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Spider-Man: From Webslinger...to Broadway Singer?

Fri., Dec. 14, 2007 3:38 PM PST by Marc Malkin

Marvel Comics

Move over, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst!

Director Julie Taymor has a couple of other stars she’d like to see play Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson: Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood, the stars of her musical movie Across the Universe.

But I’m not talking about a big-screen Spidey. Taymor is currently working on a staged musical of the Marvel Comics web-spinning superhero that will feature music by U2’s Bono and The Edge. “We had a workshop reading with Jim as Peter and Evan as Mary Jane,” Taymor told me yesterday, just hours after Across the Universe picked up a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy. “I would love for them to do it. But I don’t know. It’s all about timing. Jim is new to the movie thing, and he has, like, four movies coming out.”

Yes, a singing and dancing Spider-Man! If anyone can do it, Taymor can. Her 1997 staged adaptation of The Lion King earned five Tony Awards, including Best Direction of a Musical.

T.V. Carpio, Jim Sturgess, Evan Rachel Wood, Dana Fuchs, Julie Taymor, Martin Luther

Matthew Simmons/WireImage.com

If she’s not reunited with Sturgess and Wood on the Great White Way, Taymor says there’s always a possibility of a sequel to Across the Universe. An original musical film, Across the Universe uses the Beatles songbook to tell the story about an English dock worker (Sturgess) who falls in love with an American teenager (Wood) during the Vietnam Era. “I only used, like, 33 songs,” Taymor said. “I think there’s about 200, so there’s so much more I can do and work with.”

And it sounds like Fab Four fella Paul McCartney wouldn’t mind seeing that. Taymor revealed she was one of only three people who were in a screening room when McCartney first saw the flick and gave her his thumbs-up. “I was sitting next to him and thinking, This is the dumbest thing I could have ever done,” Taymor said of the private viewing. “I kept trying to look at him to see his reaction to different things. I even heard him singing at one point under his breath!”