

‘Spider-Man’ to resume production after

- Associated Press - Tuesday, December 21, 2010

NEW YORK (AP) - The producers of the troubled "Spider-Man" musical on Broadway said they have enacted new safety measures ordered by the government and will resume performances on Wednesday night.

A spokesman for "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark," Rick Miramontez, said producers met with federal and state labor officials and the Actors' Equity Association on Tuesday to discuss additional safety measures after a performer doing an aerial stunt fell about 30 feet. He said the measures will be enacted immediately but did not immediately say what changes the show would make.

Producers postponed the musical's scheduled Wednesday matinee, but the web-slinger will take the stage again on Wednesday night.






"He was being held up by a wire and you could see at the end of the wire there was maybe a weight or something that kind of came following after him," Bord said. "And then after they both came down, it was just silent and you started to hear people screaming in the pit."



New York City officials said Tuesday there is no separate city investigation of the production.

"Hopefully, they'll get all the bugs out," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday. "I'm told it's phenomenally complex, which is one of the reasons that it's going to be such a great show. We do have certain laws to make things safe, and we will certainly enforce the laws."

Scott Fisher, president of Fisher Technical Services Inc., in Las Vegas, which builds the equipment that does the automated and powered aerial stunts for the show, said the rope involved in the accident was clipped to the stage at one end and clipped to the performer's back at the other end.

"The stage crew would have been responsible for making the connection for hooking him up," said Fisher. "The actor is responsible for making the final check that he's good to go. It's sort of like packing your own parachute.

"The move itself is part of the staging of the show. He does a freeze-frame move at the end of the ramp to make it look like he's going to go forward and go after the girl and the lanyard is what stops him. ... So he runs and stops and freezes in a position that you wouldn't normally be able to hold unless you had a little support from behind him. If that's not hooked up and he leans forward, he's going to fall forward."

Fisher said the rope involved in the accident is not part of his company's flight systems and that he hasn't heard whether it was actually a failure of the rope or a bad hookup. But he said it was unlikely that the rope would have snapped: It's a 10,000-pound line that would be very difficult to break.

Miramontez said an announcement would be made later Tuesday regarding the refund/exchange policy for missed performances. There is no performance Tuesday night, which had always been scheduled as a dark night, Miramontez said.








The show's massive costs _ a 41-member cast, 18 orchestra members, complicated sets and 27 daring aerial stunts, including a battle between two characters over the audience _ mean the 1,928-seat theater will have to virtually sell out every show for several years just to break even. The weekly running bill has been put as high as $1 million. (Tickets are priced from $67.50-$135 for weekday performances and $67.50-$140 for weekend performances.)


The show _ whose costs easily dwarf Broadway's last costliest show, the $25 million "Shrek The Musical" _ may be about a comic-book hero, but it has now itself become easy fodder for comics.


"Becoming a bit of a joke _ a bad one _ but a joke," wrote Dan Truong, a Toronto photographer, on Twitter.




Still, a trickle of ticket-buyers appeared at the Foxwoods box office Tuesday morning. The accident did not stop Yumeho Asai, 20, of Gifu, Japan, from buying a ticket. She is studying musical theater herself. "I'm just so interested in the technical aspects," she said.




Associated Press writers Karen Matthews, Ula Ilnytzky and Sara Kugler Frazier, Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle and Broadcast reporter Warren Levinson contributed to this report.
