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

by Berger, Glen

  • • •

  So we did it. Before the end of July, a twenty-page treatment was completed, taking the reader scene by scene through the proposed musical, with made-up song titles for the eighteen songs yet to be written. We sent the document straight to Avi Arad, chief creative officer of Marvel Entertainment. Approval was right around the corner.

  Or . . . maybe not. Within two weeks of receiving the treatment, Avi had rejected it. Flat out.

  “The concept is entirely wrong and the tone of the treatment, which is quite dark, is not what Marvel anticipated receiving at all.”

  “Does that mean maybe he didn’t like it?” I asked Tony.

  “Get Arachne out of the script or we’re done,” said Avi.

  “If Arachne’s out, then I’m out,” said Julie.

  “There’s still a bit of a divide between Avi and Julie,” said Tony Adams to me delicately one day in October. “You’re going to have to find a way to bridge the divide. I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

  “Righto.”

  “We need both Avi and Julie on board.”

  Undoubtedly.

  But the divide was unbridgeable. In August and September, while Julie shot her film Across the Universe in New York, Tony was busy mediating a series of heated chats between Avi and Julie. “Some people look really calm on the outside,” Bono once observed, “but deep down, they are cauldrons. They’re boiling with nervous energy.” Tony continued to present his consistently calm presence, but privately he was swallowing a lot of anxiety pills.

  At least things were moving forward on the contractual front. On October 20, with the legal issues finally hammered out by lawyers, and with Julie’s and Bono’s signatures already procured, Tony popped down to Edge’s SoHo apartment with the deal memo. After some optimistic chat between Tony, Edge, and Paul McGuinness, Edge exited the room to fetch a pen. His signature was the last one Tony needed, so Edge planned to crack open some champagne for the three of them in just a bit. Tony smiled at Paul, gave a thumbs-up, looked back at the contract, and shuddered.

  He was looking at a stack of stapled pages on a coffee table, a black leather couch, faces, a water tower, autumn leaves through a window. Then blood leaked in his head. It compressed his brain.

  As Edge was coming back into the room, he heard his manager asking with escalating urgency: “Tony? Tony. What’s wrong?” With eyes rolling back in his head, Tony slumped onto the table. Edge held the unconscious man while he and Paul waited for the ambulance. Two days later, at the age of fifty-two, Tony Adams was dead.

  • • •

  Friends and family from Ireland congregated at a nearby pub after Tony’s memorial service, and there they spoke movingly to me of Tony’s devotion to the Spider-Man project. And perhaps as a consequence, for the next five years I was afflicted with magical thinking, confident that Tony was watching over us from above, ready to pull a cosmic string when we needed it, as if he were Obi-Wan Kenobi or something.

  I was eventually well cured of that.

  But for a good month after the memorial service, I even continued to call Tony’s cell phone, addicted to the sound of a dead man’s voice asking me to leave a message. I left him updates on the show’s progress, though it wasn’t a pretty picture. With the lead producer gone, and the treatment a nonstarter with Marvel, prospects for the show looked bleak.

  But David Garfinkle, who had taken over as head of Hello, continued to schedule meetings in the hope that we could nudge the treatment in a Marvel-friendly direction. By the end of 2005, Avi was hinting at a new willingness to consider the inclusion of Arachne. A revised treatment was drafted and delivered to Marvel in January 2006.

  We were confident that the outline now conformed to Avi’s (softened) demands. But January turned to February. No word from Avi. Calendar pages flew away, March became April, and there was still no word from Avi.

  On a splendid spring afternoon on the Taconic Parkway, I was pulled over, slapped with a speeding ticket, and now the world seemed an especially small-minded, malevolent place. I called David Garfinkle. “Damn it, David, we’ve done what was asked of us. Is this show ever going to happen?!”

  David, as matter of fact, had news.

  It turned out—though no one bothered to inform Hello Entertainment—that Avi Arad had been in the process of leaving Marvel. So the treatment spent a forlorn winter in Avi’s inbox before it was eventually brought to the attention of new chief creative officer David Maisel.

