“Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark” is Flying into Las Vegas (Like it Should Be)

After all the crazy that has happened, Monday night the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark will be closing early January 2014. The $75-million production is not even close to recouping it’s initial investment but has taken in $203 million dollars since opening in 2011 according to The New York Times. 

Clearly all of those naysayers didn’t get it completely right, because $203 million dollar is something and a lot of their investors did get their money back though not all of them. But, let’s be honest: Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark never belonged on Broadway, and even Julie Taymor knew that. It was mentioned in the new tell-all book, The Song of Spider-man, that Taymor never wanted the show to be a Broadway musical, but rather a circus-rock-concert-drama. She was adamant about that.

So why did the producers push the show in New York when it should have flew into Las Vegas from the beginning? The spectacle, the music, the “feel” of the show fits in with all of the Vegas-type-Cirque shows which all capitalize in the hundreds of millions of dollars (not even close to what Spider-man cost). Maybe this question is answered in the book (I haven’t finished the entire thing yet), but it seems pretty logical to produce this in Las Vegas and a lot better idea than New York. (Though 42nd Street in New York is looking more and more like Las Vegas every time I walk that block.)

I’m not too sad that this is happening, since I hope to cover the opening of Spider-man: Turn off the Dark 3.0 in Las Vegas, but it will mean that I will miss Spider-man: Turn off the Dark 2.0 since I was planning on seeing 2.0 in February 2014.

Hopefully, the producers will get it right this time, and they will “rise above” all of the drama and put on a good show in Las Vegas — a more completed version of the circus-rock-concert-drama that Taymor envisioned years ago.

Or not.

I’ll still be there.