It's official: Julie Taymor ousted from Spider-Man

It was 1996 when Disney Theatrical Productions took a chance on a little-known director of experimental theater named Julie Taymor. They handed her a musical based on their hit film, The Lion King, and they found themselves with a billion-dollar hit. Ms. Taymor became the theater world’s star auteur.

Now, all of a sudden, she is something else entirely.

After nine years of work, Ms. Taymor is stepping aside as director of the most expensive and technically ambitious musical ever on Broadway, the $65 million Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, its producers announced last night. They named a new director to replace her and a script doctor to rewrite the show, as they prepared to overhaul the production during the next three months — including adding two new songs by the composers, U2’s Bono and the Edge.

Last night, the producers, along with Bono and the Edge, told the Spider-Man cast that Ms. Taymor was out. According to one person who was there, Bono said that Ms. Taymor would still be part of the show, but that he felt sad she would not be there day to day. The producers told the cast members to put on their “game faces.”

Friends and colleagues of Ms. Taymor’s said she was being pushed aside because of sharply negative reviews by theater critics last month and because she would not make changes that the producers and her fellow creators, Bono and the Edge, had sought.

Ms. Taymor did not include a comment in the press release that the producers issued — a sign of the discord among them. A spokeswoman for Ms. Taymor said last night that she was “not commenting at this time.”

(Via NYT)