By the time Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark finally opens, it will have had more performances than the entire run of Hot Feet, the last Broadway show that Dana Marie Ingraham was in. Ingraham made her Broadway debut in Hot Feet, the Earth, Wind and Fire jukebox musical that ran for only three months—previews included—in 2006 at the same theater where she’s currently in her third month of previews with Spider-Man.
Since her last Broadway appearance, Ingraham has been alternating between musical theater and concert dance—the field for which she trained and that employed her exclusively in the early years of her career. Just a couple of days after Hot Feet closed, she was offered a role on tour with The Lion King. After nearly two years with Lion King, she spent time as a company member of both Karole Armitage’s and Tania Pérez-Salas’ modern dance troupes. Her last job prior to Spider-Man was the national tour of The Color Purple.
For Ingraham and the rest of the Spider-Man company members, it’s been an eventful few months at the Foxwoods Theatre, as even people who don’t follow theater know by now. The $65 million musical—directed and cowritten by Julie Taymor, with a score by U2’s Bono and The Edge—has postponed its opening three times (it’s now slated for March 15) and recently revised its second act and finale. Technical glitches and performer injuries have garnered Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark nationwide media attention unlike any usually paid to Broadway. “Somebody dubbed us the first celebrity musical,” says Ingraham. “There are no celebrities in our musical, but the musical in and of itself.”
That attention has included mocking by the likes of Saturday Night Live and David Letterman, but Ingraham appreciates that, too. “Good, bad or indifferent in terms of press, I’m just happy that people are looking at art and talking about it, ’cause it gets shoved aside a lot,” she says. “Saturday Night Live is bringing Broadway to the masses!”
Of her own personal experience in the Spidey ensemble, Ingraham says: “It has been surreal to be in a room with so many innovators, to be in a theater and you’re hearing Julie on one end, and you might hear Bono and Edge on the other, and you’ve got these amazing musicians, and you’ve got Patrick Page, Isabel Keating—these wonderful character actors. I think my jaw is constantly dropping, there’s just so much creativity. It’s really kind of a call to make yourself available to the process; you’re just soaking all of it up.”
Though there’s all kinds of aerial effects in Spider-Man, Ingraham has her feet on the ground for most of the show: She’s airborne only in the Act 2 number “Think Again,” when she portrays one of Arachne’s Furies. Her roles in other scenes include a mean classmate of Peter Parker’s, a weeping woman, a soldier and a goth girl. “I’m kind of jealous of the boys ’cause they get to fly more than we do,” Ingraham says, noting that despite a few castmate accidents during rehearsals and previews and her own self-professed “micromanaging” tendencies, she’s not worried about safety while airborne in Spider-Man.
Her track in The Lion King (which was also directed by Taymor) included an aerial sequence, and she did some semi-aerial work when dancing Tania Pérez-Salas’ piece “Las Horas,” which involved climbing a rope and moving around while hanging from it. The first time Ingraham did any onstage flying was at the auditions for Tarzan, where she learned the routine from Angela Phillips, now the production aerial supervisor for Spider-Man.
