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Bono is now captain of the Titanic.
After keeping a low pro file for months while director Julie Taymor was steering “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark” into the iceberg, Bono is spearheading a last-ditch attempt to salvage this $65 million musical — the most expensive in Broadway history — from disaster.
Bono threw his friend Taymor, who staged and co-wrote the musical, overboard yesterday, replacing her with Philip William McKinley, who staged “The Boy From Oz” with Hugh Jackman, as well as circus productions for Barnum & Bailey.
Also joining the show is Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who writes Spider-Man comic books for Marvel.
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With his new, though decidedly B-list, creative team in place, Bono, who with The Edge wrote the score to the musical, is going to “rip the show apart from top to bottom,” says a production source. “They’re going to start from scratch.”
He met with cast and crew backstage last night, and told them the changes that were coming are “in the best interests of the show,” said a production source. “Spider-Man,” which played its first preview back in November, will likely shut down at the end of April for at least four weeks while undergoing the massive overhaul, production sources say.
The new opening night will be in mid- to late-June. Bono will become the face of “Spider-Man,” sources say, and is planning to do a series of high-profile interviews talking up the new version.
“At this point, he’s the only person on the show who has any credibility left,” says a source.
Yesterday, lawyers were negotiating Taymor’s exit package. She will no longer be listed as director, although she may receive credit for some of her production designs.
Taymor, who directed “The Lion King” — a global smash that has earned $4.5 billion — is being demoted to “director of masks and puppets,” one source snickers.
Bono began to lose faith in Taymor back in December, when, after completing a concert tour of New Zealand, he finally caught the show for the first time. “He was not happy,” a source says.
For a while, he seemed to be putting distance between himself and the production. When “Spider-Man” became a media circus because of injuries to cast members, Bono was hobnobbing with his media-mogul friends in Davos, Switzerland.
After the show took a pounding from the critics in February, Bono realized that major changes were needed, or else “Spider-Man” would go down in history as the most expensive Broadway flop ever.
But Taymor, sources say, refused to alter her script or production in any substantial way.
“The show on stage right now is the show she believes in,” says a source.
Meanwhile, the problem-plagued production suffered another embarrassment last night when an aerial stunt came to an awkward halt.
A soaring flight over the audience by Green Goblin suddenly stopped when his steering mechanism failed — leaving the Goblin dangling, Spider-Man standing on a balcony ledge waiting to take off and some audience members howling, “Refund!”
The stunt was canceled for the night for safety reasons.
But bigger problems behind the scenes came to a head last week when Taymor made it clear to producers that, as far as she was concerned, “Spider-Man” was ready to open March 15, as scheduled.
Whether Bono knows how to save the show remains to be seen.
He may be at the helm now, but that iceberg is still dead ahead.
Additional reporting by Lachlan Cartwright