I love Oliver! Oom pah pah oom pah pah that's how it goes... I did a production of it last year and I was the orphan lady Mrs. Bumble which required a traumatizing amount of blue eyeshadow and a fake mole. 

*cue rant mode* 

The reason Spiderman TOtD gets so much flak is (a) before Julie Taymor left and the creative team rewrote practically the entire show is it apparently made absolutely no sense and had very little to do with Spiderman at all, which has left a distinctly bad taste in a lot of mouths, and (b) the seventy-five million dollar budget for what turned out to be, from what I've seen of it (which is the cast recording and some video clips), a pretty middle-of-the-line show, mind-blowing acrobatics notwithstanding. (plus the costumes and sets look awful)

To put that budget in perspective, your average big splashy show runs somewhere around the fifteen million mark. The original production of Wicked clocked in at fourteen million, I believe, and broke even after running on Broadway for two years.

Basically what Spiderman is trying to do is be an action movie, live, with singing. This is why it has a budget comparable to your average action movie, probably (that or all those pesky hospital bills). The problem is that this really doesn't work, because action movies have a MUCH bigger pool of paying customers to support those budgets and MUCH MUCH MUCH easier methods of distribution to those paying customers, whereas Spiderman is not only localized to ONE CITY, its technical requirements mean it CAN'T feasibly go on tour to widen the range of people they can reach and get money from.

Literally, they can't. They couldn't transfer the show to the West End because they couldn't find a big enough venue. And going on tour would be even more problematic—your average roadhouse is also not big enough to accomodate Spiderman's needs, and I don't even want to think about what a nightmare actually moving the show would be. The Phantom of the Opera tour requires an average of fourteen hours to move into a new house. War Horse takes sixteen. Neither of these shows has people flying over the audience, but they do have extensive amounts of set pieces hanging from the rigging. Mary Poppins did have flying over the audience, but the first tour was severely limited by this requirement and could only hit the really big roadhouses—for the second tour, things were changed so Mary no longer goes over the audience specifically because the producers wanted the show to go to smaller houses.

Another problem with the budget? Spiderman has weekly running costs of something in the neighborhood of one million dollars. PER WEEK. This isn't like a movie, where once it's done it's not cost free—you have to advertise and produce DVDs and suchlike—but it's pretty much able to stand on its own and get money from cinemas who want to show it and later from customers who buy the DVDs and any associated merchandise. The musical is finished in that it's frozen, but the people who own the show are the ones who have to pay the actors and the technicians and the electricity bills. So even though its weekly earnings even in previews overtook those of Wicked, that's not a sign that it's financially out of the woods. The lawsuits and nearly ubiquitous bad press don't help on that front. 

Now, about that budget and breaking even and turning a profit. Spiderman has been making an average of $100,000-300,000, I believe (once the one million dollar-per-week operating costs have been subtracted, of course). Now, if we assume that they'll consistently make $300,000 a week indefinitely, it will take them about five years to break even. This is MINIMUM time period required to cancel out the $75 million budget. If they make anything less than $300,000 every single week, it's going to take longer. So let's take the average instead and say they'll make just $200,000 per week. That works out to a bit more than seven years. 

And about that estimate. Broadway's five longest-running musicals are, in order, The Phantom of the Opera (25 years and still counting), Cats (18), Chicago (17 years and still counting), Les Miserables (16), and the Lion King (16 years and still counting). Wicked comes in 12th and it'll hit its tenth anniversary this Fall. That's a grand total of twelve Broadway musicals that have made it to ten years running or more—and that's assuming that Wicked doesn't close between now and October 30.

Number thirteen is 42 Street, which ran for nine years. Fourteen is Grease, which ran for eight. Fiddler on the Roof and Jersey Boys are the only other Broadway musicals that have lasted longer than seven years. That's SIXTEEN in the history of Broadway. The rest? Often will run for a couple of years. The lowest number of performances in the top 100 longest running Broadway shows is 1,045 (it was Annie Get Your Gun, which ran from March 1999 through September 2001).

Spiderman had a record-breaking 182 preview performances, which at least speaks well of its team's determination. As of the 28th of this month, it's had 883 performances, and it's been running for just a tad over two years. Yes, it's been doing moderately well—but only until that moderate success is put against the background of the tens of millions of dollars they still have to recoup and the fact that the numbers are most definitely not in their favor.

(Those five longest-running, by the way? All of them won multiple Tonys and multiple Drama Desk awards—at least six Tonys and at least three Drama Desks per show. No, of course awards aren't an indicator of quality, but what they are an indicator of is public awareness, and shows that have high public awareness are the shows that keep pulling in audiences and make money. Spiderman? Two Tony noms—one for scenic, one for costumes. Didn't get either. One Drama Desk nom for outstanding featured actor, which it also didn't get.)

...

All that said, if we can get tickets, the class I'm taking in New York this fall will be going to see it (in the words of my professor, "so we can talk about technical aspects and budget"). 

/infodumprant 

Sung-through musicals can be done very well with a cast that's able to, you know, sing well for two and a half hours straight. The important thing is that it really isn't just one song that never ends—it's many songs strung together with dialogue that's delivered on-pitch and often set to music. Some are more melodic than others; RENT is largely sung-through, I believe, and the dialogue parts have a pretty noticeable tune rather than the more rhythmic style adhered to in Les Mis. 

Either way, I'd disagree that the style sounds forced. In some ways, it's a lot more naturalistic because there's no need to deal with dialogue-to-song transitions, which can be really jarring, especially in older musicals where people will spontaneously burst into song with no warning. Those kinds of transitions, if handled poorly, can really destroy suspension of disbelief, which is why underscoring is becoming more and more the norm. Granted, it can be done badly and it's hard to get right, which is why most musicals aren't sung-through. 

The Les Mis musical is a serious case of adaption distillation—rightly so, since cramming over a thousand pages of meticulous detail into a three hour long pseudo-opera would be impossible—and as such ends up as what is basically emotions for the sake of being emotional. There're a lot of big, grand statements ad sweeping declarations set against really lovely music, but ultimately the meaning gets lost in the swells of manufactured passion. This is, I think, why Javert is second in popularity only to Eponine; "On My Own" captures the heart strings of...almost everyone, apparently, but Javert is a breath of pragmatism in an otherwise unabashedly soppy musical. 

Which is not to say it doesn't have value. I don't know what the production values for that local production were like, but the national tour is spectacularly beautiful and in general excellently casted; the same applies to other productions of similar scale. All those buckets of emotion make for excellent catharsis. And its huge international success both as a musical and the recent movie is nothing to be sneered at, particularly considering that the movie may prove a gateway for new people to discover and learn to appreciate musical theatre, which is always always a good thing.