A Peek At Spider-Man, The Musical

The curtain goes up for previews Sunday, Nov. 28, on "Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark," a Broadway show with music by Bono and The Edge of U2. The buzz is louder than a swarm of green hornets.

We actually thought we would be broadcasting this story about a year ago; we had been invited to go behind the scenes with Bono, The Edge and director Julie Taymor. But one day last year, the show ran out of money, the opening had to be cancelled and critics predicted it would never reach the stage.

Then, like the comic book itself, there was a cliff-hanging rescue from near death.

The show follows the comic book story of young Peter Parker and his alter ego Spider-Man, with some new twists and new villains. With high velocity flying and special effects, it's the most daring and most expensive Broadway show ever.

"60 Minutes" and correspondent Lesley Stahl were on the inside through much of the ordeal: as Spider-Man was created, collapsed and sprang back into action.

"60 Minutes" recently got access to some of the show's final rehearsals prior to first preview performances. It's a spectacle of extraordinary dizziness. That's how Bono described it, when we sat down with him and his U2 band mate, The Edge.

"We've moved out of the rock and roll idiom in places into some very new territory for us. There's big show tunes and dance songs," Bono told Stahl.

Asked if they were thinking of Rodgers and Hammerstein, The Edge said, "More dark, more sort of dark and twisted."

The three of them, Bono, The Edge, and Broadway veteran Julie Taymor, took us to the theatre to see the set.

The big stars of Spider-Man are not the actors playing Peter Parker, Mary Jane or the Green Goblin: the real box office draws are the three talents behind the scenes.

"So tell us about the collaboration," Stahl asked.

"It was like being a student in a master class of musical theatre, and opera," The Edge explained.

"I mean, you know. Really. She [Taymor] played a small role, but it was significant," Bono joked.

Actually, her role was all-encompassing: Taymor was the creative force in every nook and cranny of the show.

"You said something along these lines: 'I really love to go into something when I don't know whether I'll be able to pull it off,'" Stahl remarked.

"Absolutely," Taymor said. "I love it when people say, 'What a horrible, lousy idea.' I think that's great. I hate the comfort zone, let's put it that way. I don't think anything that's really creative can [be] done without danger and risk."

The danger and risk with Spider-Man, the musical is that to stay afloat. To keep running, it has to be as big a hit as Broadway has ever seen.

Taymor knew she had to create a theater experience that would be just as thrilling - if not more so - than the Spider-Man movies. The razzle-dazzle she came up with runs about $1 million a week in operating costs.

We started following the making of Spider-Man over a year and half ago, when they let Stahl and "60 Minutes" sit in on one of those early master classes where actors performed the songs so the three of them could tweak the music.

Bono and The Edge had already written most of the music back home in Dublin. At one point, while "60 Minutes" was there, they critiqued a song for a new villain they created: a Spider-Woman.

We got to stay and watch the way Bono and The Edge meticulously re-shaped a number of their songs. Bono got up to work with the orchestrator on coordinating the horns and strings, with the rock band, and then the ultimate show-and-tell: Bono showing how to do it right by performing in front of the entire group.

The song Bono performed is a duet for Peter Parker, the geek who turns into a superhero, and Mary Jane, the girl of his dreams.

The long, hard journey of Spider-Man the musical started eight years ago in 2002.

"I was told that the two of you wanted to do this with one condition in the beginning," Stahl remarked.

"Julie Taymor was the only condition," Bono said.

Asked why, he explained, "Julie Taymor's definitely a magician. And I think that's what you call a person who, even though they put the rabbit in the hat, is really surprised when it comes out: that's her."

Bono had worked with Taymor when she cast him in her Beatles movie, "Across the Universe."

Her magician's tricks for Spider-Man involved the sculpting of fabulous masks, as she did when she created "The Lion King." She then shot the Spider-Man villains for pictures that are projected on giant LED screens built into the set.

