George Santos Produced Broadway’s Ill-Fated Spider-Man Musical. At Least, He Claims He Did

Laura Davison, Bloomberg News

Representative George Santos, a Republican from New York, center, departs following a House Republican conference meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2023. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Santos, the embattled freshman representative from New York, could be removed from office if the chamber's Ethics Committee determined that he had broken the law, but not until then. , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Add Broadway producer to the long list of George Santos’s fabrications.

While running for Congress in 2021, Santos told some potential donors he was a producer on the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, according to people familiar with the discussions. That show, which ran from 2011 to 2014, was an ill-fated production that lost tens of millions of dollars and suffered from technical mishaps and actor injuries.

The lead producer, Michael Cohl, denied Santos’s involvement, saying through an assistant that he wasn’t a producer on the musical. Santos’s name also never appeared in the playbills for the show.

A spokeswoman for Santos referred questions to his lawyer, Joseph W. Murray, who didn’t immediately respond to a voicemail seeking comment.

That fake item adds to the falsehoods that Santos, 34, told supporters while running for Congress. The New York Republican said he graduated from Baruch College where he was a volleyball champion and worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. He also said his grandparents survived the Holocaust survivors and his mother died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. All of those claims are untrue.

Santos, who was sworn in last month, is one of the most embattled members of the House of Representatives. Nearly four out of five voters in his district covering parts of Long Island and Queens think he should resign.

This week, Santos said he would step down from serving on committees while he is under investigation. He’s being probed by US and Brazilian authorities, and complaints have been filed to the Federal Election Commission and the House Ethics Committee.

When Spider-Man was playing on Broadway, Santos was in his early to mid 20s and was still living in Brazil for some of 2011, the year it opened. He worked as a customer service representative at a call center for Dish Network in Queens from late 2011 to 2012, according to the New York Times. In 2013, he founded Friends of Pets United to raise money for sick animals. The group was never registered as a charity and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is now probing it.

Santos and Spider-Man do have something in common: they’re both well-known for things not going as planned. Spider-Man, at a cost of $75 million, is the most expensive musical ever made. The show featured music by rock stars Bono and the Edge, as well as aerial combat scenes and complex scenery. Plagued by high costs and technical problems, the production closed at a financial loss.