Spider-Man is a true marvel on Broadway- SEE POLL

It is worth waiting for this world wide web

Here's a heads-up to the Broadway nay-sayers, the doom and gloomers and those who want to tear down the new Spider-Man musical just because they think they can – start eating your words, people.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is so spectacular and so awe-inspiring that all the haters – and there seem to be plenty of them out there – look like complete morons.

To those who have declared the most talked about show ever to arrive on Broadway to be dead on arrival, a ridiculously expensive ($65 million) folly that never had a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding . . . well, we’ve had an awful lot of snow in New York this year, and Spider-Man is so sizzingly hot that it won’t have any problem melting away all of the bad press that’s greeted its arrival on the Great White Way.

For sure the production, with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge of U2 and story and direction by The Lion King’s creative genius Julie Taymor, has had its fair share of problems, led by the injuries suffered by some of its cast members, including a horrifying fall by one of the stunt doubles playing Spider-Man.

Technical glitches have plagued some of the preview performances, and the official opening date has been pushed back several times – it was to bow in December, but now the new date is March 15 – leaving critics howling that the preview window has stretched way beyond the Broadway norm, and others proclaiming that all the difficulties only prove that Spidey’s web has been a tangled mess from the start.

We went to the Saturday afternoon matinee at the show’s Foxwoods Theater home on 42nd Street.  There wasn’t an empty seat in the house – the previews are the hottest ticket on Broadway, which of course is a good thing for the producers who hope to eventually recoup their initial record-setting investment.

The performance on Saturday was technically flawless.  Actually, it was a technical sensation completely unlike anything ever staged on Broadway or anywhere else, a feast for the eyes that’s so dazzling, so “wow, wow, wow” that you’ll be left totally awestruck.

Spidey flies and swings through the theater, he leaps from balcony to balcony, he stages a battle with his arch-enemy the Green Goblin right over the heads of those in the lower orchestra seats, he climbs all over the elaborate sets . . . it’s just a wonder to watch, and an unbelievable achievement to actually execute.

Taymor brought the brilliance of her inventive mind to Broadway with The Lion King, which is still going strong 14 years on, but she’s utterly raised the bar to a soaring height – which is exactly what she, Bono and The Edge said they wanted to do – with Spider-Man.

The show’s storyline has also gotten battered around by some early commentators – it’s not cohesive, it’s hard to follow, there is no narrative, blah, blah, blah.

As any fan of the Spider-Man comics or movies will know, the story in a nutshell centers around Peter Parker and his girl Mary Jane. Peter transforms into Spidey and saves the world from evil but still tries hard to maintain his identity as Peter when he’s not weaving his webs.

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Nster.com