Once upon a time, the way a Broadway show worked was that they previewed out of town. They'd take the show to New Haven or Philadelphia or Washington or just about anywhere for a month or three…anywhere but Broadway and everyone understood how that worked. Audiences understood they were paying to see a work-in-progress; that there would be mistakes and weak segments that would later be trimmed or rewritten. Reviewers understood that the show was not to be reviewed because it was not done yet. It might very well stink in tryouts but that didn't count…and famously there were shows like Oklahoma! and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum that were written-off as flops in early previews but managed to get everything fixed by the time they debuted in New York and the critics came to render their judgments. The whole point of previewing in another city was to do all the testing and repair work and revision without the whole world watching.
I feel bad for the folks behind the Spider-Man musical now previewing in New York. Their first preview on Sunday had, if not the whole world watching then certainly a lot of the theatrical community and potential customers. I don't recall any legitimate newspaper ever publishing an article reporting on the disasters and bad reaction to any other preview…but here's The New York Times and The New York Post was even worse.
Of course, the folks behind Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark have no one to blame but themselves. They chose to put money into special effects instead of outta-town tryouts, plus they've been hyping the show in every possible direction, calling as much attention to it as possible. They're also charging not just full Broadway prices for previews but high Broadway prices…and scalpers are getting $300-$500 for choice seats. If I paid a thousand bucks for a pair of tix to see a new show, I don't think I'd be too forgiving of the kind of mistakes that usually mar preview performances, nor would I be that tolerant of material that obviously needs to be rewritten.
On Facebook this morning, I saw a bunch of folks cackling over the snap assumption that the show is a disaster. One said, "No one is praising the story and that's the kiss of death." I don't think so. No one has ever praised the story in any of those Cirque du Soleil shows and most of them have done pretty well.
Ah, but I hear you wishing I had a Comments section so you could write, "True but people don't go to Cirque du Soleil shows for the story." Which is true but I also don't think people always go to a Broadway show for the story. No one went to Smokey Joe's Cafe for a story. There wasn't one and that show ran for over two thousand performances on Broadway and is still popular all over the world. Do people go to Mamma Mia because they say, "Hey, let's go see a show about a woman who isn't sure which of three men fathered her daughter who's about to be married"? Or do they go because they say, "Hey, let's go see a show full of neat ABBA hits"?
I'm not sure where I'm going with this other than to suggest that a lot of the old rules are already not applying to Spider-Man. Many of them sure aren't applying to The Addams Family, which got pretty bad reviews but is still packing 'em in at the Lunt-Fontanne. (It'll be interesting to see how much that changes when Nathan Lane departs the cast next March.) Even if it gets similarly bad notices, I suspect Spider-Man will keep selling tickets because there's a grand affection for the title character and no one is suggesting they're not bringing him to life vividly on or over that stage…and because it's all such a talked-about spectacle. One assumes they'll get the technical problems all solved and the running time will get down to normal…and then it'll be one of those, "What? You haven't seen it yet?" shows. Whether it'll sell enough tickets to turn a profit, I dunno…but they're going to sell a lot of tickets, at least for a while. (This article suggests the Foxwoods Theater is already thinking they might need another tenant soon. That kind of talk feels way premature to me…but then again, I haven't seen the show…or the precise math on what it's going to take in terms of grosses to keep the doors open and the actors flying.)
Whatever happens, we'll be talking for some time about what it means about how the theater is, for better or worse, changing. For some reason, that discussion interests me more than the show, itself.