Spider-Man's 182 Previews vs. the Longest Broadway Preview Runs

Most Broadway musicals preview for something like three to six weeks, somewhere in the range of twenty-five to forty performances, before locking the show and opening officially to critics. Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark previewed 182 times, spread across roughly seven months from its first performance in late November 2010 to its official opening on June 14, 2011. Put next to a typical Broadway schedule, that number stops looking like a long preview period and starts looking like an entire separate production cycle that happened to be sold to the public as previews.

The record it broke was not close, either. Before Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark, the longest preview run in Broadway history belonged to A Teaspoon Every Four Hours, a 1969 play written by and starring comedian Jackie Mason, which played 97 previews. The show is a useful contrast for exactly the reason its own history is almost darkly funny: after 97 previews, A Teaspoon Every Four Hours opened and closed on the same day, June 14, 1969, exactly one official performance. Ninety-seven previews bought it a single night as an officially reviewed show. Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark's 182 previews, by comparison, led into a run of 1,066 total performances.

Previews exist for a specific reason: they let a production keep adjusting a show, night by night, in front of paying audiences before critics file an official review. For most of Broadway's twentieth-century history, that adjustment period happened somewhere else entirely, on an out-of-town tryout in a city like Boston or Philadelphia, away from New York's press and industry audience. As out-of-town tryouts became less common, in-house New York previews increasingly took over that same function, and Nick & Nora, discussed below, is one of the shows credited with popularizing the extended in-house preview as a deliberate substitute. What separates a normal multi-week preview period from a record-setting one like Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark's is not the format, but the scale of the problems still being worked out once the audience is already buying tickets.

Ask a longtime theatergoer to name a Broadway show famous for endless previews, and Nick & Nora comes up more often than A Teaspoon Every Four Hours, even though its total was lower. The 1991 musical, based on the Thin Man characters, played 71 previews at the Marquis Theatre, a number the production chose deliberately: rather than take the show on an out-of-town tryout, the creative team used an extended New York preview period to keep rewriting the book and score in place. The strategy backfired in a way that has become a familiar Broadway cautionary tale. Word spread during those seventy-one nights that the show was in trouble, and by the time it officially opened on December 8, 1991, the reputation had outrun the material. Nick & Nora closed after nine regular performances.

Other shows sometimes mentioned in the same breath as "notoriously long previews," including Young Frankenstein, Shrek the Musical, Rocky, and Carrie, turn out on inspection to have previewed for fairly ordinary stretches, in the range of sixteen to thirty-seven performances. That is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: those shows earned their reputations for other reasons, budget, reviews, subject matter, but not for the length of their preview runs. The genuinely record-setting company is a much shorter list, and Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark sits well clear of all of it.

Since 2011, nothing has seriously approached Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark's total. King Kong, the 2018 musical built around a twenty-foot animatronic ape, faced its own well-publicized technical demands and still only previewed for 29 performances before opening that November. That gap is part of what keeps the 182-preview record notable rather than merely historical: even a production engineered around comparably ambitious stagecraft, arriving seven years later with the benefit of hindsight, did not come within a fraction of matching it. The number stays tied almost entirely to this one production, and specifically to the mechanical and safety problems documented elsewhere on this site, including the structural work the Foxwoods Theatre itself requiredfor the flying sequences that drove much of that extended schedule.