Riedel's post-review Spiderman column

Whose money was it anyway?

Except that they aren't.

^I agree. If the number is truly that high, there is virtually no way to recoup. You don't price your nut just below your sell-out gross.

They're doing good business now, but still only pulling $100,000 more than their nut. After paying royalties, and promotional costs, that's nothing.

Scott, I meant to ask in the other thread how many times you have seen the show.

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if you wanna go to see it tonight with discount, first 2 rows of orch center are available as of noon today 2/9

I was actually asking because you have been commenting on all the work that has been done on the show but you have only seen it once. I am assuming, like a lot of us here, you are going by what you have heard as opposed to what you have seen. According to my friend who has seen it more than once, not much changed except the ending. He saw it twice. Once in December and again last week. I am being chastised by a friend for posting the reviews on my Facebook page. She is telling me the score is fantastic as are the sets and how wrong the negativity surrounding the show is. She has never seen the show.

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With Ticketmaster's new system you can see clearly which seats are and aren't sold.

Actually, it's not that cut and dry. What you see is what Ticketmaster has been authorized to release for sale (priority seats, VIP seats, promotional seats, house seats and ADA seats will appear as sold to the general public). One of the popular marketing trends is to release tickets in blocks to give the illusion of limited availability. Programming can be set up to release blocks of seats from a hold status to an open status at the rate seats are being sold so that the availability remains relatively the same until the everything the production company wishes to sell has sold out. I don't know if the producers of Spider-Man are doing this. Some producers wait until 30-60 days prior to the performance date to deploy this technique in order to generate a sense of urgency while others simply put everything on sale from the start and follow the old-fashioned what-you-see-is-what-we-have model for ticket sales.

If there is one thing I know, it is box office management. Now, I don't know what Riedel has been told about Spider-Man sales from any reliable sources, but the obsession the man has with this show is akin to a Conservative Republican Evangelist's unwavering focus on homosexuality.

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And a nut under $1.2 million, I imagine.

Scott, I admire your passion for the show, but at this point, it appears to be bordering on delusion. First you claim that there are all these widespread changes occurring, when the show it self has said there aren't.

You insist that Bono has been diligently working on the score, when in reality he's been touring, having surgery, and hanging out in Davos for the most part.

Now you are denouncing Riedel's claim about available tickets - well, in fact, ticketmaster does in fact have wide swaths of seats available midweek both in Feb and especially March. And that's just the tickets that have been released, as we all know, seats are often held back. I looked. There are TONS available.

Just like with the "work being done", I'm sure you will disagree about the technical definition of "lots of available seats", but it's pretty clear to me that Riedel is correct in this case.

Also, it is a fact that the show sold only 84% of its tickets last week. That's a lot of unsold seats for a show that needs to sellout every show for 5 years just to break even.

As for the $1.2mil nut, I have no problem believing that number. If it was $1mil before they started having to redo everything, add safety measures, add an ending, etc, I can see that jump easily. Especially since producers always lowball their nut estimates. Looks like we need to push out that breakeven date even further.

Like I said, I do admire your passion for the show, but the obvious question (which has been asked before and unanswered to my knowledge) is WHY? Why do you feel the need to defend the indefensible here? What's your connection?

Updated On: 2/9/11 at 12:56 PM

Here are my thoughts on the whole Spider-Man review thing:

(1) Should the critics have published the reviews in the first place? I've always been torn on that question. I actually see both points of view. The truth is that the show will have been in previews a very long time, what many consider unreasonably long. The opening dates have slipped repeatedly. That's the truth of it. On the one hand, enough is enough. On the other---well, it just hasn't opened yet, has it? Another justification has been related to the cost of tickets; to me, that's 100% irrelevant. If people who buy tickets are willing to pay the price asked, then so be it. It's a business, supply and demand and all that. Again, I am neutral on this question.

(2) Are critics extinct as stated in another thread? No --- not yet anyway. The newspaper industry is changing big-time, and changing rapidly. It is becoming endangered, along with traditional critics. But they are not out of the game just yet.

(3) Will this hurt the show? Yes. I think the reviews themselves certainly do not help, but things went bigger by being picked up by the national media. There was a report on the reviews on last night's "NBC Nightly News" that I saw. I have read that other media did stories on this, too. I think these will seriously hurt the show, as these reviews will now be known by a lot more people than would have seen them otherwise.

(4) Will the show now close? If asked previously, I'd have said the show would last about 14-15 months or so---after the novelty factor wore off. That was just my guess. My current opinion is that it will be a bit sooner, again under the assumption that the publicity of the reviews will truly hurt. We will see.

(5) Were the reviews fair? Not entirely. The play is not very good, but did it deserve the truly savage attacks? No. I said earlier that this is far from the worst musical I've ever seen. But the brutal nature of the reviews suggested something almost personal. I think that everyone has been so hung up on the $65 million cost that they can't get over that. Now I suppose that one could argue that, with that kind of money, the bar is raised extremely high. Would the reviews have been so savagely written if, say, the cost of the show had been only $20 million? I don't think so. (Again, this is not about the opinions expressed, but rather the manner in which they were expressed.) What should be judged is what was shown. Yes, I agree that what is shown is not very good, but did it really deserve the savagery it got?

(6) I actually hope that "Spider-Man" makes it. Why the heck not?

I also kind of hope to see Spider-Man make it, because I love the character and I know that whatever else takes the Foxwoods will probably suck even worse.

But, yeah, the show is a disaster.

yeh but then when you go to get them they arent there and you have to go to a ticket roker