After that, my attitude changed. When a show about the music hall star Marie Lloyd made landfall in the same venue, business was so bad that the theatre closed the upper tier of seating. The piece was named Up in the Gallery, after Lloyd’s most durable number. When the star, Adrienne Posta, gazed wistfully up at the rows of unfilled seats and declared, “there he is! Can’t you see/ Waving his handkerchief?” it was curiously moving. I sensed something similar in the air at Foxwood’s Theatre on 42nd Street during the notoriously disaster-prone Spider-Man musical. In January 2011 the show had yet to be enmeshed in the unseemly web of litigation in which it now wriggles, but the producers were refusing to admit the critics, actors were being admitted to hospital by onstage accidents, the book was a mess and Bono’s songs stank. The stagecraft, however, was extraordinary. A street full of tiny mechanical New York cabs chugged across the back wall of the stage, giving the impression that the theatre had been upended and we were gazing down from the roof of a skyscraper. Multiple actors in red-and-blue Lycra swung and scuttled and swooped around the auditorium, creating the illusion of a single superhero in transit across the theatre. It was a species of catastrophe, but it was also a thing of wonder. A Hindenburg disaster from which everyone walked out alive.