  “And,” David Garfinkle reported to me on the phone, “Maisel has finally replied.”

  Apparently David Maisel expressed some concerns about the sexuality in the story, and about secondary characters overshadowing Peter Parker and Mary Jane. Nevertheless, Hello Entertainment had been granted a green light, accompanied by David Maisel’s sincere hopes that fruitful collaboration lay ahead.

  Keep pulling those strings, Tony . . .

  4

  * * *

  The Four Geeks

  We already knew Spider-Man was going to be one of the bigger shows Broadway had seen in over half a century—it was going to have a bigger budget, a bigger publicity machine, and some gargantuan technical demands. And David Garfinkle had never produced a play. A single play. Ever. So the British producer Martin McCallum, who helped shepherd Miss Saigon and Les Misérables to the stage, was brought on by David Garfinkle to be “line producer.” Martin lived in Australia, but when the time was right, he would move to New York and carry on in the role Tony Adams was meant to play. Meanwhile, Bono and Edge were instructed to start composing music, because a crucial staged reading was just twelve months away.

  Julie flew to Èze, in the South of France, to meet with them. As Julie explained to her co-bookwriter: the last time she had gone to the French Riviera to meet with our composer/lyricists, Neil Jordan was the fourth member of the creative team.

  “So best not to bring you over this time, Glen. Emotions are still a bit brittle.”

  Still?

  “I want to pave the way for you. But next time, I promise.”

  In France, Julie took Bono and Edge step by step through the treatment, and the boys played Julie a half-dozen songs. Rough demos. Just themes, really. They didn’t have any lyrics yet. Bono sang extemporaneously over the tracks in a language Edge called (in Bono’s honor) “bongelese”—a smattering of intelligible words and phrases mixed with a lot of random phonemes. Over the deeply somber piano chords of what would become the anthem “Rise Above,” Bono sang:

  Cause the sense is in the side

  Cause the marble’s in the slow

  And the sheepers in your heart

  In batten you will grow . . .

  On the page it’s silliness, but with the music, it really wasn’t. In fact, in song after song, the emotional content was so clear and untainted by left-brain comprehension I began to wonder whether I was going to prefer bongelese to the lads’ actual lyrics.

  The tunes themselves were exciting. Everyone thought so. Julie captured them on a shabby miniature tape recorder as Edge played the songs from his computer. But through the wobble and distortion, we could hear that the demos were mysterious, playful, varied . . . theatrical.

  “Arachne’s Theme” was a series of descending notes that managed to sound ancient, grand, and foreboding. And a riff they called “Boy Falls From the Sky” was going to be the driving electric-guitar-fueled hit of our musical. Which, according to David Garfinkle’s schedule, was opening in previews in Chicago on August 21, 2008. Two years from today. So it was time to start writing that script. Julie might suggest a line or two, but I was expected to generate all the dialogue. I then had to submit it all to Julie. If she rejected a word or a sentence, there would be no arguing—just a frogmarch back to the keyboard.

  Julie liked her scenes written with concision, and always with an eye toward how it would play a hundred rows back. So our main characters had to be designed with the capacity to be played big while retaining their integrity. We could
n’t have the actors resort to shtick and mugging. So Peter Parker would be a charmingly fumbling teenager. He’d have an endearing, self-deprecating humor whenever he was around his unrequited love or confronted with bullies looking to do him harm. I had Peter covered. And newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson? He was already well established in the last forty years of comic books, TV episodes, and movies as an obsessive, cigar-chomping, self-righteous, self-promoting penny-pincher. He was like a stock character out of commedia dell’arte—a form Julie had often dipped into, most recently in her Green Bird on Broadway. You couldn’t ask for a more “theatrical” character. Arachne had no dialogue until the final scene of the show, so I wasn’t going to worry about her quite yet. The Green Goblin? In my audition scene, he was a Tom Waitsian carnival barker. A loose-limbed philosophizer, with wild mood swings and a happy unawareness of other people’s personal space. Standard supervillain/trickster tropes, but no point reinventing the wheel.

