Alan Cumming says Spider-Man musical is still crawling forward

Alan Cumming was basking in the glow of the first-night celebration for his show “I Bought a Blue Car Today” at Joe Allen’s in London when he got an e-mail: “Looks all good. They’re going back into the theater.” That green light — or at least a cautionary yellow light — earlier this month was for “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the new Broadway musical in which the British-born actor has been cast as the Green Goblin. Cumming had begun to wonder if he would ever get to wear Oscar winner Eiko Ishioka’s costumes after production abruptly stopped on the mega-musical. The producers had come up significantly short of capitalization, said to be about $45 million. In fact, some of the cast began to look for other opportunities. When his CAA agents warned the producers that their client would walk if he did not receive a retainer check by messenger that day, lo and behold, one materialized faster than you could say, well, “itsy-bitsy spider.” “I have very good agents, it seems,” said Cumming, adding that the news of the shutdown had taken everyone by surprise. “Mentally, you go from thinking, ‘I’m going to be doing this for a year’ to ‘Oh, maybe that’s not going to happen after all.’”