When it comes to “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark” — my favorite show since “Taboo” — expect delays.
The $65 million spectacle is scheduled to play its first preview Nov. 14. But there’s such chaos at the Foxwoods Theater that the first performance will be delayed at least a week, production sources told The Post yesterday.
Julie Taymor, the mad genius who’s staging this monster, is demanding more time to pull things together. She’s told friends who were planning to fly into New York to lend her moral support at the first preview to hold off on their travel plans.
As The Post reported last week, an actor in the show broke his wrists during a group sales presentation two weeks ago. Another actor, it later emerged, injured his feet three weeks ago.
People working on the show are grimly joking about opening a Julie Taymor Center for Rehabilitation in Times Square. It will be staffed by former cast members of another Taymor show, “The Lion King,” who suffered back problems after spending years hunching and crouching as hyenas and giraffes.
The pileup of injuries is only one reason why “we are way behind,” says a “Spider-Man” source.
While Taymor has staged individual scenes, she’s never actually run the whole show from beginning to end. Transitions from scene to scene — key to the flow of a musical — haven’t been mapped out, let alone staged.
“We’re less than two weeks away, and we have no idea what the running time is going to be,” says a source.
The delay may also force the producers to push back their Dec. 21 opening.
Yesterday, theater insiders were buzzing that “Spider-Man” would likely open sometime in January 2011.
“You can’t open a show in the middle of the Christmas holidays unless you want to bury your reviews,” says a longtime theater publicist. “But maybe that’s their plan.”
Some people think Taymor’s starting to crack under the pressure. At the group sales presentation, she gave a speech that one person describes as making her sound like “a total wack job.”
Another source says: “The chick is nuts.”
Wearing pantaloons, she spoke of Spider-Man and Bono, who’s writing the score, as being iconic, mythical figures.
Bono, she said, is more than a musician — he’s a man on a mission to make the world a better place.
And Spider-Man isn’t just a comic book hero — he’s a figure out of Greek drama.
The group sales people, whose main interest is in selling as many tickets as they can, were perplexed.
“I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Spider-Man or Shakespeare,” one said.
Actors, meanwhile, are increasingly concerned about safety. There’s one place in the show where some of them have to negotiate a 30-foot drop.
“It’s pretty scary,” says one.
State regulators who monitor Broadway’s special effects are inspecting the show tomorrow. Should they veto some of the state-of-the-art flying — which catapults actors throughout the theater, over theatergoers’ heads — it could cause further delays.
Although “Spider-Man” is generating a lot of press — there’s a “60 Minutes” piece in the works, scheduled to air just before the show opens (if it opens!) — the box office isn’t exactly exploding.
Sources say the advance is only about $5 million.
“The fact is, the public doesn’t know what this show is yet,” says a veteran theater producer. “And if it doesn’t get the greatest reviews since ‘Oklahoma!’ I bet it’ll crash quickly. It’s just too expensive.”
L
IEV Schreiber had been flirting with starring in a revival of “That Championship Season” on Broadway this spring. But after taking a close look at the 1972 play, about a reunion of basketball players, he decided it was a little dated, sources say.
And so he’s been replaced by Kiefer Sutherland, as Mike Fleming, my formidable competitor over at Deadline.com, reported yesterday.
Sutherland will be joined by Chris Noth, Jason Patric, Jim Gaffigan and the great Brian Cox.