Spider-Man Co-Star Deserts Problem-Plagued Musical on Broadway: How Many Other Imperiled Performers May Follow?

News today, out of the Wall Street Journal, that Spider-Man co-star Natalie Mendoza will be leaving the musical, long in trouble. She is still recovering from a concussion she sustained after a fall during the first preview performance at the Foxwoods Theatre. Show's opening was set back a month, to February 7. Three other performers have been injured. Stunt man Christopher Tierney, a close friend of Natalie's, was taken to hospital after a fall, and underwent back surgery. He is now in recovery mode.Mendoza is not talking. Lawyers said to be hammering out an exit package. This was to have been Mendoza's first appearance in a Broadway house.It's a a sad sad story from many angles. Cast was reported "demoralized" over injuries, resentful...

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Big Top Bits: Oz Flashes Flesh: Feld Folds Coney Canvas for Brooklyn’s Barclays ... Vargas Lands Prod.Placement in Water for Elephants Tease

If all else fails, Strip! Here comes yet a more "nude, rude and lewd" edition of that robustly risque little indoor trick I can live without, Circus Oz, from Down Under. And I do mean under. Show touting a "dropped" costume budget resulting in rising hemlines. Wonder if their horny little robot dog is still around, hoping and groping, jumping and humping. You can read up on that critter right here on the previous post (a look-back item slotted here by sheer coincidence before this Oz release vamped my way, thanks to cyber courier Don Covington ... Actually, you might have to fly Over There to see the scantly clad half-talented acrobats who make up this in-your-face cabaret of cross-dressers, doped-out S&M-ers and every other what-not under the fading sun. Laughing while she spoke,...

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My Warmest Christmas Greetings to All ... Holiday Lights from My Own Backyard

Images I snapped of the Fourth Annual Holiday Circle of Lights at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, and easy stroll from where I live (not in the cemeter...

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On the Spider-Man Watch: Under New Safety Rules, Actors Can Arbitrarily Stop Show If they Feel Endangered; NYT Questions Show's Circus Push ...

From reports today in The New York Times, stunt aerial actors using harnesses (mechanics, I assume) must first be vocally certified as being properly rigged and attached to the lifelines by two or three stage staffers, and they themselves must give a thumbs up before the stage manager can authorize each flight.They have also been given the authority to arbitrarily and suddenly stop the show if they sense rigging problems or danger in the air.In a two-hour cast meeting at which director Julie Taymor took questions, a "demoralized" company questioned why they had not been give more tech rehearsals.A Times editorial questioned the unconventionally complex production, expressing a degree of apprehension that it may not be suitable for the stage. "....this production may represent the point at...

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Circus in Film: Cirque du Soleil Due Out in 3D ... I'll Take Retro 2D

Director James Cameron (Titanic; Avatar) joining visions with Cirque du Soleil to put its acrobats in 3D movies. First project, nameless so far, now in production. What to make of it all? Circus action has not always translated well on film. That third dimension just might make it a more viable experience.Of course, it could also further distance circus art from the grittier realities it once captured. Lately, I'm finding myself being pulled backward in a black and white, very 2D direction, thanks to some old cinema discoveries. They remind us of how far our ring stars have advanced away from old-fashioned sawdust drama, escaping through a maze of fog machines and special effects, masks and trenchant body-movement allusions to Big...

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Dangerous Nights on Broadway: "Accident Prone" Spider-Man Musical Should Mandate Hard Hats for Orchestra Seats -- And That's No Joke

"If Spider-Man makes it out of previews," cracked TV personality David Holmes, "it will be the leading cause of death in the state of New York.""Please pray with me for my friend, Chris, " said one of the show's stars, Natalie Mendoza, referring to stunt double Christopher Tierney, who during a Monday night show, fell 30 feet to the stage when a rope attached to his sailing body suddenly malfunctioned.When Tierney went down, "you started to hear people screaming in the pit," recounted Christine Bord, a balcony ticket holder.The seriously injured actor was ambulanced off. Shortly after, customers were sent home.Taken to Bellvue Hospital, Tierney was reported to have suffered only minor injuries. But a report in The New York Times had the hospital...

