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

by Berger, Glen

  Julie had just walked the red carpet, and was now cheerfully bringing up the cost of this new Spider-Man movie.

  “Two hundred fifty-eight million! That’s a new record—most expensive movie of all time . . .”

  She knew this factoid was especially pertinent in light of the article that appeared in the New York Post just two days before.

  $pider-Man. Could the upcoming stage version of “Spider-Man” be the most expensive musical of all time?

  The May 2, 2007, edition of the Post was notable for running the first-ever newspaper article written about the Spider-Man musical. The article was penned by notorious Broadway muck-meister Michael Riedel.

  Word is that the show, which is getting a staged reading this summer, could cost almost $30 million to bring to Broadway. “The numbers are going to be astronomical,” says a producer, who is familiar with the show’s finances.

  “Thirty million is ‘astronomical,’ ” snorted Julie, “and meanwhile the Spider-Man movie costs a quarter-BILLION. And David, it’s not really going to be thirty million anyway, is it.”

  “Uh, no no . . . it’s more like twenty-three . . . twenty-four—”

  “And who wants a ten-million-dollar Spider-Man musical anyway!? That’s just stupid. And you know, The Lion King, in 2007 dollars, cost easily thirty million—it’s just that nobody cares, cause it’s taken in over a billion in grosses . . .”

  We were eager to check out Spider-Man 3 because the teasers suggested that Peter Parker would be drifting toward the “darker” side of superherodom. Julie was hoping Marvel’s exploration of darker themes would give her license to touch on some grittier material herself.

  But we and the rest of the audience were disenchanted by the results on-screen. Peter’s “darkness” was mostly a new, emo-style haircut, a surly attitude, and an out-of-left-field dance number. That number, along with a song Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane performed, prompted Spider-Man junkies online to predict that Taymor’s Broadway musical was going to be nothing more than two and a half hours’ worth of the very worst parts of Spider-Man 3.

  We clearly needed to inoculate this show against potential embarrassment. Julie and I went back to Dublin in June 2007 for three more days of work with the boys, with all of us making sure we didn’t lose sight of the storm clouds inside every adolescent.

  “I’m not the crack of the pavement . . . I’m not the trash can overflowing,” suggested Julie, trying to pin down Mary Jane’s frame of mind. “That’s such a teenage sentiment. I’m not going to let the place define me.”

  Edge and Bono nodded in agreement. They’d been there. Bono grew up in Ballymun, five miles from Dublin’s center, near a dodgy tower block called Seven Towers. Barely out of their teenaged years, the two lads would become—like Peter Parker—as close to mythic figures as the real world allowed. Walking down the street with Edge or Bono, I would see on the faces of pedestrians the same reaction as the cabbie or child in a Marvel comic book whenever Spider-Man swooped by: Eyes would widen, mouths would gape, and they’d point, as if they’d just seen a giraffe.

  So now Edge and Bono were making the case that Peter Parker was “an indie kid, like Kurt Cobain before Nirvana”—back when Kurt was considered the geekiest kid in his high school. After Peter is beat up at school, what he sang had to feel real.

  Bono closed his eyes to concentrate. “I hear it as bummed-out garage rock.”

  Bono then sang the verse while demonstrating how to “walk home dejectedly.” He started at the back of the room and slinked toward us, moving with the feline yet masculine strides only rock stars can get away with.

  Edge grimaced. “Could you try and be more like the geeks?”

  “Edge is giving me geek lessons,” explained Bono, apologetically.

  “He’s having a hard time,” said Edge, shaking his head with a grin.

  Moments later, however, the room was shot through with tension as Julie insisted with an unnerving fervor how “Think Again” (Arachne’s song of vengeance) needed to get to “an unearthly, terror-rising, terrifying moment.” She explained how Arachne was so enraged by Peter Parker’s betrayal, she was now “pulling the vaults of heaven and hell into her presence.”

  Like Arachne, Julie herself seemed to possess this frightening capacity to rain down retribution. The day after I landed the Spider-Man job, a former assistant director for The Lion King told me how he witnessed Julie dressing down an assistant designer for wasting her time. He said he had never seen anything like it: “It was like one of those sixteenth-century disembowelments.”

