Spider-Man the Musical was meant to open on Broadway on Monday night. It didn’t (it will now open on march 15). Sadly, it didn’t stop the critics from going along to have a look.

“Spider-Man” is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst… From what I saw on Saturday night, “Spider-Man” is so grievously broken in every respect that it is beyond repair.

Ben Brantley, The New York Times

The failure rests squarely on [Julie] Taymor’s run-amok direction. This is, after all, her vision, and it’s a vision that has been indulged with too many resources, artistic and financial… The investors of “Spider-Man” have inadvertently bankrolled an artistic form of megalomania. The book, by Taymor and Glen Berger, is an absolute farrago, setting up layers and subplots before the main narrative line has been established.

Charles McNutly, Los Angeles Times

Neither Taymor nor her co-writer, Glen Berger, have found a way to improve the book, a protofeminist stew that foolishly decants the myth of the weaver Arachne into a story that’s incoherent to begin with.

Jeremy Gerard, Bloomberg

More dispiriting is the music… [Bono and the Edge] transformed their sound into stock Broadway schlock pop—sentimental wailing from the early Andrew Lloyd Webber playbook, winceable lyrics and the kind of thumpa-thumpa music that passes for suspense in action flicks.

Linda Winer, Newsday

But it’s not all bad:

Give a kidney to go see ‘Spider-Man.’ I’m telling you, mark my words, it’s being panned right now, nobody’s saying good stuff about it. I’m telling you, you go buy your ticket – you buy your ticket now, if you’re thinking about coming to New York, because when this thing opens and it’s starting to run, you will not be able to get tickets to this for a year. This is one of those shows, this is the ‘Phantom’ of the 21st century. This is history of Broadway being made. I sat next to the casting director, by chance, and I said, ‘You, sir, are part of history.’

Glenn Beck, Fox News

Glenn Beck? Yes, that Glenn Beck.

Gawker

With great subtlety.

Copyranter

Sounds fair.

Twolicy?

Kazoo?

THE outgoing Government has spent more than two years defending its decision to guarantee the entire liabilities of the Irish banking system on that infamous night in September 2008.

But as that debate raged on last year, a decision was made to guarantee another whack of bank cash, this time the billions of emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) being channelled into Irish banks by the Central Bank of Ireland.

Between August 27 and December 31 last year, the amount of ELA sanctioned by our Central Bank surged from €14.4bn to just over €51bn — with every last cent explicitly guaranteed by the Irish taxpayer.

The development sees masses of risk transfer from the European Central Bank and the euro area en masse to the ordinary Irish worker and the State in general.

Relax. We’re good for it.

Irish Taxpayer On Hook In Liquidity Operations (Laura Noonan, Irish Independent)

(Photocall Ireland)

Thanks DD