Spiderman. He's on the web.

You've got to have some sympathy for the New York Times. Because someone has given Bono a column in the paper, while the rest of the world might be laughing so hard milk spurts out their nose, the Times has to nod and pretend, hey, this guy has a point.

Even when he's talking about his Spiderman musical.

“Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning,” said Bono, leaning forward in Row A on the aisle, as Reeve Carney, playing Spidey, rehearsed onstage. “This feels like it.”

I don't know if anyone's spider sense is tingling right now, but our bullshit meter's certainly going off.

“We’re wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, ‘Wings of Desire,’ Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones — the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you’re separate from others,” Bono continued. “If the only wows you get from ‘Spider-Man’ are visual, special-effect, spectacular-type wows, and not wows from the soul or the heart, we will all think that we’ve failed.”

Hmm. Here's the advert they're using to try and flog tickets:



That really does look like the way Blake would be selling his work, and doesn't at all make it look like people dicking about on trapezes and great big monsters, right?

And bonus points, by the way, for Bono cramming his face into the advert for no real reason.

Back at the Times, Bono and June Taymor are talking up their show:

Bono observed: “The scope of this thing is just hard to grasp sometimes. It just doesn’t fit into the normal —— “

“Broadway mishegoss,” Ms. Taymor said.

“Right,” Bono said. “And trying to blend comic books — which is a very American contribution to the world of mythology — and rock music and Broadway into this thing of art that we don’t even have a word for.”

It's a musical, Bono. There's a really good word for it. Perhaps - if you must - rock musical.

[Thanks to Rob F and Michael M]

Bono's musical refunds cash

More U2-related news, as the ill-starred Spiderman musical which Bono and The Edge have been involved with starts to pay back ticket holders before a song has been sung or a single web slung.

Not that the towel is being thrown in, oh no no no no:

Producers said the show was "moving forward" and an opening date, for later in the year, would be announced soon.

It turns out that finding a singer willing to be bitten by a radioactive spider is proving difficult, and the producers can't really think of any other way to create a man/spider hybrid on stage.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Brian May

io9 digs Brian May's Spider-man theme from whatever corner it went off to die in:

Now the city's sleeping
Spy-D do his creeping
Creeping, he is creeping
We'll be weeping, weeping, weeping, woo!

They've got the full weepingm weeping, woo on their site. Thanks to Michael M.

U2: Spiderman, Spiderman, does... what-evah

Bono and The Edge has been talking about the Spiderman musical like it isn't a financial nightmare.

Sorry, did I say musical? Oh, hush my mouth:

The guitarist was keen not to describe the production, directed by Julie Taymor, as a musical, but rather an "opera".

And what makes the musical not a musical but an opera?

Now, you or I might answer this question "generally, an opera will be sung throughout, while a musical has dialogue; and in a musical the characters will dance." But The Edge seems to use a separate distinction, which is "if I am involved, the show will be whatever is cooler":

"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.

This is, of course, arrant wasp toss, to borrow David Quantick's phrase. Musicals are pants and not really cool? A man who is churning out eye-podge like the Zooropa tour and the current U2 "Oooh, look, we've got a big mechanical crab" effort is suggesting that the work of Oscar Hammerstein is "pants"? Seriously?

"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."

Oh, yes - protect that all-important audience of Spiderman fans who are more likely to go to an opera than a musical.

"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'."

Ah, yes. That's exactly making it sound like an opera and not a musical.

So, with The Edge tossing wasps left, right and centre, you'd have thought Bono would be able to take the day off. But, oh no - if there's a self-aggrandising bar being raised, Bono is going to be keen to be having a go at that target:

Bono explained the characters won't be the same which appeared in comic or the film adaptations of the original Marvel comic series.

"Our Peter Parker is much more…not Kurt Cobain, but a kind of slacker, a more kind of shy sort of guy," said Bono.

Now, I read The Amazing Spider-Man, in three panel chunks, when he replaced Modesty Blaize in the Evening Argus, and the one thing about Peter Parker in that was that - yes, he was nothing like Kurt Cobain, but he was quite shy and something of an under-achiever. I await Bono reinventing Batman as some sort of millionaire with a fetish for teenage kids, or Superman as - hey, how crazy - a bloke from another planet who's allergic to Gordon Burns' Krypton Factor.

But just when Bono has done one big reveal which turns out to be dud, he turns out to have another sleeve with nothing up it:

Bono said: "We've got a new villain, it's a girl. It's a very extraordinary role. We've taken it to a much more dizzy place than you'd expect."

Oh, you've got a female villain? What an extra-ordinary twist you have come up with, Mr. Bono. A bad female? Whoever else would have had the sheer gall to suggest a lowly female could be the bad guy? You certainly have shaken all my preconceptions, like a man shaking an Etch-A-Sketch so hard it will never show another drawing.

Bono's Spider show hangs by a thread

The Bono and Edge scored Spiderman musical is on hold due to a "cash-flow crisis":

A statement on Sunday from the publicists for Hello Entertainment, one of the producers of “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark,” said work had been suspended on the musical because of “an unexpected cash flow problem.” The statement went on to say: “The plans necessary for this correction are in hand now, and it is expected that activities, including work in the theater, will resume within the immediate future and with no material impact upon the planned production schedule.”

That's an odd sort of immediate future - one which is immediate, but apparently unforeseeable.

Michael Jackson! Michael Jackson! Does whatever a spider can action!

One of those stories where the headline suddenly collapses when you poke it from the Daily Telegraph:

Michael Jackson planned to star in Spider-Man movie
Michael Jackson had planned to star in a new Spider-Man movie before his death, the superhero's creator has disclosed.

