How Bono and The Edge Wrote the Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark Score

Before Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark, Bono and The Edge had spent roughly three decades writing for U2's albums and stadium tours, not for a Broadway stage. Signing on to write the show's music and lyrics marked their first attempt at a full stage-musical score, a discipline neither of them had worked in before. It put a guitar-driven arena-rock sound in direct contact with a medium built around a book, blocking, and a company singing the same numbers eight times a week rather than once a night in a different city.

The collaboration itself had an unusually long runway. Bono and The Edge were attached to the project alongside Julie Taymor as far back as 2002, years before the show ever reached a stage, and the gap between signing on and opening night became a running theme in how the pair talked about the experience afterward. Bono later summed up the toll bluntly: "If we thought it would take this long, there is not a chance on earth we'd have done it." That is not the kind of line a band drops about a studio album; it is closer to what touring musicians say about a leg of a tour that would not end.

Both musicians described the hybrid they landed on in similarly unconventional terms. The Edge said the finished show carried elements "of rock and roll, circus, opera and musical theater," while Bono called the result a "pop-up, pop-art opera." Neither description reads like standard Broadway-composer language, and that was largely the point: the score was built to sound like a U2 record that happened to be staged, not a traditional book-musical score that happened to have rock instrumentation.

The clearest example of that approach is "Rise Above 1," the score's best-known number and a highlight built around Peter Parker's arc. In the show it was sung by Reeve Carney, who originated the role. Carney, Bono, and The Edge performed the song together on the season 10 finale of American Idol on May 25, 2011, the same day it was released as a single, and it debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 the following week. It went on to peak at No. 74 on the Hot 100 and No. 34 on Billboard's Adult Pop Airplay chart, a modest but real chart run for a song that started life inside a Broadway set rather than a recording studio.

Translating that arena-rock sound into an eight-shows-a-week theatrical run came with its own strain. The production's physical demands were part of the reason Carney did not sing every performance himself; an alternate covered some of the week's shows, a scheduling pattern more associated with a role's stunt and vocal load than with a typical book-musical lead. Whatever the score gained in raw rock energy, it also inherited rock's touring math applied to a fixed venue, eight shows a week, with no night off between different cities the way a real U2 tour would have built in.

Critically, the score fared no better than the rest of the production. Reviewers who covered the show, including the critics who broke with Broadway convention and reviewed it during its extended preview period, were largely unimpressed with the music itself, and coverage from the period describes the score as having been almost universally panned even as individual songs like "Rise Above 1" found some separate life on the radio and on television.

The production's original cast recording was released on June 14, 2011, the same day the show officially opened after 182 previews. Reviews of the album were negative, with at least one national critic dismissing the songs as a muddled listen on record even by the standards of the stage show. Beyond that cast album and the "Rise Above 1" single, there is no verified record of the songs having a further life once the show closed on January 4, 2014: no evidence turned up of U2 folding any of the material into its own live sets, of other artists recording cover versions, or of the songs being licensed for use outside the production. Whatever became of Bono and The Edge's stage score, the record suggests it closed along with the show itself.