Spider-Man and U2 Do Broadway Opera

“Spider-Man” on Broadway? With U2? Yes. Apparently U2 is doing their own stylistic version of a Spider-Man “opera”, and composing the music…

U2 frontman, Bono, explained to a British BBC Radio One station how “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” will stray slightly from the original Marvel comic story and film adaptations…

Bono talks about what to expect of their version of the Spidey characters:
“Our Peter Parker is much more . . . not Kurt Cobain, but a kind of slacker, a more kind of shy sort of guy.”

Bono says they’ve created a new villian of their own:
“We’ve got a new girl. “It’s a girl. It’s a very extraordinary role. We’ve taken it to a much more dizzy place than you’d expect. We’ve got big tunes. We’re very proud of it.”

Who will play the character Mary Jane?
Evan Rachel Wood got the role of Mary Jane. “She’s the greatest actor of her generation, she’s the one to watch. She happens to sing like a bird, it’s like a true voice. She’s a very pure spirit and a very bright mind and she brings the part of MJ to life really,” Bono said.

About the music in the show… it’s an “opera”, not a “musical”.
“It touches on opera, it touches on rock ‘n’ roll. There are some real character driven songs as well, very unusual song types for us. It is a new challenge. The thing is we don’t really like musicals. Most musicals are really pants. They’re really not very cool,”said The Edge.

“It is much more like opera than a straight musical. We’re actually not calling it a musical for that reason because we don’t want to put people off.” [The same thing happened for the Sweeny Todd promo. No one knew it was going to be a musical until they got to the theater!]

“We just thought, ‘Well if we’re going to do this we should do something that knocks it out of the park and hits on every level with great tunes’,” The Edge lastly says.

The production is supposed to be ready early next year.