Spider-Man musical smashes Broadway box office records

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the Spiderman musical penned by U2’s Bono and The Edge, has received the highest single-week takings in Broadway’s history.

Having suffered a number of high-profile setbacks since its inception, the musical took $2.9m (£1.8m) over nine performances last week, The Broadway League reported. The show is the most expensive Broadway show ever produced, costing $75m (£48m) to make.

"For all the problems, there was magic on the stage," Bono said. "Things did get chaotic and messy after our producer Tony Adams died. But this week’s news has us all giddy again and we are raising our glasses to Tony, to our indefatigable cast, crew, creative – and production team."

Co-producer Jeremiah Harris admitted that he and fellow producer Michael Cohl, "came into a very difficult situation" when they signed up. "We’ve changed the team. We added players when we needed to. We’ve moved some players around to different positions. And the success we’ve had here is the culmination of all those people working hard to get done what we’ve gotten done," he said.

PRG (Production Resource Group) supplied and integrated the lighting, audio, video and automation systems, as well as engineered and built the vast scenery and supervised the extensive renovations made to the theatre.

For the main audio control, PRG supplied a Meyer/LCS CueConsole 2, used in conjunction with Meyer/LCS D-Mitri Digital Audio processors. Three Avid Digidesign Profile consoles handle additional audio mixing and routing. The audio system sends SMPTE triggers to the PRG V676 lighting console to trigger the video system and it receives MIDI from the V676 as a DMX channel to trigger audio cues from lighting.

The centrepiece of the sound system is the Meyer D-Mitri mixing system, which has a large input/output set up, 144 in x 144 out. Production sound engineer Simon Matthews, commented: “Spider-Man’s biggest challenge was really just sheer size. The audio system is 50 per cent larger than any other Broadway show.”

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark also has the largest wireless RF system on Broadway, which runs 100 wireless frequencies on a daily basis. “This system includes RF microphones; god mics; in-ear monitors for the aerialists; walkie-talkies; wireless intercoms; and then a whole slew of 2.4 GHz for all of the standard access points for control networks,” explained Matthews. “Lighting uses quite a lot of wireless for control and there is wireless in some of the props.”

The musical has now beaten the previous record set by Wicked in 2011, which took $2.2m (£1.4m) over an eight-show run in January last year.