Let Broadway's Spider Man Finish What It Started

Since it opened in previews at the end of November, the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has drawn unprecedented attention from the news media, online websites, theater community and public. Though much of this attention has been driven by a concern for the production's safety, its intensity and prominence call to mind a moral panic, motivated less by the production's well-being than by upholding the arts in their present form. Spurred by the immediacy and rising role of new media, a less authoritative old media and a Broadway community unnerved by challenges to its longstanding aesthetic and social order, the attention shows no sign of dying soon.

The spotlight has been unrelenting since the production was conceived nearly nine years ago. As its creative team -- Julie Taymor, Bono, The Edge and Glen Berger -- lost and reestablished funders, worked up a $65m budget, and both intrigued and annoyed a Broadway community dismayed by the effect of an expensive musical about a comic-book hero on the complacent Broadway order, the production garnered unrelenting scrutiny. Attention spiked when early accidents raised the question of whether or not the creative team was taking too many risks and endangering the cast, and Broadway websites, in the best of times energetic trackers of theatrical shows, pummeled the production. When the show's first preview was halted multiple times due to technical malfunction, websites received hundreds of thousands of online hits, late-night television crafted parodies, and media reviewers tackled the show, violating the tacit agreement not to do so until previews -- performances held before critics are invited to visit -- were over. By the time last week's incident unfolded - in which dancer/aerialist Christopher Tierney fell when his harness malfunctioned -- the perfect storm for a moral panic had been set. Within hours the Broadway community weighed in on the morality of pushing performance thrills at the risk of safety. Calls were made to close the show, sue the creative team and put Julie Taymor in jail. Not only did Spider-Man surface as a trending topic on Twitter and a breaking international news item, but it became the target of a potential legislative hearing on safety standards.

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