A superhero falls to earth

PROFILE:SPIDER-MAN: It was an inauspicious start to his Broadway run when Spider-Man got stuck in the rigging last weekend. It wasn't the finest hour for Bono and the Edge, either, who had to watch their big-budget musical make headlines for all the wrong reasons, writes Seán O'Driscollin New York

HE WAS HANGING from the ceiling. He was stuck. He struggled, he pushed, he pulled, he tried to swing himself to the stage but couldn’t make it. Frantic stagehands appeared; engineers pulled all sorts of levers. The intercom came on: “Ladies and gentlemen, due to technical difficulties, the intermission will begin early.”

Some of the audience left their seats; some stayed to see how Spider-Man could possibly escape. “People were watching a bit astounded,” says Jacob Yant, who was in the audience. “Some of the crowd was getting a bit antsy, and one woman shouted out: “This isn’t a dress rehearsal!”

Poor Spider-Man. His humiliation at Foxwoods Theatre, on 42nd Street in Manhattan, last Sunday night must have marked a low point in his 48-year career. After five or 10 minutes he was swung close enough to the stage for staff to grab him and bring him to safety. Out in the popcorn corridor the intermission dragged on for an interminable 40 minutes while the huge forest of cables, pulleys and levers that keep the comic-strip superhero in the air were reworked by an army of experts.

“There were technical breakdowns five times,” says Yant, “but the storyline was the main problem. At one point a group of dancing spider ladies come on stage, all of them with eight legs. No explanation: they were just there.”

If that first preview is representative of the problems with Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, then this new musical – the most expensive show ever produced on Broadway – is in serious trouble after the €45 million that has already been spent on the production, with another €750,000 needed to keep Spider-Man flying each week.

With luck, perhaps, another superhero is coming to the rescue. Bono is stumping up cash and writing the show's songs, along with the Edge. Can the amazing duo save Spider-Man from defeat? Will the Spider-Man brand be forever tarnished? Will Conan O'Brien and the New York Postever stop laughing at Spider-Man's onstage entanglements?

“If anyone can save this situation it’s U2,” says Tom Harbinson, a Connecticut-based construction manager who also attended the previews. Harbinson, who got tickets for the sold-out show through a U2 fan site, says the band’s brand is all over the show. “The songs are by Bono and the Edge, but all of U2 are credited with one of the main numbers. Vertigo is also playing in the background of a school dance scene; even the LED screens on the curtains are an adaptation from U2 concerts, so they are in this in a big way.”

Harbinson believes the Spider-Man brand, which is owned by Marvel Comics, has not been irreversibly damaged by being associated with the musical. “U2 are not just bringing their music; they are also bringing their business model – and they are very, very good at finding the right people. The stage designs and costumes are spectacular. The U2 machine can get behind this and make it happen.”

Other customers waiting to see the show are also convinced its vast budget and huge ambition will eventually win over doubters. “No matter what people say of the show, the spectacle is going to sell it,” says Andres E Correa, a Venezuelan living in New York. He is to see the show in January, along with two Italian friends. “People are complaining about the storyline. This is a show in which Spider-Man flies all around the theatre; the director is trying things that have never been attempted before. I am not that interested in the story; I want to see the spectacle.”

So it looks like Spider-Man can walk away from this damaged but unbroken, a multibillion-dollar global brand that can still draw on the Tobey Maguire-led film franchise for selling power. “I don’t think the stage show is really going to hurt Spider-Man all that much,” says Greg Theakston, a comic-book historian and former illustrator for Marvel Comics. “Spider-Man has been interpreted and reinterpreted many, many times. There is this universal fascination with a geeky teenager who has this secret superhero existence in which he gets the girl. It’s every adolescent fantasy.”

Theakston started illustrating Spider-Man in the late 1960s, just a few years after the superhero was created by the comic-book legend Stan Lee, the founder of Marvel Comics. Spider-Man’s effect on the superhero world was revolutionary. “Up to that point every teenage superhero had an older mentor who was the real force behind the story, such as Batman with the teenage Robin. Then Spider-Man came along, and he needed nobody except himself. He was heralding a new awakening in the Sixties, when young people were ready to take on the world – they didn’t need a father figure.”

Lee, who is now 87, credits teenage angst and an earlier pulp-fiction character called the Spider as his inspiration. He has also repeatedly credited watching a spider climb up a wall as his final inspiration: he was deeply impressed by its limber motion and quick reflexes.

Spider-Man first appeared in the Marvel comic Amazing Fantasy,in 1962, as a dorky but likeable teenager who was orphaned and now lived with his aunt and uncle. Unlike Superman and Captain America, Spider-Man's teenage alter ego, Peter Parker, knew what it was like to be young and hormonal in the sleepy United States of the early 1960s. He was awkward around girls, didn't say the right thing, didn't know who he really was. "He was every teenager. It was always going to be a hit," says Theakston.

Both characters have evolved since then, as Parker became first a self-questioning college student, then a married teacher and then, reflecting the new image he received from Maguire, a single man again. “The films were very important, because they revitalised the character,” says Theakston. “There is a danger that superheroes can age with their audience, and that can be very hard to overcome. Maguire’s upside-down kiss of the heroine when she pulls back the mask took Spider-Man out of comic books and into mainstream sexiness.”

The films were so successful that they are being “rebooted”, with Andrew Garfield taking Maguire’s place in a number of storylines, as if the first three movies had never happened. “It is a bit funny that the new films will just start over,” says Theakston, “but Spider-Man has always been reinvented. He might be hanging from the ceiling on Broadway or being totally rewritten in Hollywood, but as long as there are teenagers dreaming of a different life he is always going to be there. That’s a market that’s not going to go away.”

Curriculum vitae

Who is he?Superhero and global branding franchise.

Why is he in the news?He's the star of a huge-budget Broadway musical that has the US media wallowing in Schadenfreude.

Most appealing characteristicConvincing bored, awkward teenage boys that one day they too will have superpowers and get the girl.

Least appealing characteristicNo parent of a son under 12 escapes Christmas without buying at least one Spider-Man lunch box, pencil sharpener, duvet, gloves, music set or hamburger.

Most likely to say"Wherever justice needs me, Mary Jane, I'll be there."

Least likely to say"I refuse to endorse this product. It's too tacky."