  In Julie and Elliot Goldenthal’s Grendel, the moment comes when the monster embraces its monstrous nature and unleashes a juggernaut of havoc. In Julie’s short film Fool’s Fire, the dwarf-jester Hopfrog brings down destruction on his royal tormentors. The climax of Titus, Julie’s first feature-length film, has the title character slaking his thirst for revenge in an orgy of cannibalism and carnage. Through the large glass windows of Edge’s guesthouse, we could see storm clouds rolling in from the Irish Sea, and as Julie conveyed Arachne’s fury, you could half believe it was Julie summoning those clouds. When I yowl at my five-year-old to stop jumping on the furniture, he bursts with laughter because I look like an idiot. Julie, on the other hand, possessed a demigod-like talent to unleash chthonic weather systems capable of sending wild beasts scattering. And all I could think whenever I witnessed one of these exhibitions was, God, I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of those. And, of course, one day . . . I would.

  But for now, faith and fellowship were ever-blooming. Bono and Edge were bona fide collaborators. It wasn’t sheer luck or a random fact that they’d been working together since the 1970s, or even that Bono’s wife, Ali, was Bono’s high school sweetheart. The collaborative ethic was in their bones. I mean, with their résumés? Edge and Bono could have acted sniffy with me. But they didn’t. They banished every idea of an artistic hierarchy. They made the days and minutes about the work.

  If Bono seemed a little sapped during our meetings this week, we can cut him some slack—his mornings were spent in international diplomacy, his afternoons on writing songs, and his evenings being the father of four. And “sapped” is relative—he was still overflowing with ideas—good ones, lousy ones, it didn’t matter because there was always another one on the way.

  And even though Bono did more of the talking, you could catch him every now and then glancing toward Edge with the same expression I hope I’ll be wearing for my wife in our garden as we tend to the squashes in our sunset years. The glance that said, I know that you’re the brains behind Pa. And what a good egg Edge was—earnest, conscientious; and Julie—geez. Whenever I saw her, I felt the way Jane and Michael Banks felt the day Mary Poppins showed up at their door.

  Really, as far as I could tell, our only problem was that Edge and Bono were off to Fez, Morocco, the next day to work on their new U2 album with bandmates Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton (work that would yield No Line on the Horizon two years later). Our composers still had twenty songs to finish for our musical before the July reading.

  Twenty songs.

  One month.

  • • •

  Hello Entertainment had rented out three rooms at Chelsea Studios, down on Twenty-sixth Street, for the first two weeks of July 2007. In the biggest of the rooms, where the reading would be held, Teese Gohl had assembled two guitar players, a keyboardist, and one multicolored-Mohawk-sporting drummer, as well as an array of computers programmed to produce more sounds, and also some heavy-duty speakers and subwoofers. Considering how small the room was, all this was going to make an impact.

  The Swiss, avuncular Teese Gohl was the show’s music supervisor. Back in 1987, Teese produced Elliot Goldenthal’s first film score (Pet Sematary), and he has worked with Elliot and Julie ever since. He was now trying to get the band up to speed with hurriedly produced music charts.

  Though Edge and Bono were going to drop by the room from time to time to mentor t
he musicians, they were mostly going to be cloistered in a smaller room generating all the lyrics they hadn’t gotten to yet. No plush couches, no open-air courtyard with trickling fountain and birds trilling in the trees like in their working space in Morocco. They were musical theatre composers this month, so all they got was a long table and some uncomfortable folding chairs. With hushed-voiced astonishment, Edge guitar tech and master roadie Dallas Schoo would end up remarking that in twenty years with the boys, he had never seen them as focused as they were these weeks.

  The first song the lads completed was “Bouncing Off the Walls,” their “throw-yourself-around-the-room” song. The finished lyrics read like—well, like “bongelese”:

  And if feels like a flood

  Tidal wave in your blood

  Like a rush

  Body crush

  Sky-hook in the neighborhood . . .

