After months of speculation, delays due to financial constraints and good old-fashioned suspense, the identity of the guy playing your friendly neighbourhood wotsit in the Broadway musical, **Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark **can be revealed. And it’s… Reeve Carney.
Now, your first instinct may be to ask, ‘who the HELL is Reeve Carney?!?’ You may even want to throw in a few more exclamation and question marks, just to underline your bafflement, ie ‘who the HELL is Reeve Carney?!?!?!!!???’ And, dear readers, you wouldn’t be alone in that. Handily, Empire looked him up on this here internets machine.
He is, apparently, the lead singer in an up-and-coming rock band called, well, Carney. He is 26 years old. He has, if the 30-second clip we listened to of his new single, Love Me Chase Me, is anything to go by (hey, we said we looked him up, but we’re not Woodward and Bernstein), he’s got a fairly high-pitched, dexterous, rock voice. And he’s acted before, in **Snow Falling On Cedars **and, perhaps more tellingly, The Tempest, Julie Taymor’s movie version of the William Shakespeare play.
Taymor, of course, is the director of the hugely ambitious Spider-Man musical, which will boast lyrics and music written by Bono and The Edge. They were kind enough to say the following about Carney: "Our ambition was to find a Peter Parker who could really act and sing, but who still brings a kind of performance that could be new to Broadway audiences. We wanted something a little more authentically rock and roll. Reeve is everything we could have hoped for: an amazing voice and a truly charismatic presence."
Nice. But if you haven’t been keeping track, the cost of the musical – rumoured to be around the $40 million mark and rising – has delayed it beyond its initial opening date of February 2010.
It’s now just listed as ‘2010’. Empire wonders if all the scheduling mishaps were responsible for the absence of Jim Sturgess from the lead role. Sturgess had been heavily linked with the musical, even attending an early run-through of those U2-tastic songs, but the constant delays might have forced him to look elsewhere.
The selection of Carney, though, along with the appointment of Michael Cohl as lead producer, would seem to indicate that the show is getting back on track. Previously-announced cast members Evan Rachel Wood (as Mary-Jane Watson) and Alan Cumming (as Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin) remain on board. Whatever happens, Taymor has such a brilliant track record that we’re still hugely excited about this.