Julie Taymor Talks SPIDER-MAN's Journey to 'Simpler' 2.0

Although SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK has seldom stopped making headlines in the past year, the team behind the musical has been all but mum on details regarding their tumultous journey. From recasting, to a record setting 183 previews, to delays and injuries, and finally opening night - which took place just this Tuesday - there has been more attention focused on the show than any in recent memory.

One person who everyone's looked to for comment is the former director of the production who was infamously ousted this April: Julie Taymor. For more than a hundred previews, Taymor led SPIDER-MAN through all of its highs and well-reported lows.

Before the show was to be re-imagined, Taymor was all but removed from her duties and replaced by director Philip William McKinley. She kept her "original direction" credit but her role was greatly diminished and the show received a major overhaul.

During yesterday's Los Angeles theater conference, hosted by Oberlin College professor Roger Copeland, Taymor broke her silence for the first time publicly since her departure.

Chief among the complaints from audience members was the inclusion of a confusing character, the mythological Arachne. Taymor asserted that the character was not a new addition to the franchise, saying that the spider-like woman was "straight from page one" of Spider-Man's comic book roots. Still, she admits, the storyline could have used more work: "During those preemptive previews, we hadn't worked it into the script yet," she says. The producers, reports The New York Times, insisted before the November previews that the show had to begin making money due to the mounting expense of putting the mammoth spectacle into motion.

From the very first performance the internet and other forms of media were abuzz almost instantly; most of the word was less-than-stellar. "You get bored of a show before it even opens because there's been too much talk about it. Twitter and Facebook and blogging just trump you," Taymor says. "It's very hard to create, it's incredibly difficult to be under a shot glass and a microscope like that...When you're trying to create new work and you're trying to break new ground and experiment, which seems an incredibly crazy thing to do in a Broadway environment, the immediate answers that audiences give are never going to be good."

"I thought it would be very difficult to be put up next to and compared to traditional - even if they're modern - traditional musicals," she went on to say. Because of this, she originally envisioned SPIDER-MAN playing "a circus tent on top of Madison Square Garden," according to Variety.

Admittedly, though, Taymor hadn't intended for audiences to find the story overly easy to follow. If people don't know how to talk about it, she said, "In my world, and in your world, [that's] a good thing. You want people to absorb, they should be entertained, they should have a great time, but they should also be stimulated enough that when they go home or talk to their kids, they are actually digesting, thinking, talking about it."

Taymor's first viewing of the reworked show was reportedly on Tuesday's opening night. What did she think? "The production today has become much simpler," she told the crowd, and left it at that.

Read the full Variety article here, and New York Times article here.