With or without you

It's Bono as you've never seen him before. Yes, the U2 frontman sings a bit. But where Stories of Surrender really becomes a true test of tolerance for the man is when he is acting selected stories from his hefty 2022 memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, on a darkened stage as if he were auditioning for the role of himself in his own biopic. He gives it his all. It's occasionally entertaining, but it's mostly cloyingly awful.

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It might seem that, as Bruce Springsteen did with his autobiography Born to Run, Bono took his book and made a solo show and concert film to go with it. But Springsteen on Broadway played for a year, made millions, and left an album and a Netflix special.

Bono's run extended to a dozen shows in front of fan club members at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway, then a finale - for reasons that become apparent at the end - at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, the world's oldest continuously active opera house.