Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark Universally Panned By Critics!

"Directed by Julie Taymor, who wrote the show's book with Glen Berger, and featuring songs by U2's Bono and The Edge, Spider-Man is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst."

"[It's] equal parts exciting and atrocious...constantly seesawing between the galvanizing and the lame. The flying sequences can be thrilling, as when Spider-Man first takes off over the orchestra; other times, they look barely good enough for Six Flags, the harnesses making the movements clunky."

"The big shock when sitting down finally to assess this $65 million web-slinging folly, is what a monumental anti-climax it turns out to be. Spider-Man is chaotic, dull and a little silly. And there's nothing here half as catchy as the 1967 ABC cartoon theme tune."

"The book is a travesty, the music is lazy and awful—it's like listening to the scraps left on the floor after U2 recorded "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"—and the actors, including the voice-cracking lead Reeve Carney, are just not up to the vague, sloppy task set before them. If every flying element worked pretty much perfectly, as it did when I saw it, the show is still one of the worst things, if not the worst, I've ever seen on Broadway."

"This is, after all, her vision, and it's a vision that has been indulged with too many resources, artistic and financial... The investors of Spider-Man have inadvertently bankrolled an artistic form of megalomania. The book, by Taymor and Glen Berger, is an absolute farrago, setting up layers and subplots before the main narrative line has been established."