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Artist News
Bono agrees with negative review of Spiderman show
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 23 May 2011
Bono has told ABC News that he agreed with a lot of what the New York Times had to say about ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark’, the fated Broadway show for which he and The Edge have written the songs.
As much previously reported, the rather ambitious multi-million dollar theatre musical, which is backed by rock promoter Michael Cohl among others, has suffered numerous setbacks and false starts. Long running previews were halted in March amid technical problems and poor reviews (critics had paid to see the show, having lost patience waiting for a press night), and a revamped version was launched earlier this month, with the show’s much postponed official opening now scheduled for 14 Jun.
Asked about the New York Times reviews that asked “how can $65 million look so cheap?”, Bono remarked: “It might have been a little hard for some other people around here to take that, but we don’t disagree with the New York Times. That’s the sort of stuff we were saying backstage. The last version of ‘Turn Off The Dark’ had a lot of magic and mysterious stuff. It was beautiful actually, in so many ways. It just, it didn’t cohere”.
Of course, the New York Times review did also criticise the original version of the show for failing to properly show off Bono and The Edge’s songs, saying they were lost in a “sustained electronic twang of varying volume, increasing and decreasing in intensity, like a persistent headache”, so the U2 twosome didn’t have to personally absorb too much of the criticism.
