Take your jazz hands off that pistol, musical lover. It’s been a long, dark road, but it seems that the Spider-Man Broadway musical with music by U2 I told you about a while back (“Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”) will finally be getting its debut.  Rolling Stone quotes producer Michael Cohl, who says preview performances will start November 14th and opening night is scheduled for December 21st. That’s a picture of the actual set above (I added gay Spider-Man for… uh… scale).

In October ’08, the Post reported that the play would cost $40 million (which they were trying to bring down to $35m), and would have a weekly running cost of $1 million.  They estimated that it would have to run for 8,000 years in a Broadway theater just for it to break even (which would be three years shy of Cats‘ run).  More recent estimates put the cost even higher, at $50 million, though it doesn’t say whether that includes the weekly cost.  Luckily, they’ve got some big stars to headline the bill.  Hold on, I’m receiving an update…

Jennifer Damiano will fill the role of Mary Jane Watson, and Patrick Page will play both Norman Osborn and the villain Green Goblin. The actors join Reeve Carney, playing Peter Parker.  Because of the delays and the uncertain nature of the production, both actress Evan Rachel Wood, who was to star as Mary Jane, and Alan Cumming, in the Green Goblin role, quit. [RollingStone]

Director Julie Taymor originally wanted Jim Sturgess for Peter Parker, but apparently that didn’t work out either.  Which could have something to do with Jim Sturgess being an actor who gets offered real film roles and this being a Broadway musical about Spider-Man.  With U2 songs.

Bono and the Edge, who wrote both the lyrics and music for the show, remain firmly in place. Last year the Edge said that the music “touches on opera, it touches on rock & roll. There are some real character-driven songs as well, very unusual song types for us.”

By “character driven,” do you mean talk-singing numbers sung from the perspective of the Green Goblin?  Because that sounds great.  Good luck with that.

_{Homophobic Turtle is not pleased.  (…Or is he??)}

Julie Taymor’s plan to turn Spider-Man into a thuper fabulouth musical will finally come out of the closet in February 2010, EOnline reports.

“Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” [Editor's note: you're f-cking kidding me, right?] the hyped stage musical directed by Julie Taymor (The Lion King) with music and lyrics courtesy of U2′s Bono and The Edge, will kick off what its producers hope will be an amazing run beginning with previews on Jan. 16, 2010, and a Feb. 18, 2010, opening night.

The $40 million effort, reportedly the most expensive Broadway production ever, will make its debut in the Hilton Theatre, the only venue big enough to allow the superhero room to spin his way around the sprawling skyscraper sets while duking it out with various bad guys.

According to a previous report, the show would have to run 8,000 years just to break even (I was going to do the math to verify that claim, but then I was like, “Nah”).  But for an artist like Julie Taymor, clearly this isn’t about the money.  It’s been truly a labor of love.  The love of getting washed-up rockstars to write uninspired songs about a movie that came out 10 years ago.

National Geographic Cinemas has picked up the concert documentary U2 3D.

U2 3D will be released in late January in 3-D only.

The film was shot in South America during the band’s "Vertigo" tour entirely in digital 3-D. [ComingSoon]

It’s too bad Bono’s mom didn’t use RU486, and if that didn’t work, pull a 187.  The thing I’m most impressed with is that even with a guy named "The Edge" in the band, he can still come off as the most pretentious A-hole.

In related news, Bono and Sean Penn were in Africa for photo ops recently when they both tried to save the same baby and TORE IT IN HALF!  <:-0