion during a preview performance in November.

NEWS - GLENN BECK TELLS OF HIS VISIT WITH BONO BACKSTAGE AT THE SPIDER-MAN MUSICAL BROADWAY PLAY

Glenn was backstage with Bono?

Thursday, Jan 13, 2011 



Glenn took some friends to the show last night, and when they arrived he ran into some of the producers. The producers thanked Glenn for his kind review , which has now been picked up by Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times, and Glenn let them know that he honestly feels that they deserve a much better review than his. Glenn believes the show is “the eighth wonder of the world.”
About halfway through the show Glenn got a text message that said, “Would you like to see Bono after the show?”
Glenn joked, “I just text back and went, ‘that’s the way I roll. ‘”

So much like the time when Glenn met Albert Pujols

he got to meet another famous person who he had no business meeting. Pat joked, “Where the guy has no clue who Albert Pujols is.  Here’s the greatest baseball player on the planet, he doesn’t know his name, he couldn’t tell you what team he’s on, he couldn’t tell you what he does and he’s the one who gets the autograph signed?”
Stu added, “It would have been nice to maybe have someone who actually has, I don’t know, purchased something that they produced to meet them.”
Glenn has no idea how things like this happen to him. When he showed the text to his wife she laughed and just said their life is like some weird movie.
Glenn described his actual meeting with Bono:
“So anyway, we went downstairs and somebody is facing me and Julie Taymor comes up and she was the one who did the Lion King and she’s now done this.  Brilliant.  The producer is there.  Brilliant.  The guy who did the set is there.  Brilliant.  All of them, just brilliant.  And the guy standing with me, he’s facing me and he’s like, behind you.  And so I kind of start to turn and there’s Bono.  And he’s just kind of like hanging out, just listening to what we were talking about.  And I said, hey.”
At first Glenn figured Bono had no idea who he was, but Bono was quick to thank Glenn for his kind words on radio. Glenn told the story, “And [Bono] said, some of us don’t need to have good reviews, he said, but there are people that have given up so much of their life and are the beginning and, you know, a good review means everything to them because they’re at the beginning of their career.  And he said, I can’t tell you how much that meant.”

NEWS - SPIDER-MAN STUNT ON BROADWAY GOES AWRY; Is Show In Peril?

im beginning to think, that maybe Bono  SHOULDNT venture into this area again, if the EVER get this thing to run right, and make millions, like im sure they hope to, then let that be that, youve done it Bono, check that off your personal bucket list of things to accomplish.

MICHELLE

'Spider-Man' Stunt Goes Awry; Is Show In Peril?

Stunt Double Taken To Hospital With Minor Injuries

HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

POSTED: 11:24 pm CST December 20, 2010

NEW YORK -- Broadway might need a superhero to save the new Spider-Man musical. "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," the most expensive production in Broadway history, suffered its fourth accident in a month when a stuntman playing the web-slinger fell about 30 feet into a stage pit during a preview Monday night. The safety tether that clips to his back failed to prevent the spill. 

The performer, Christopher W. Tierney, was wheeled out of the Foxwoods Theatre on a stretcher, still in his costume, and taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital with minor injuries. He suffered broken ribs and internal bleeding, said a castmate, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly about the musical. 

An uncle in Florida, Michael Tierney, said when reached by phone Tuesday night that he had spoken with his nephew a few hours ago. "He sounded pretty good," Tierney said, adding that his nephew was still at the hospital when he spoke with him. 

In a statement, Actors' Equity said investigators determined that the accident was caused by human error. It gave no details but said additional safety measures are being undertaken. 

A state Department of Labor spokesman said the cause was under investigation. 

The fall was the latest setback for the troubled, $65 million show. 

Conceived by Tony-winning director Julie Taymor and U2's Bono and The Edge, who wrote the music, "Spider-Man" has been more than eight years in the making. It has been plagued by delays, money woes and several other accidents, including one in which an actress suffered a concussion and another in which a performer broke his wrists in an aerial stunt. Its official opening has been postponed twice, to early February. 

The huge costs - a 41-member cast, 18 orchestra members, complicated sets and 27 daring aerial stunts, including a battle between two characters over the audience - mean the 1,928-seat theater will have to virtually sell out every show for several years just to break even. The weekly running bill has been put as high as $1 million. (Tickets are $67.50 to $135 for weekday performances, $67.50 to $140 on weekends.) 

A spokesman for "Spider-Man," Rick Miramontez, said in a statement that new safety measures ordered by the government after the latest accident have been adopted. Wednesday's matinee was canceled, but Wednesday night's show will go on, Miramontez said. (No performance had been scheduled for Tuesday.) 

Leo Rosales, spokesman for the New York Department of Labor, said the show's producers had not yet presented new safety protocols and would do so on Wednesday. If the measures were inadequate, he said, the state won't let the show perform the complicated aerial maneuvers. 

"If it takes longer, it will need to take longer," he said of the show's timing. "We need to be satisfied." 

