Metro

Pulling back the curtain on the $65 million ‘Spider-Man’ on Broadway

About five years ago, renowned set designer George Tsypin was approached by the Chinese government to oversee designs for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But film director Julie Taymor had a more compelling offer for the Russian artist: work on the most expensive Broadway musical ever produced.

“I gave the Olympics up for this,” Tsypin said.

“Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the splashy $65 million production, is set to open on March 15 after multiple delays — and years of work involving everything from Kevlar to NASA-developed carbon fibers.

PROBLEM-PLAGUED MUSICAL BRINGING IN CO-DIRECTOR

“We want to make it look effortless, and I don’t want people to know I spent five years creating it,” Tsypin said. “But the reality is we’re moving buildings at an unbelievable speed throughout the show.”

Not that it always worked. The production has been plagued by injuries, stops and delays during a record-setting 15 weeks of preview performances as cast and crew worked out the kinks.

Despite all of the scrutiny of the show, Taymor has managed to guard the technical movements of the 125,000 pounds of scenery, as well as the mechanics of the flying sequences, as if they were state secrets. Staffers were hesitant to pull back the curtain lest they ruin the “magic” of the show.

But The Post got a backstage look at the 21/2-hour-long Broadway extravaganza.

MAKING SPIDER-MAN FLY

The 45-foot-tall Chrysler Building folds up and is stored in the theater’s roof. “There’s 125,000 pounds of scenery flying above us,” said Tsypin. The buildings on the perimeter of the set — steel structures packed with LED lights — are programmed to sway when characters are flying.

The sets alone clocked in at about $6.5 million. That’s double what an average Broadway production spends on set design. “Unlike a conventional show, the set is changing all the time,” Tsypin said. “It’s a moving organism. There must be at least a thousand cues just for the set alone, not counting flying and light.”

Engineers dismantled the pit between the stage and the house so actors could fly between them. “It was a conceptual choice to get the audience sucked into the action,” Tsypin said. It meant getting state approval to renovate the landmarked theater.

Tsypin used carbon fiber developed by NASA engineers to build Peter Parker’s bedroom. Each wall of the bedroom is wielded like a large shield by a stagehand dressed in black. Peter doesn’t just bounce off the walls — the walls bounce off of Peter.

The original scene in the lab of Norman Osborn (the man who becomes the Green Goblin) had actors dancing on ground-level. Tsypin hated the look. “It was too close to earth,” he said. “I told Julie, and they restaged the whole thing.” He built a bridge, three stories in the air.

A total of nine actors play Spider-Man during the show. If one Spidey flies from stage right to stage left, there’s another masked hero, of similar height and build, waiting to make the aerial journey back.