Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History

by Berger, Glen

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  Contents

  1 It’s Just a Play

  2 Hello

  3 A Falling Piano

  4 The Four Geeks

  5 Stages

  6 It’s a Process

  7 Goodbye “Hello,” Hello “Goodbye”

  8 Smudge Sticking

  9 The God Mike

  10 We’re Not Ready

  11 Breakdowns

  12 Plotting

  13 Plan X

  14 The Serenity Coin

  15 Spidenfreude; or, How Do You Want to Fail?

  16 The Crucible

  17 Mutate or Die

  18 A Goblin in a Box and an Eensy-Weensy Spider

  19 The Russian Hairdresser’s View of History

  20 Rise Above

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About Glen Berger

  Index

  This book is for Karin Almquist

  An honest-to-gosh, show-stopping glitch occurred, just as the title character of this new musical was about to vanquish or be vanquished by the evil Green Goblin. Never fully explained “mechanical difficulties” were announced by an amplified voice . . . And for the first time that night something like genuine pleasure spread through the house. . . .

  Patrick Page (who plays the Goblin) ad-libbed a warning to Reeve Carney (who stars as Spider-Man), who had been awkwardly marking time by pretending to drink Champagne.

  “You gotta be careful,” Mr. Page said. “You’re gonna fly over the heads of the audience, you know. I hear they dropped a few of them.”

  “Roar,” went the audience, like a herd of starved, listless lions, roused into animation by the arrival of feeding time. Everyone, it seemed, understood Mr. Page’s reference to the injuries that have been incurred by cast and crew members during the long (and officially still far from over) preview period for this $65 million musical. Permission to laugh had been granted, and a bond had temporarily been forged between a previously baffled audience and the beleaguered souls onstage.

  All subsequent performances of “Spider-Man” should include at least one such moment. Actively letting theatergoers in on the national joke that this problem-plagued show has become helps make them believe that they have a reason to be there.

  This production should play up regularly and resonantly the promise that things could go wrong. Because only when things go wrong in this production does it feel remotely right . . .

  —Ben Brantley, New York Times, February 7, 2011

  JOAN MARCUS

  1

  * * *

  It’s Just a Play

  The four drinks I knocked back on an empty stomach in the empty VIP room were finally kicking in. The conversations around me in the crowded lobby had become amplified and muffled, like I was floating in a diving bell surrounded by a lot of classy-looking fish. Fine. Just so long as I didn’t have to talk to any of them. Any moment now, the lights were going to blink, and then we’d have to take our seats, and I’d be saved. Except, no, I’d still be screwed. Because there wasn’t a drug in the world that would make sitting through the show tonight anything but unremitting torture.

  We were already thirty minutes behind schedule. They were holding the curtain because everyone was having such a fine time gabbing with each other. So I had to come up with a plan because hiding would be pathetic, but people were going to try to talk to me, or worse—congratulate me. It was opening night. And I was the cowriter. Giant letters spelled out my name on that building-sized sign out front. So congratulating me would seem like the thing to do. But this show was a special case, and I was a special case in this special case, and so collecting “congratulations” was like collecting a pile of wet socks.

  Of course, I imagined it was a hundred times worse for her. And, oh man, how the two of us yattered so eagerly about this night once upon a time. To think there was a time when—no, I couldn’t think about any of that—I just had to walk purposefully and no one would stop me to talk. So I sidled past Bill Clinton and Lou Reed, Salman Rushdie, John McEnroe—it was like being trapped in an updated version of the Sgt. Pepper album cover. I figured I’d be fine so long as I didn’t run into her, because I wouldn’t know what to say. But I ran into someone else, and he immediately walked away which, like a sliding set piece, revealed . . . her. And I didn’t know what to say.

  Julie Taymor. She was standing near the doors that led out to Forty-third Street. She wasn’t going to come at all tonight, which was boggling. Yet understandable. And, in being understandable, even more boggling. It had been three months since I’d last seen her, and the rush of old, cozy feelings smacked against The New Reality, and the impact made me just sick.

  Even now, I carry the dream with me every day—to make up with her. So it all can be as sunny as it once was. Publishing a book detailing our six years together might not be the most effective way to achieve that. In fact, I was warned not to write about any of this. But I can’t help it—it’s a story, and that’s what we do with stories. We tell them. In fact, this whole book is a story about storytelling—the story of an epic attempt by earnest human beings to tell a story and to tell that story brilliantly. Only, there’s this:

  Before something can be brilliant, it first has to be competent.

  —from My List of Lessons Learned

  One should probably begin the story of the making and remaking of a Broadway musical about Spider-Man with that hallowed day in 1962 when Stan Lee, along with illustrator Steve Ditko, came up with The Big Idea: Bullied high schooler acquires spider powers.

  It’s a trim little setup. And just different enough to be revolutionary. Not only was this teenaged Peter Parker suddenly burdened with “great responsibilities,” he still had to run the every-day gauntlet every teenager has to run—the social troubles, the money troubles, the dermatological troubles . . .

