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. It’s based on the recording of that name by the now rather elderly American post-punk band Green Day and captures the highs and lows of adolescence with real panache. The stunning stage design with its banks of TV monitors looks as if it belongs in Tate Modern and the music really rocks.

One of the great pleasures of New York for me used to be browsing round the Virgin Megastore on Times Square where you used to be able to pick up albums far more cheaply than in England. The jazz department was especially good, and most of my large collection of Blue Note albums was purchased there at ridiculously low prices.