Wow. That's quite a thing, but since the headline and the standfirst both claim Stan Lee says a guy in failing health had been planning to appear as Spiderman, it must be true, right?

Marvel legend Stan Lee, 86, said the King of Pop had discussed his plans to produce the flick - and believes he wanted to play the eponymous web-slinger himself.

Oh. Or possibly isn't true.

"I'm not sure whether he just wanted to produce it or wanted to play the role. Our conversation never got that far along."

So rather than knowing for sure that Jackson wanted to play Spiderman, it's just a guess on Lee's part.

Asked if he thought Jackson would have taken the title role, Mr Lee replied: "I suspect so."

... although, naturally, there is nothing at all for Lee to base that on as, by his own admission, casting never even came up.

Still, 'Michael Jackson had speculative discussions about buying the rights to Spider-Man' - who would bother to read a story if that was the headline?

Joel: didn't start a fire, will close the stadium

Shea Stadium is going to close very soon - the New York Mets were ashamed of being one of the few professional sports teams who played in a venue named after a person who did something, rather than a corporation which cut a cheque, and so they're relocating to CitiField.

This means, of course, not only an end to baseball at the venue, but also the conclusion of a chunk of musical history. VH1 called it "the most hallowed venue in rock and roll", which might be pushing it a bit, but it's still had a quite an impressive track record - REM, the Beatles, The Clash and Humble Pie have all had a go there. So, who more fitting than Billy Joel to round off the list?

Yes, Billy Joel. We expect it was tricky to find someone who was free that day.

Interestingly, Wikipedia insists Marvel re-enacted Spiderman and Mary Jane at Shea Stadium, but as everybody knows, Peter Parker and Mary Jane never married, did they?

Radio One More Time: Bang Gotcha Junction

When Peter Powell took over the Saturday morning slot, he pledged no more Junior Choice: he wasn't going to be playing Nellie The Elephant any more. Did this mean that there was no longer anything for the younger listener on Radio One?

Not quite. For Mark Page, who had taken on the early weekend slot, took on the the role of children's entertainer single-handed. His solution? It was to buy in an odd Australian drama about gnomes and, possibly, talking butterflies and... no, we never could quite work out what Bangotcha Junction was about. It sounded like the worst sort of summer holiday kid's TV filler material, and seemed less like a reassurance that Radio One was still a family network and more like a bid to bamboozle any remaining youngsters off the network. To give him his due, Mark Page did stick with the thing all the way through - although, we suspect, nobody would have noticed if he'd skipped a few episodes or just stopped them half way through the story.

It was, however, still the first proper serial drama Radio One ever aired.

And would have remained so, too, had there not been an early-90s attempt to add some drama to the network with adaptations of Batman and Spiderman. These stories were told in an aural approximation of comic-book style: short episodes, lots of sound effects, jumpy-plot-cuts. They're best filed under 'surprising to see it done at all' rather than 'startling success', and while the bitty-episode format made sense, it made for horribly wearing omnibus edition. Still, at least they didn't try to create a British superhero for the purpose - although we'd have liked to have heard the Leopard Of Lime Street being given the stereo treatment.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Wentz confuses 'lookalike', 'self', 'movie', 'real life'

Apparently, Pete Wentz has taken great offence at Tobey Maguire looking a bit like him in the the new SpiderMan movie, Spiderman III: Money For Old Mope.

It seems the trouble is that when Peter Parker paints a picture of pooped-out pecker, he looks a little bit like Pete Wentz. This is only to be expected, since Wentz is a pretty boy who dresses up like he's a fifteen year-old whose family don't understand him, which is probably exactly the stage direction in the Spidey script.

Wentz, though, bless him, isn't the stickiest of webs, and seems to think this is all some sort of elaborate pop at him:

Wentz hasn’t seen the movie yet, but he’s still bemused at the news that a mega- grossing superhero franchise may have stolen his identity. “My nephew, who doesn’t know anything at all, says I was in a movie.” Pete tells Rolling Stone. “I was like, ‘All right…’ I’ve heard about this from so many people.’” And on Tuesday night, right after our conversation, Wentz went onstage in Moline, Illinois, and shouted “Spider-Man 3 sucks."

Let's hope Wentz never finds himself under the oak tree in Milton Keynes mall - he's going to think he's been cloned or something.

Singalongaspiderman

Often, we've woken in the middle of the night thinking that it's strange nobody makes musicals about superheroes - after all, both are nothing without glorious costumes and are based on the idea of apparently ordinary people suddenly doing extraordinary things (either bursting into song, or being faster than a speeding bullet.) Then we wake up in the morning, and realise it's a stupid idea which would be the financial equivalent of offering your kidneys on Freecycle, and forget the idea.

Now, though, we hear that Bono and The Edge have signed up to get into musical theatre by providing a score for a song-and-dance version of Spiderman.

Yes, Spiderman: The Musical.

Meanwhile, it seems that hanging around with Johnny Borrell (yes, that's all back on) is rubbing off on Kirsten Dunst, as she's putting on a superb strop at the backstage rejiggling for Spiderman 4:

"It's disrespectful to the whole team, I think, to do that," she tells Entertainment Weekly about the prospective of big name cohorts dropping out. "And audiences aren't stupid. It'd be a big flop without me, Tobey or Sam. That would really not be the smartest move. But they know that already. [Sony chief] Amy Pascal would never do that."

You could, however, sack the drummer and guitarist without disturbing things overmuch...