Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has cancelled tonight's performance. They'd already axed the matinee but the evening performance is off (as may be others) while they work out safety issues. Observing it all here from the cheap seats, there are two things I'm kinda curious about…
The first question gets us back to math. Last week when there were eight performances, the show grossed $1,036,133. That's close to capacity so let's round it down to a million, which would mean that each performance grosses $125,000. They offered refunds and exchanges for Monday night's performance since it wasn't completed and they've now cancelled two more performances…so that's $375,000 foregone right there. I think a few other performances were cancelled before that. How much of that does the insurance company cover and at what point do they stop doing that?
The other is whether the delay is to make sure they fix the one moment in the show that injured actor-stuntguy Christopher Tierney on Monday night…or if they're going through the entire show, through every stunt and rigging and special effect to verify that it's safe or safer. And if the answer is it's the latter, how come they didn't do all that before they started performances?
Protests within the acting community are mounting and a lot of folks are asking that very question. So I'm guessing that they're checking everything out. Because there's a very good chance that if one more actor gets hurt, this show is history.