  There was, however, method in it. The story of Peter Parker was like the story of Everyteen, which included waking up to a new body whipsawing you from depression to mania. According to neuroscientists, the brain of the adolescent is crackling with more dopamine activity than at any other time in one’s life. This means that everything a teenager does or feels is just that much more vivid. The prefrontal cortex of the adolescent is still developing, so more primitive, emotional parts of the brain have an outsized influence. Our composers were trying to honor these neurological facts. They wanted a straight transcription from Peter Parker’s limbic system, catching the flow in midsentence. (I mean, who starts a song with “And”?) In other words, the song could be a personal account by any adolescent hopped up on a Frappuccino and throwing himself around the room with an air guitar and the stereo blasting.

  And the fish they are fed

  As you fall off your floating bed

  And you dive in the pool

  That is the window of your room

  And you swim ouuuut . . .

  Traditionalists would call the song insipid. We thought it was fucking inspired.

  For “Rise Above,” the lads wanted the song to embody one of their go-to proverbs: “It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” Like any teenager (like Edge and Bono enraged enough by the Troubles to write “Sunday Bloody Sunday”), Peter’s growing awareness of the sickening injustice in the world spills over after his uncle Ben has been murdered. These feelings slowly transmute, however, into the revelation that

  Every heart that bleeds

  Will color your world red

  And the sorrow in the night

  Will be the blue you cannot shed . . .

  The “red” and the “blue” refer to the colors of the Spider-Man costume, which was about to make its big reveal. In other words, the iconic Spider-Man costume wasn’t just “a costume”—it was the outward display of his suffering. Peter was literally going to wear his pain. But would any—and I mean any—of that come across to an audience? Would the soaring music and Julie’s staging compensate for any lyrical woolliness? These were good questions. We didn’t ask them.

  As a standard Actors’ Equity–approved staged reading, only twenty-nine hours of rehearsal time were allotted. But several of the actors had worked with Julie before, and that was going to make her job easier. Six of the actors were recent alumni of Across the Universe. Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood, the movie’s leads, would be Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. Their mutual friend T. V. Carpio, who played heartsick lesbian Prudence and sang “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in the movie, would be “The Girl Geek.” And David Chandler, Julie’s companion from Oberlin College days, had agreed to play the Green Goblin.

  So confidentiality statements were signed, scripts were distributed, and the sweltering summer days were spent in high spirits. Evan Rachel Wood’s flowing-haired hippie look in Across the Universe had evolved into Vogue magazine–ready black club dresses and black nail polish now that she was dating Goth-rocker Marilyn Manson. But her alabaster cool melted when she heard her new Edge and Bono–penned songs. “No way! That’s my favorite!” she shrieked, when Bono confirmed they sampled a sound from David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes.” She was already staking a claim to be Mary Jane “for the real one.” She didn’t want anyone else debuting these songs.

  Jim Sturgess, meanwhile, seemed like he knew his career was about to break big once Universe opened in September. Whether he’d commit to performing Peter on Broadway was an open question. But he was obviously having a fine time that week in New York. During one raucous session while learning “Boy Falls From the Sky,” Jim suddenly found himself with Bono for a backup singer. The two of them shared one microphone as they belted the final lines of the song: “To give you must yourself receive / And when you do / . . . Then belieeeeve!”

  The band whomped a final chord, and the rehearsal room erupted into whistles and applause. Suddenly aware of the hyper-sincerity of the lyric, Bono slipped into a Green Goblin drawl to catcall his own song. “Bravo, bravo. ‘Belieeeeeeve.’ Boy, that’s pow’r’ful stuff, ain’t it?!” The line went straight into the script.

  Feeling confident, we did a run-through of the show the night before the reading. Hoo, was it lousy. Shrill, amateurish, embarrassing dreck. But that always happened with first run-throughs. Almost always. Anyone up for a drink? Or five?

  • • •

  Only eighty seats could fit in the biggest of the rented rooms, and on July 16 they were filled with investors and representatives from Marvel. The actors filed in. Julie got the nod from an ashen-faced David Garfinkle. She stood in front of the audience with winsome anxiousness.

