NEW YORK- After this week's accident, in which an actor fell thirty feet into the orchestra pit, becoming the forth cast-member to suffer serious injury, rumors are circulating that the Spider-Man musical is under an actual black magic curse.
"That's ridiculous," says visionary director Julie Taymor, while spraying a fire-extinguisher on a cast member who has spontaneously burst into flames. "I don't believe in curses, or even bad luck." Nevertheless, the show which has been repeatedly delayed, gone bankrupt once, and whose original producer died of a stroke while signing a contract with The Edge, does seem to have suffered more than its share of ill-fortune.
"Even if there were such a thing as 'bad luck,' there's no reason why it should happen to this show more than any other," Taymor says while rehearsing a scene in which hundreds of live black cats are released into the paths of her cast members.
Critics suggest that the show has suffered from Taymor's insistence on loading it with unnecessarily complicated stunts that don't even have anything to do with the story, such as one scene in which Spidey dives under a dozen ladders so he can smash a hall of mirrors and knock over a fifty-gallon drum of salt while screaming "Macbeth."
Taymor however, refuses to scale back her vision. "Sure, we could have made things simpler to save trouble and money," she says. "We didn't have to build the villain's armor out of gold stolen from an Egyptian tomb. We could have skimped on the set by not building it entirely from bones dug up from an Indian burial ground, but it's that attention to detail that makes this show special.
Taymor does admit that the decision to bury the severed hand of a gypsy under every seat in the theatre might have been a little over the top.
