party chat

Neil Patrick Harris Will Not Get to Do His Dream Spider-Man Joke at the Tonys

When Neil Patrick Harris announced that he would be hosting the Tony awards again this year, he more or less promised that there would be some Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark-related stunts. “It should be a great show, ” he said at the time. “We’ve got a fantastic mix of live performances, a few secret surprises, and since they’re closed for retooling, we’re using all the rigging equipment from Spider-Man. What could possibly go wrong?” But disappointingly, it’s looking like any Spider-Man mockery at the Tonys will be stunt-free. We spoke with Harris last night at the premiere of the filmed version of the recent staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, in which Harris appeared, and he explained that because of the Tony’s new venue — the Beacon, not Radio City Music Hall — his pratfall capacity is severely limited. “Dude, if there were an orchestra pit, I would have done a high fall from like, five stories up. I was very excited,” he said. “But alas, there’s no pit, so there’s nowhere to set anything. If I was going to do some sort of Spider-Man fall, I would have to land on the bare stage, and apparently they’ve tried that before and it didn’t go so well.” Thus the Tonys will have to lampoon Spider-Man with words (and song and dance numbers), not show-stopping disaster re-enactments. You know what this means? Spider-Man has finally caught the good kind of break! Maybe things really are turning around for it.

Neil Patrick Harris Will Not Get to Do His Dream Spider-Man Joke at the Tonys