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Spider-Man, Oh Spider-Man! RU Stuck and Sinking in Cobwebs of Catastrophic Confusion? ... Show Delays Opening by a Month for Frantic Revamps ...

Sony Pictures Imageworks/AP/APSpider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, now in previews at the Foxwoods Theatre, guaranteed at least to set one new all-time record -- most number of previews before opening night, assuming new opening night on February 7 actually happens.Book writers Julie Taymor, who also directs, and Glen Berger, said to be grasping all tweeters and twits and Yelps! from every which source, desperate to understand how to fix a problem-plagued second act. Daily dialogue rewrites in the works. Seems that Ms. Taymor veered seriously off course in her after-intermission scripting fantasies, concocting her own plots not convincingly connected to Spider-Man lore, causing grave audience discontent.As of this moment, to nobody's knowledge...

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Some "Made Nut," Others Went Nuts... Jackpots & Juice, Rumors & Rackets & Rickety Revivals Under Tents And Barns

Sunday Morning, Looking Back ...In the land of Bottom Feeder Big Tops : What a place to start, but you want the fun stuff, right? ... OK, I had almost forgot the names Dick Garden and Gopher Davenport (or maybe I wanted to forget) until Sir Harry of Kingston dropped both, apprising me of two sorta new shows aiming to join the perilous parade in '11: One to be called Piccadilly Circus, fronted by Canada's ill-distinguished tanbark hack, Dick Garden, our man who comps in moppets by the thousands, then sells $30-plus mandatory ducats to the parents they must bring along ... The other, yet another return or revival or re-booting of --- drum roll, please! --- Clyde Beatty Circus. Latter title been a bust ever since Johnny Pugh went with Cole Bros....

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Neon Flowers in a Desert: Circus du Soleil Gives Away Whole Chunks of its Vegas Shows on PBS ...

TV Review: Flowers in the DesertBottom Line: It made me wonder, who is more desperate for patronage and loot, PBS or CDS?This totally caught me off guard, and was I surprised. CDS allowing much more than a midway tease on Pledge Break Society (PBS-TV), but large sections of most of its long-running Vegas productions.Depending on your CDS attitudes and/or particular artistic tastes, you might be left swept away, or a little dizzy, numb and dumb with a blitzing overload of special effects, flying and floating props, and endless variations on the trampoline, most of it darkly lit. At last, a show to render a typical Feld fireworks display about as simple and harmless as the kid kit of sparklers and firecrackers I'd light off at home on the...

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Spider Spite: New York Post Review Calls Spider-Man Musical "Epic Flop" Before it Even Opens; Will Vicious Hit Piece Provoke Law Suit?

Reeve Carney, opening night before the chaos struck; Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark - the musicalPossibly, New York Post theatre critic Michael Riedel was lusting after a cheap chance to pan a new musical before it could even officially declare itself stage-ready for legit reviewing. Before it was hardly out of the womb. So he pounced like a vulture onto a show in its very first preview performance.We are talking the $65 million dollar Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which just opened for a month-plus of previews, and seems to be already in deep dark trouble. That is, if Mr. Riedel's gleefully implicit advance postmortem is to be taken seriously.In the old dayz, new tuners angling for NY acclaim would test their wares out on junior stages...

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Spidertacular Dangers: New Spider-Man Musical in Perilous Previews Fells Three Actors so Far

Natalie Mendoza & understudy America OlivoTop photo by Jacob Cohl, off the website gotham1stOne blog, gotham1st, is calling Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (the new $65 million musical now perilously previewing in NY) "a great show for understudies." In fact, who knows, when Opening Night finally occurs next Jan. 11, audience may witness a parade of lucky understudies strutting their stuff (perhaps by then more securely attached to safety cables, etc.)And that's also assuming the show by then has not been de-Spidered by increasingly nervous NY city safety and health inspectors.Latest to take a tumble is one of the stars, Natalie Mendoza, who is reported to have suffered a concussion the result of being hit on the head by a "safety rope."...

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