Just when you thought newly elected New York representative George Santos’s seemingly endless lies couldn’t get any stranger, reports that he claimed to have been a producer for Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
That Santos would spin lies to align himself with this particular musical rather than any number of other shows that have played in New York in the recent past is a baffling choice. As curiously anticipated as this take on Spider-Man was at first, things soon devolved into utter chaos, with the show becoming notorious for all of its many, many problems before it even opened — something even a casual Broadway-goer would have known.
One of its (real) producers died, accidents and dangerous injuries seemed to be regularly occurring on set, the director was replaced, its PR team resigned right before opening, the opening date was delayed six times, and the pricey production just kept swallowing more and more cash.
Still, when others may have preferred to wipe Turn Off the Dark from their résumés, Santos made claims of being one of the producers to potential donors for his campaign back in 2021, according to Bloomberg — despite the fact that he was working at a call center in Queens when the musical opened in 2011, and was living in Brazil for a portion of the year.
“Of all the tribulations the producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had to endure, we are very pleased, proud, and relieved to report that working with George Santos was not one of them,” actual producer Michael Cohl confirmed to Entertainment Weekly. Burn.
At this point, asking why Santos keeps telling all the lies that he has doesn’t seem like it would produce a satisfying response, even if he ever did opt to respond. So we’ll just toss claiming partial credit for a notoriously troublesome musical to the ever-growing pile and wait for whatever absurdity comes out of his mouth next.
