New York critic pastes Bono’s Broadway turkey

It seems Bono's Spider-Man show on Broadway is in more trouble than we realised. After this week's news of an another accident in which a stunt actor - now named as Christopher Tierney - fell 30ft into the pit when a cable snapped, the actors' union Equity has forced a halt to all performances until more safety back-up measures are brought in.

But there's a bigger problem according to one reviewer who has been to see Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark at the Foxwoods Theatre during the preview stage: the musical itself is so terrible, says Richard Lawson, that the producers should pull the plug on it.

"The technological stuff is really the least of the show's problems," writes Lawson on Gawker.com. "The real problem of director Julie Taymor and U2's unwieldy catastrophe is that it is really, truly horrendously and unfixably bad down to its bones.

"The book [the lyrics] 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."

Lawson admits that he has broken with theatre etiquette by 'reviewing' the show before the 'previews' are finished. But he argues that because "people are getting hurt" in the effort to make the production work, and New Yorkers are paying good money - $140 a seat - to see previews that are often chaotic, he felt bound to break the rules.

"People are injuring themselves, tech is a mess, and while they struggle to figure all that out, they're trotting out a dying turkey of a book and score and hoping that'll suffice."

In the meantime, the threat is swarming with safety inspectors from the New York Department of Labour, trying to ascertain how aerialist Christopher Tierney fell 30ft and ended up in hospital with several broken ribs. ·