Passing pleasures

I was in New York the other week, furtively sneaking into a preview of the doomed new Spider-Man musical, which features music from Bono and The Edge of U2. Just typing the infinitely silly names of those two humour-free and tiresomely bombastic rock stars makes me feel irritated, but not nearly as irritated as the $65-million show itself, with its pretentious and sometimes downright incomprehensible storyline, and a score that contains nothing approaching a decent tune.

Spider-Man is one of the biggest fiascos I have endured in more than 30 years of reviewing theatre, and so po-faced that it doesn’t even achieve ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ status. What a terrible disappointment from the director Julie Taymor, who achieved something genuinely magical with her stage version of Disney’s The Lion King.

I don’t want to turn this into a theatre column, but should you be visiting New York and fancy a great rock musical, rather than something that sounds like the rejected tracks from a particularly dire U2 album — and in my view they haven’t made a decent one since The Joshua Tree in 1987 — then book for American Idiot.