Theater

Revamped 'Spider-Man' to Reopen

Bono gives interview about changes to musical.

Take cover: Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark reopens Thursday with even more flying sequences than before. After firing Julie Taymor for her disastrous early version, the show’s producers are going with a much more by-the-comic-books version. Now, the Green Goblin survives into Act II; Aunt May, Uncle Ben, and Mary Jane have expanded roles; and Arachne, Taymor’s original villain, has been scaled back and turned into a guardian-angel figure. “In Turn Off the Dark 2.0, the myth of Arachne does not overpower the reason people are there,” Bono says in his first interview about the show since November, “to discover what makes Peter Parker a superhero.” Bono also acknowledges many problems with the original version—“story knots, bad sound and finally a failure to cohere, meaning that the whole was not greater than the sum of the parts.”