  A comic-book panel would depict a publisher sitting behind a cluttered desk in the cramped Madison Avenue offices of Marvel Comics staring at a sketch of a figure wearing a bodysuit covered in webbing. Lee and Ditko would be standing on the other side of the desk, looking on expectantly. The publisher would be looking . . . doubtful.

  “Several months later . . .” would read the caption in our next panel. Lee and Ditko’s new superhero is swinging with a hoodlum under his arm on the cover of Marvel’s Amazing Fantasy #15. It’s our webslinger’s debut, and it’s in the final issue of an anthology series already slotted to be canceled. That’s how dubious the publisher was of this new “spider-man” idea.

  The next comic-book panel would flash us forward forty years. It would be a split screen depicting the gleaming offices of media giant Marvel Entertainment on one side and the makeshift office of two almost-entirely-untested Broadway producers on the other. The producers are being informed via phone that they’ve just been granted the rights to make a musical out of Marvel’s most treasured property: Spider-Man. Exclamation points shine above the producers’ heads.

  But if this is a story about storytelling cast through the prism of Spider-Man the Musical, then maybe we should be starting fifty-thousand years ago, back in a time when the world was teeming with Paleolithic ceremonies feat
uring singing, dancing, and human characters endowed with animal powers. In a large, single-paneled splash page, we would see two prehistoric figures arguing over just how their musical performance is supposed to go. On their hairy faces—anger, exasperation. Why? Because collaboration, by definition, requires humans to interact with each other. Which means every moment in a collaboration quivers with the potential for transcendental connection. And also fury, and hair-tearing frustration, and silences as icy as distant planets. Just look at Lee and Ditko. You think they had a falling-out? Of course they had a falling-out.

  Another scene to ink and color: a twenty-first-century living room, somewhere in the United States, or Sweden, or South America. Children have commandeered couch cushions and bathrobes. One of them is pretending to be Spider-Man. By the looks of it, their pretending includes a large cast of characters and an elaborate plot.

  Storytelling. It’s what homo sapiens do. We do it as automatically as a pancreas produces insulin. We’re compelled to codify otherwise-random events into cause and effect. Into patterns. Into narrative. It’s a drive that in part makes humans so human. And it’s a hunger that drove the creators of this confounded musical (as well as its audiences) into spasms of excitement, disappointment, and a few dozen other emotions as the show careened down the long road to its much-delayed opening night.

  And it’s why my last comic-book panel would depict a scene from opening night. I would draw it in an emo-manga style, with a smudged, cocktail-sipping crowd in the background. In the foreground, a woman with flowing hair framing sad-smiling eyes is regarding the addled-looking man in front of her. The man’s heart is on his sleeve, his tongue is in a knot, and in the banner at the top of the panel, that poor schmuck’s thoughts from over a year later are revealed:

  I loved her. I still do.

  With heart-scarred bewilderment,

  I love her. . . .

  And the thing of it is . . . she despises me.

  Julie Taymor despises me with photograph-shredding rage. Or so I hear. Though maybe by now she’s past caring. After all, it’s been thirty months since that last phone call; that last lit match on a kerosene-doused relationship, six years of collaboration KAFWOOOSH! . . .

  Sure, yes, maybe she’s moved on. But I doubt it. While I was writing this book, teams of lawyers were busy submitting suits and countersuits. Among other demands, Julie wanted half of my money. And I wasn’t about to give it to her.

  Here’s what happened. . . .

  Or—wait—let me say one more thing first.

  I am aware—I really am—that the following pages contain metaphors more appropriate for an account of an amputation tent in the Crimean War; adjectives best saved for the Apollo space program or the Bataan Death March. Next to events of actual weight, I know this whole thing sounds self-important as hell.

  That said, for those who lived through this odyssey, very high stakes were involved, and very real costs were exacted, and I wouldn’t want to minimize that fact. And so it is with simultaneous irony, bitterness, and innocent awe that I state this (because I know it, but I’m going to forget it):

  This book? It’s about a play.

  Just a play.

  Just a fucking play.

  Okay. Here’s what happened. . . .

  2

  * * *

  Hello

  There once were two men with little in common. Tony Adams was an Irishman whose charm was off the charts. In 1975—and only twenty-two, mind you—he coproduced The Return of the Pink Panther. This movie would turn out to be the first of several films he worked on with both Peter Sellers and director Blake Edwards. Soon bloomed a deep, lifelong friendship and artistic partnership with both Blake Edwards and Blake’s wife, Julie Andrews. The three of them shared the belief that one of a producer’s greatest tasks was to conjure up the circumstances by which artists can create their best work.

  As Julie Andrews (as Mary Poppins) once explained: “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and—snap!—the job’s a game.” Tony carried this principle with him throughout his career. If it’s going to be a drudge, then what’s the point? Thirteen years after coproducing the film Victor/Victoria, Tony—for his most significant theatrical credit—shepherded a musical adaptation of it to Broadway.