Stahl joined Taymor at the stage six months ago, as the sets were just arriving at the theatre. Living up to her reputation that no expense is spared, Taymor spent around $10 million to give the set a look of the comics and pop-up art with mechanized skyscraper backdrops and spider webs. Millions more were spent on the special effects and the flying.

"I'm trying to make the theatrical experience an environmental experience. We want to have the theatre of it right in the laps of the audience," Taymor said, after a "flying" actor whizzed through the theater and landed just inches from her and Stahl.

"You don't know until the last half second that he's going to be that close," Taymor said.

The actors and dancers were taught to fly by coaches Taymor brought in from the Spider-Man movies and Cirque du Soleil.

"We actually have a battle that will be over the audience's head. And they can leap through each other's wires," Taymor explained.

"But will they fly like they do in the movie? Where they soar quickly…and swoop down?" Stahl asked.

"Yes," Taymor replied.

All the aerial acrobatics are computerized. Nothing this technologically intricate or dangerous has ever been tried before on a Broadway stage.

The technology invented for the show was modeled on the flying camera they use in football games.

"So, you have a four-point system, which means that the human being is attached to four wires. And that means you can move them with a lot of control anywhere," Taymor explained. "And you can go…50 miles an hour. You can fly fast."

If you're thinking they could get hurt doing that, you're right: two of the flying actors were injured in rehearsals, one breaking his wrists.

Making it safe and getting this right was one the reasons the show had to be postponed earlier this month and why the budget soared to more than $60 million.

"It's costing a fortune," Stahl pointed out.

"If you try and do a $30 million [show] in this day and age, in this time, Spider-Man, you couldn't do any of the flying. You just couldn't do it that way. So as soon as you decide to give people the level that they're expecting, you have to be willing to pay the price," Taymor said.

The show itself has had its own near-death swoons, going back to the day in 2005 when the original producer, Tony Adams, arrived at The Edge's apartment with the contracts.

"He had a seizure and died on the spot," Bono said.

"I left the room to literally go and get a pen to sign the contract. And I came back in the room, and he had gone into some kind of what I thought was some kind of seizure," The Edge remembered. "It was a very difficult moment for us. We really weren't sure whether the show was going to go ahead."

The show was handed over to Adams' business partner and survived, only to swoon again last year. That's when they woke one day without any money.

Bono told Stahl he found out about the project's financial troubles when he opened the newspaper and read about it.

"So everything goes dark, and the rest of the world thinks it's over. And you start picking up the phone, calling people for money, right?" Stahl asked. "And they're saying no?"

"No. They're saying 'Maybe,'" Bono recalled.

The man Bono finally turned to was Michael Cohl, a long-time rock concert impresario who used to promote U2.

"All the deals were bad. The budgets were bad. There was no money," Cohl told Stahl.

But Bono leaned on him, and he agreed to become the new producer and raised more than $30 million to get the show back on track.

"When you think of putting on the most expensive Broadway show in a recession, why didn't you say, 'Bono, it's time to pull the plug. This is insane,'?" Stahl asked.

"I think you have to build the show that you have to build. Nobody wants to see the $25 million Spider-Man. They may think they do, but they don't. Nobody wants to see that. They want to see the one that Julie and Bono and Edge are creating. That's the one they want to see. And if it costs 60 million, it costs 60 million," Cohl said.

The cast and dancers worked around the clock for months to master the complex choreography and synchronize the music with the moving scenery and, of course, the two dozen flying sequences.

Taymor says that even as the curtain goes up for previews, they'll still be working out the kinks.

Asked how scared she is, Taymor told Stahl, "Oh, yeah, I'm scared. If you don't have fear then you are not taking a chance. But what I do have is a team. If your collaborators are there, which is what answers the fear question, and they all are as impassioned as you are, and believe in it, then your fear is mitigated."

"It has been one of the funest, more joyful rides of our artistic life, for sure," Bono said. "If it is the success that we think it is, if people agree with us and come through the doors, after all the melodrama we've been through, it'll be a very, very sweet success."

Produced by Andrew Metz