The Stage

Realizing that getting new stores out there is crucial to growing the comics business. Diamond has announced a couple of new programs to help get new stores up and running by softening the financial...

Realizing that getting new stores out there is crucial to growing the comics business. Diamond has announced a couple of new programs to help get new stores up and running by softening the financial...

We've written about the BATMAN LIVE stage show here a few times...Since October, it's toured throughout Europe, leaving audiences gasping at the stunts, spectacle and just plain weirdness of a live action show about Batman. The BATMAN LIVE show is the result of a lot of work: four years of concepting and rehearsals. The 42-person cast includes Batman, Robin, Alfred and a rogues gallery including The Joker, Catwoman, The Riddler, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, and The Penguin. Based on what we've seen, it's quite the spectacle. Well, now the show is coming to the Western Hemisphere for a two-year tout, with a September 5 premiere in Anaheim. And here's a BRAND NEW video featuring Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and Allan Heinberg (who wrote the book) talking about how the show brings Batman to life and their own thoughts on the production.

Thrill to the "wish" song, "I Want to Kill Your Dog" and the tender romantic ballad "Nik nik nik nik!" as MARS ATTACKS, the gory card set from the '60s, becomes what it always needed to be: a Broadway musical with a book by...John Layman! It's based on the story of the MARS ATTACKS miniseries Layman wrote for IDW, MARS ATTACKS: 21st CENTURY SLAUGHTER, which is coming out this summer. Wow. Can this plucky bunch of kids succeed where Bono, Edge, and Taymor failed? Or is this press release just misdated from Sunday, April 1st?

After months of peaceful performances, this was a rocky week for the Spider-Man musical. On Tuesday original director Julie Taymor sued over royalties and on Wednesday there was yet another injury to the cast. Back-up Spidey Matthew James Thomas, who plays the title role at matinees Wednesday and Saturday, was injured backstage while racing from one scene to another. The injury required a 10-minute pause in the musical, a trip to the hospital, and stitches for Thomas.

Oh yeah, it's on. After being ousted from the directing chair of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the troubled Broadway show about the webslinger, director Julie Taymor kept a tight smile at the opening of the show. However, now the gloves are off and she's suing the producers over her creative rights and unpaid royalties.

Okay its official -- EVERYONE is coming to Comic-Con and putting on a show. If you thought it was already a three-ring circus, you were only half right Now it's a three-ring 3D circus. Cirque du Soliel the internationally renowned brand-name for acrobatics, swinging by your hair, juggling and other wonderment, will be bringing the finale of its Kâ show to Comic-con in a staging at Petco Park on Friday Night, which will be set against a 3D projections.

Now that the drama had ended, and the show has gone on, some of the folks associated with the epic Spider-Man musical revamp are talking about their roles in it. Playwright/comics scribe Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa pens his memoirs of how he came to help rewrite the show and it's quite sunny in tone, but also gives his side of it for the first time:

Based on this trippy preview, we'd say probably. This stage show opens July 19th in the UK, and arrives in America in 2012.

The Spider-Man the Musical Saga closed another chapter of its saga last night with a star studded opening -- President Bill Clinton attended, as did Matt Dmon, Cindy Crawford, and of course, composers Bono and the Edge. Even more notably, director Julie Taymor, who got fired three months ago, showed up and took a curtain call. On the red carpet she was repeatedly asked if she missed being a part of this, to which she fired back, “I AM part of this.” At the end of the curtain call, Taymor and Bono even shared a cold, celebratory smooch.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN writer Dan Slott attended the premiere of the NEW, revised, less Arachne Spider-Man musical last night, and he tweeted his review!

A newly family-friendly and sense-making version of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark opens on Broadway tomorrow, and its faithful Boswell, Patrick Healy, has the new storyline for the creators. The new version of of the show, as rejiggered by director Philip William McKinley and writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa includes MORE Green Goblin, MORE Mary Jane, Uncle Ben and Aunt May, FIVE MORE flying sequences, MORE songs, and LESS Arachne. The experience seems to have been an unusually humbling one for the normally egotistic Bono, who co-wrote the songs and shared the blame when it went far off the rails.