  Tony then began working for billionaire Dutch media tycoon and theatre producer Joop van den Ende. He developed a show titled Oh What a Night. The script wasn’t working, so Tony eased the writers off the project and brought on scribes Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice. The script was renamed Jersey Boys. But somehow the rights lapsed, and Tony lost the property. Jersey Boys would open in four years’ time to profits galore, but none of those profits would go to Tony.

  Unbowed, Tony launched Hello Entertainment. Why “Hello”? Because that was the name of his “business entity” back in the 1960s when he was just a teenager living in Dún Laoghaire. A budding impresario, young Tony was booking rock bands and clearing a few quid, but was at a loss for office space. So Tony had the phone number of a local pub printed on his business card along with HELLO, figuring odds were fair the publican would answer the phone with a “hello.” Or not. Bit of a wheeze, worth a shot at any rate.

  And now Tony, nearing fifty, had resurrected that wink-of-a-name from his youth for a production company whose specialty would be to bring popular culture to the stage. He was going to find already branded entertainment ripe for adaptation, and reconfigure it for Broadway. This was 2001—no one but Disney was trying to do this in any concerted way. For his crew at Hello to get their feet wet, Tony selected a project called Star Trek Forever. He envisioned the show as just some fun—a limited-run event slotted to open in London in time for an enormous Star Trek convention there in 2002.

  Are you feeling torn

  Because you fought a Gorn?

  Are you stuck between a Horta and a real hard place?

  Yeah, sights weren’t set very high on this one.

  • • •

  Financing was still up in the air when our second man came into the picture: David Garfinkle. David was primarily an entertainment lawyer from Chicago, and he was . . . less charismatic, but that was hardly his fault. Different people are born different people. A kind fellow, certainly, and pure-heartedly enthusiastic about bringing popular culture to the stage. And did it matter that he wasn’t as charismatic as Tony? Yes, it did matter. Not then, though. It would matter a great deal later, but not in 2001, when Tony and David first met each other in Sag Harbor during the intermission of a one-woman show about Janis Joplin. The two of them hit it off, and soon Tony was getting legal advice from David for Star Trek Forever. David had a Rolodex of contacts, cultivated over years of working with clients in television and film such as Paramount Pictures and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. Tony invited David to come on board Hello. Finding investors—that would be David’s bailiwick.

  Though strictly business partners, Tony and David assiduously attended couples counseling to ensure their collaboration would thrive. They were swinging for the fences, you see, and that was going to require Trust, and it was going to require Communication. These capitalized words are going to come up a lot in this story.

  Meanwhile, Marvel and Sony were working on a movie called Spider-Man, directed by Sam Raimi. It opened in summer 2002 to lunatic grosses. Marvel was eager to capitalize on their superhero’s newfound level of popularity any way they could. They had already fielded calls from several interested theatrical producers, including the Nederlander Organization—one of the largest operators of live theatre. However, Michael Parker, who worked in licensing at Marvel, remembered meeting a guy a few years back—a producer who had both the savvy and graciousness or, really, the humanity to serve this material properly. He gave Tony Adams a call.

  Hello Entertainment was a production company without any producing credits. Yet, by the end of that summer, Tony Adams and David Garfinkle had persuaded Marvel to give them a chance to put Marvel’s pre
cious property on the Broadway stage. How did they swing this? Did I mention Tony was charming?

  Armed with provisional stage rights, Tony contacted fellow Irishman Paul McGuinness. Back in the early seventies, a young Paul McGuinness worked as a film technician for director John Boorman (Deliverance), which was how eighteen-year-old film assistant Tony Adams first met Paul. By the end of the 1970s, Paul McGuinness had dropped his work in film to become manager of a rock band called U2, consisting of four ambitious Irish teenagers.

  So now, decades later, with Paul McGuinness’s encouragement, Tony and David Garfinkle were flying to Dublin. They were going to court Bono and The Edge of U2. U2. The “biggest band in the world,” according to a number of metrics and a consensus of critics. The scheme was pie in the sky of course. But upon returning home, Tony received a fax from Paul with the composers’ answer: Yes.

  The fax contained more news: Literally just down the street from Edge and Bono lived acclaimed Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan. The two musicians popped down the road. “Hey, Neil—how about writing the script for our little show?” So Hello Entertainment now had Neil Jordan on the team as well.

  Now it just so happened that two of Neil’s films were scored by his friend, composer Elliot Goldenthal. Elliot’s longtime domestic and artistic partner was none other than Tony Award–winning, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship recipient Julie Taymor, whose last Broadway project was the multibillion-dollar grossing The Lion King.

  So through Neil Jordan, Hello approached Julie to be Spider-Man’s director. She was intrigued by the idea. But she was busy developing other theatre projects (including an adaptation of Pinocchio for Disney). She wasn’t going to get involved unless she could find a narrative something to spark her imagination; to ensure the show wouldn’t be just a by-the-numbers work-for-hire.