  But what about Goblin’s pre-supervillain incarnation as scientist Norman Osborn? Julie was unimpressed by the character in the first movie, as embodied by Willem Dafoe. She felt a soulless entrepreneur wasn’t a fraction as sympathetic or compelling as, say, Alfred Molina’s scientist in Spider-Man 2. In that film, Otto Octavius’s earnest desire to save the world through technology led to his accidental transformation into supervillain Doctor Octopus.

  So we’d make Norman Osborn a brilliant scientist and humanitarian who believed that “speeding up evolution” was the only way to save humanity from Earth’s imminent ecological implosion. However, Norman’s fears that competitors would steal his work would lead him to rush his research, resulting in his accidental transformation into the Green Goblin.

  At Èze, Edge remembered encounters with media mogul Ted Turner. Bono jumped at this, recalling the time they went for a walk in the fields with Ted and his assistant. Ted was holding forth on one topic after another when suddenly he spied a snake on the ground and reached to pick it up. His assistant cautioned him that it was a poisonous copperhead, which Ted dismissed.

  “That’s no copperhead.”

  “But—”

  “Nah, the hell it is, honey, the—ah GEEZ, you’re right!”

  Ted jumped back in fear and then, not missing a beat, added, “Hey, I’m gonna keep her.” And right on talking and trudging through the tall grass he went.

  An enthusiastic, fast-talking genius from Georgia with a soapbox always at the ready. Someone who could launch into the patter of an auctioneer or preach salvation like a Baptist minister with the zeal of The Music Man’s Henry Hill? Yeah, I could work with that. And hey, maybe we’d slow down that Southern accent once he was the Goblin. It would add a dash of Klansman, which would go just fine with the Goblin’s embrace of a perverse eugenics.

  The song demos played in an endless loop as I typed. Haunting, some of these songs, there was no doubt about it. Scene by scene the script began to take shape. The writing that September would have been going just fine, in fact, if it hadn’t been for . . . the Geeks.

  Julie feared that getting through the whole “origin story” before the end of Act One would be impossible without some narration. Before I was hired, she came up with the idea for a “Geek Chorus.” She claimed the pun was unintentional, but the concept for the Geeks was certainly similar to the role of the classical Greek chorus: Four teenagers—three boys and a girl—would remain onstage for the entire show, comment on the action, wax philosophical, and fill us in on all the plot points we didn’t have the time or wherewithal to dramatize. Employing a Geek Chorus was a good idea.

  Wasn’t it?

  Yes.

  Probably.

  We weren’t sure, actually. If they voiced the confused thoughts and feelings of Peter, it would eliminate the need for endless monologues. That would be helpful. They could add four spirited backup voices to any song. They could juice the whole show with fanboy passion. They could convey comically yet sincerely the veneration that comic books command.

  In theory, these were sound reasons to write a Geek Chorus into the show. But we decided to add a few more rules: They would have to sound like teenagers today. Fine. But no contemporary slang could be used, because what was hip today was dated tomorrow. So instead they’d speak in an argot that we would invent. Well . . . okay. That worked for West Side Story, I suppose. Oh—and to set these four teens apart from the rest of the characters in the show, they should speak in verse. Rhyming verse. But Julie was allergic to hip-hop, so even though everything that rhymes these days inevitably sounds like hip-hop, it mustn’t sound like hip-hop. But it shouldn’t sound like Dr. Seuss either. Or Gilbert and Sullivan. And the four characters should each have a distinct personality. But every now and then they should speak in unison. And they absolutely must be funny.

  I didn’t blanch. I have an indefatigable confidence in my writing abilities, so I took this assignment and ran with it. After an hour, I blanched. I was sure I’d figure out how to write the Geeks eventually. Hell yeah, I’d figure it out. . . . Eventually.

  • • •

  By the beginning of October, a ragged version of Act One was completed—just in time for a two-day summit in Bono’s Upper West Side penthouse apartment. I didn’t know U2’s music the first time I met Bono and Edge—it was easier to be indifferent around them. But now I was a hard-core fan, with their entire catalogue committed to heart. So I should’ve been producing flop sweat like crazy. But trying to get pages written in the days leading up to this conference had turned me into a sleep-deprived shell of a former self. I shuffled into Bono’s den and took in the surroundings and the excited banter of my collaborators like some quietly amused Peruvian sloth, and when Julie suggested I read the script out loud to our composers, I launched into the show unthinkingly.

