Love it or hate it, you can't deny it -- "Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark," the upcoming Broadway musical featuring songs from U2, is swinging into New York City and there's nothing you can do about it. And even if the likes of Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming's reported involvement isn't enough to turn your opinion on the show, you can take some comfort knowing that rockers Bono and The Edge were initially uneasy with the concept as well.
"We were open to the idea of musical theater, but 'Spider-Man'? That's a different thing," said Bono in a recent interview posted on YouTube.
"That's comic books -- which there's a whole series of relationships between punk rock, rock bands and comic books that goes back years," he continued, "but to mess with all these different aspects of pop culture, put 'em in a blender and see what we could come out with on the other end..."
As the U2 frontman trailed off, his colleague The Edge chimed in with his thoughts on superheroes: "In many ways, the audience for a rock and roll band and the audience for a comic book are the same. It's kids, like ourselves, fifteen or sixteen out in the suburbs -- in our case Dublin City, but it could be any city in America or in Europe. It seems at that moment in your life that there's this world out there that you can't get access to, and the only way to connect with it is through music, comic books or movies."
The Edge continued to explain the appeal of working with the character of Spider-Man as opposed to someone like Superman, praising Peter Parker as a non-alien figure that audiences can sympathize with.
"He's a human being," he said. "He's a kid who came up through a regular high school and got bitten by a spider. Could happen to anyone! He's sort of like every rock-and-roll star's story in a weird way. Every rock-and-roll star probably started out as the geek that was bullied in school and eventually their form of revenge was to write songs, learn to play guitar, sing or play drums -- and some of us ended up in big bands."
"I'm more of a Green Goblin," Bono jokingly disagreed. "Edge is the nerdy guy."
What do you think of the U2 duo's thoughts on the project? What about the musical itself?
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