Why Critics Broke Tradition to Review Spider-Man During Previews

Broadway has long operated on an unwritten rule: whatever happens during previews stays off the record. Critics are free to attend, but they hold their notices until a show's official opening night, on the understanding that a production still adjusting itself in front of paying audiences has not yet become the finished object being reviewed. Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark is the rare case where critics broke that rule themselves, rather than a producer breaking it on them.

By early 2011 the show had already postponed its official opening several times, most recently from February 7 to March 15, while continuing to sell tickets to preview audiences at prices close to a regular Broadway run. With more than 60 preview performances already behind the production and no clear end to the delays in sight, a group of New York theater critics decided the ever-expanding preview period and the ticket prices being charged for it meant they should not keep waiting for a moving opening date. On February 7, 2011, the date that had at one point been set as opening night, reviews started running anyway.

Eleven reviews from major New York newspapers and national outlets appeared that week, and every one of them was negative. Ben Brantley of The New York Times was the most widely cited, writing that the show may "rank among the worst" musicals in Broadway history. Scott Brown, reviewing for New York magazine, called the production "hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked" and, despite everything, "never, ever boring." Peter Marks of The Washington Post compared it to "the dankest subbasement of the American musical theater." Writing somewhat later in The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn took particular issue with the show's attempt to graft the Greek myth of Arachne onto the Spider-Man story, describing the result as "a grotesque hybrid."

Brantley's own explanation for why he broke with convention was straightforward: it seemed unfair to readers not to offer an accurate appraisal of what was actually happening on a stage that people were continuing to spend hundreds of dollars a ticket to see, regardless of what the production's official calendar called the show.

The production did not take the early reviews quietly. Producer Michael Cohl responded publicly, arguing that any reviewer who found no redeeming value in the show was "just not legitimate," and suggesting it was hard for people who did not understand pop culture to fairly judge a pop-culture event. The comment was read at the time as combative rather than conciliatory, and it did nothing to slow the story: within days, the production suspended performances for roughly a month to retool the show, brought in writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa to revise the book, and moved toward the creative overhaul that eventually led to Julie Taymor's departure as director.

When Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark finally reached its official opening on June 14, 2011, after 182 total previews, critics reviewed it a second time under the normal rules. The verdict was less brutal but still not a rescue: Brantley himself described the reworked show as no longer "the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February," adding only that it was "just a bore." Aggregated review scores tracked the same shift in degree rather than direction, moving from an average grade around F+ for the February notices to roughly C+ once the retooled version officially opened, a measurable improvement that still left the show well short of a genuine critical turnaround. A production built around one of Broadway's most expensive scores, written by Bono and The Edge, ended up remembered as much for how early it was judged as for how it was ultimately received.

Nothing about the February 2011 reviews has an equivalent anywhere else in modern Broadway history. Critics have occasionally attended long-delayed previews before, but a coordinated decision by eleven separate outlets to publish on a date the production itself had already abandoned as its opening remains, by most accounts, unique to this show. For a fuller account of how that record preview period fed into the production's overall costs, see the site's case file summary.