Taymor, the director, said in a statement: "An accident like this is obviously heartbreaking for our entire team and, of course, to me personally. I am so thankful that Chris is going to be alright and is in great spirits. Nothing is more important than the safety of our Spider-Man family and we'll continue to do everything in our power to protect the cast and crew." 

One audience member who attended Monday's performance, Brian Lynch, said he knew of the previous mishaps and still wanted to come. 

"I was making jokes about it earlier in the day," said Lynch, visiting from Hollywood, Calif. "I said if anyone got hurt I was ready to jump in and help out. I never thought it would happen, I thought they probably worked it all out. I really didn't think it would happen like it did. It was pretty horrific." 

The accident happened during the show's big finale, when the Green Goblin drops Mary Jane and Spider-Man leaps to her rescue. 

"But then he just kept falling, it seemed, and then everything went dark and then people, crew ran up to the stage and we heard the girl playing Mary Jane screaming from the pit," Lynch said. 

"Spider-Man" might yet prevail. Other Broadway shows have struggled with getting their sets and stunts to work during previews, including "Mary Poppins," whose house set went off track in 2006, and "Titanic," which was plagued by numerous technical problems during a month of previews in 1997. Both were hits. 

Mary Martin, who starred many times in productions of "Peter Pan," had numerous accidents, "beauts," as she flew about the stage. A year before she died, in a 1989 interview with the Chicago Tribune, she recalled smashing into a concrete wall during a rehearsal as she was trying to show the children in the cast that they shouldn't fear being in the air. 

"It was like a cannon shot," Martin said. "I thought, 'My God, these kids will never fly now,' never thinking that my arm might be broken. So we went right back and I said, 'Now we're going to fly it like it should be,' and we did, and it went perfectly." 

But "Spider-Man" - whose costs beat the previous most expensive Broadway show, the $25 million "Shrek The Musical" - has reached a dangerous level of attention: fodder for comics. Online, where parodies by "Saturday Night Live" and "Conan" poking fun of the musical's early technical problems had recently been eagerly passed around, the tone shifted Tuesday from jokey schadenfreude to mild outrage. 

An actor from TV's "Modern Family," Jesse Tyler Ferguson, wisecracked: "I'm torn between wanting to see 'Spider-Man' on Broadway and not wanting to see someone literally die doing musical theater." 

The production - supervised by Juniper Street Productions, a management firm that has overseen such Broadway and Las Vegas productions as "The Producers" and "Promises, Promises" - has been under investigation by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration since Nov. 2 at the request of the state Labor Department, according to OSHA. 

"It's certainly going to be continuing as a result of the latest incident," OSHA spokesman John Chavez said. 

The state Department of Labor inspected 37 separate aerial maneuvers planned for the show at rehearsals in November and approved the use of all equipment in the show, Rosales said. "From what we saw back then," he said, the maneuvers appeared to be safe. 

Miramontez said OSHA, Actors' Equity and New York State labor officials met with the "Spider-Man" company on Tuesday to discuss additional safety measures, and "it was agreed that these measures would be enacted immediately." 

Tierney, who appeared in the national tour of "Moving Out" and in "Dirty Dancing" in Toronto, is the show's main aerialist and performs stunts for the roles of Spider-Man and the villains Meeks and Kraven the Hunter. The castmate who spoke on condition of anonymity said the cable to Tierney's harness snapped. But one special-effects expert raised the possibility that the rope was not hooked up securely. 

Scott Fisher, president of Fisher Technical Services Inc. of in Las Vegas, which builds equipment for aerial stunts for the show, said the rope was supposed to be clipped to the stage at one end and the performer's back at the other. 

"The stage crew would have been responsible for making the connection for hooking him up," Fisher said. "The actor is responsible for making the final check that he's good to go. It's sort of like packing your own parachute." 

He said the script called for the stuntman to lurch forward at the end of a ramp as if leaping to Mary Jane's rescue. "He runs and stops and freezes in a position that you wouldn't normally be able to hold unless you had a little support from behind him," Fisher said. "If that's not hooked up and he leans forward, he's going to fall forward." 

Fisher said the rope was not part of his company's onstage flight systems. But he said it was unlikely to have snapped: It is a 10,000-pound line. 

After the actor fell, screaming could be heard coming from the pit. 

"A voice yelled, 'Someone call 911!' Then there was a silence," an audience member, fashion blogger Mariana Leung, wrote on the website NearSay.com. "A minute later, the stage was still dark. Then there was an announcement that the show would be delayed. A few minutes later, a second announcement that the performance would not continue. The lights came up." 

Just last week, the show's lead producer, Michael Cohl, delayed the official opening for the second time, pushing it back from Jan. 11 to Feb. 7. He cited "some unforeseeable setbacks, most notably the injury of a principal cast member." 

The first preview on Nov. 28 did not go well. The musical had to be halted five times because of technical glitches, and actress Natalie Mendoza, who plays Spider-Man's evil love interest Arachne, was hit in the head by a rope and suffered a concussion. She was sidelined for two weeks.