  “So this is the thing about Spider-Man. It’s a very visual piece. Look how gorgeous it looks.”

  She mockingly swept her hand behind her at this drop-ceilinged room cluttered with performers and sound equipment.

  “Glen’s going to read the stage directions, but there will be places where that just won’t work, and you’ll just have to go with the flow.”

  Julie flashed me a “well-here-goes-nothing” smile. I leaned into the mike.

  “Okay, then. Act One.”

  The opening musical notes jolted the audience to attention. The Geeks’ first scene was actually entertaining. Jim’s and Evan’s charisma filled the room, and we were off to the races. Everything we had hoped the script contained was now coming alive in front of us: Jameson’s bluster amid the bustle of the Daily Bugle; the psychopathically charged tension between the Green Goblin and Spider-Man; the ululating electricity of Arachne’s “Think Again”; the bleak, hushed intimacy of Mary Jane’s “If the World Should End.” The story, the humor, and the whole emotional palette were being delivered, and now there was just one more scene:

  Glen: Mary Jane falls screaming into the abyss. Peter’s web-shooter fails him. He impulsively leaps. He is revealed as having fallen into a giant web. Arachne stands over him.

  We never had time to sit down with Teese to discuss how to underscore this final confrontation between Arachne and Peter. The music had to be something to get hearts racing, but Teese—at a loss, but knowing he needed to improvise something—began playing a slow, wistful sort of thing on the piano. Julie shot a panicked glance my way. This was awful. Peter Parker was trying to discover from a homicidal, eight-legged human-spider hybrid of mythic lore which cocoon his girlfriend was suffocating in, and meanwhile Teese was underscoring an “Eve-has-a-woozy-flashback-about-Chet” scene from an afternoon soap opera, circa 1981. Julie tried to get Teese’s attention, urging him telepathically to pick up the damn tempo, but Teese was too focused on the keyboard to notice.

  The actors finally got through the dialogue and now we were reaching the climactic fight, which we envisioned would one day be performed with spectacular leaps inside a mammoth funnel-shaped web hovering over the audience. I read the stage directions for all they were worth: “A dizzying, frenzied mating dance and Dance of Death all at once!”

  Killingly, it was also another scene no one had time to orchestrate. So the audience was treated
to the recorded placeholder track: a puny galloping beat punctuated with a couple of mewing notes on an organ, all sounding like it was generated for a Donkey Kong video game, circa, oh, 1981. The actors slowed down their dialogue to match the music and a scene that should have taken ninety seconds took over four minutes. I made a mental note to myself not to listen to anyone’s opinions about the last ten minutes of the reading.

  Which would turn out to be a serious mistake.

  Meanwhile, Julie looked like she wanted to crawl under her chair. But! The audience was still with it—they wanted to find out how this whole saga got resolved. So with one final push, we drove toward the ending.

  Glen: A new dawn. The web has disappeared. Light bathes the bare stage.

  The music the band was playing now was surging; it was filling souls with light; it was making these last words work in a way they had absolutely no right to, and I rode it, baby, I rode it:

  Glen: Peter is awkwardly standing in front of MJ trying to explain. He gives up.

  Peter: (shrugging) I know.

  Mary Jane: I knew it.

  Glen: Peter and MJ kiss. But they’re interrupted by a wailing ambulance siren, distracting Peter. MJ shrugs, nods with a grin. Peter Parker shoots a web, and he soars away toward the rising sun over the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

  The End.

  The music reached a crescendo with a final roll on the big drums, and Pow. Applause, whistles, wild whoops. Julie sneaked a glance my way, then slumped in relief.

  Bono was already back in Ireland. He missed the whole thing. A beloved aunt had passed, and he needed to be back for the funeral. No matter. The work, for now, was done, and Edge would of course report back to his partner the consensus of the investors, agents, producers, and Marvel representatives in the room: The top of Act Two needed work, a couple of songs required some rethinking, and . . . we had nothing to worry about. This show was going to be a blockbuster.