  Within minutes, Bono’s sunglasses were off and he and Edge were voicing approval, tossing new suggestions into the air, pointing out how the Girl Geek’s narration matched the sean-nós Gaelic singing style Bono had been considering for Arachne. Julie and I acted out the first scene between Peter and MJ—a scene relying on stumbling lines and long, horrible pauses in lieu of content. Through grins, Bono called it “kabuki,” “brutal,” and meanwhile I was marveling over my acting partner’s comic timing. Now Bono was playing Mary Jane’s abusive father, and Edge was convincingly playing gentle, well-meaning Uncle Ben as the four of us volleyed lines with increasing intensity until it culminated in a song yet to be written.

  Doing his best Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, Bono turned to me, tapping his fingers together. “How long have you been with us, Smithers? You’re going to get on very well in this corporation.”

  Well gee, this was getting gratifying . . .

  Your life seems to be going in one direction, and then suddenly you wake up on the ceiling, with strange new powers. That’s when Peter sings “Spun Around” (later renamed “Bouncing Off the Walls”), another song needing music and lyrics.

  “There’s an expression in our band which we use all the time,” said Bono. “A ‘throw yourself around the room’ song. I think this might be the place for one of those.”

  Indeed. Seeing as Julie wanted to stage the scene with Peter actually throwing himself around the room. With the help of cables, the actor was going to leap and flip from wall to wall. And then the whole bedroom was going to break apart, and Peter would dance toward the high school with the Geeks cheering him on.

  Bono told us his definition of a “geek”: “a person full of passion, unencumbered by cool.” And he wasn’t wrong. Julie demonstrated a silly ecstatic dance for the song right there in Bono’s living room as Bono scatted a tune, improvising something sounding like the joyous flipside to the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” He and Julie played off each other, flirting and daft, while Edge studied them with a grin, and I gaped at these goofballs who were skipping and gesticulating, pulling faces, exclaiming, and just . . . playing.

  And like the old fellow in Krapp’s Last Tape, this is the scene I
rewind over and over again. Stupefaction. Rewind. Play again. There’s Julie buck dancing, or doing the Charleston, or whatever the hell she was doing in that room of giggling and twinkling inspiration, and yet almost exactly five years later, the New York Post was depicting the Inferno reimagined by Julie Taymor. In the ninth circle of hell, “dangling from two of [Satan’s] three mouths are Bono and The Edge, ‘their backs being skinned so as to leave not a patch.’ In the third mouth, being ground head first, is the greatest traitor of all—Taymor’s cowriter, Glen Berger.”

  To get from a scene of collaboration and affection to this vengeance-steeped hellscape . . . well, you’d think, at the very least, it would take a couple dozen implausible plot twists. But no, it just proceeds, step by sensible step. Hooved swamp dwellers evolve into humpback whales. Earnest intentions turn into intractable wars. I’ve never written nonfiction before, but I can tell you the fiction-teller’s directive for millennia has been to simply copy the way life unfolds; to wend an ever-flowing series of circumstances from a beginning to a very different endpoint and make every bend and cataract feel inevitable. These things happen. Just ask any divorcée about her wedding day. These things happen. All the time. Rewind. Play again. We were four jolly sailors, four imperturbable Argonauts set to capture the Golden Fleece. Full of passion, unencumbered by cool, we were also—and this is painfully clear—four geeks. And all I know is . . . those friends will keep dancing and laughing in that Central Park penthouse, but they’ll never be anything again but ghosts.

  Now Bono was playing a clip from (of all things) The Matrix. He and Edge selected a tune by Radiohead to mix into the scene. The effect was inspirational, mysterious. Bono and Edge had pinpointed a mood for the song they were going to write that would carry an audience from the nihilism sparked by Uncle Ben’s death toward the musical’s defining moment—when Peter vows to fight in the name of love and justice as Spider-Man.