I keep on hearing how wonderful ,Bono is (The Edge not so much) but every time I manage to lift the veil a little, what I see isn’t all that much fun at all. It is painful enough to the godawful Spiderman: Turn Off The Lights soundtrack without actually gossiping about it, right?
Well, it depends how the gossip goes. I can’t be alone in thinking that everything to do with the Spidey musical is Bono at his worst. Everything about the show is a disaster and tough it is still playing it will take another eight years for the sucker to break even.
Hubristic, self-glorifying idiocy about the theater, we expect from these two clowns. But about music? That’s a surprise.
Michael Reidel is the New York Posts brilliant Broadway gossip columnist, we quoted him quite a bit two years ago as we detailed the Spiderman: Turn Off The Lights debacle. I saw it twice, once the production headed by “The Lion King”s and the other, the refashioned for mainstream American currently running . They were both disasters but Taymor’s version was a beautiful ruin and the current version is trash.
Common knowledge: Bono and the Edge turned on Julie and gave her the boot though that terrible score should be at least partially to blame. Glen Berger, who co-wrote the book with Taymor before turning traitor and secretly re-writing it for Bono, has written a tell all called “The Song Of Spiderman” and Reidel is reading it and offers this in his column yestrday:
“Bono and The Edge come off as amiable dunces. They know nothing about musicals, so David Garfinkle, the show’s hapless producer, sends them a CD with 60 famous Broadway tunes.
They find them dopey and maudlin.
Jerry Herman? Stephen Sondheim? Richard Rodgers?
Nothing those hacks wrote can touch the score to “Spider-Man,” which has produced such standards as, well, give me a minute . . . “Bouncing Off the Walls”?
Because of other commitments, Bono and The Edge are slow in writing the score, finishing songs in rehearsals (which may be why most of their lyrics make absolutely no sense).”
Just to clear something up here Reidel, their lyrics never make any sense.