Theater

'Spider-Man' Musical a ‘Bore’

Revamp goes from “from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity.”

After 183 preview performances, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark finally opened Tuesday night—and even Julie Taymor, the director who was booted from the earlier version, was in attendance. But was it any good? “This singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February,” Benjamin Brantley writes in The New York Times. “It’s just a bore.” The new version “bears only a scant resemblance” to the original; while it retains Taymor’s beautiful sets, they seem out of place in what is now “a straightforward children’s entertainment with a mildly suspenseful story, two-dimensional characters, unapologetically bad jokes and the kind of melodious rock tunes that those under 12 might be familiar with from listening to their parents’ salad-day favorites of the 1980s and ’90s.”