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

by Berger, Glen

  And when such a gambit didn’t work? Then it was just a lot of embarrassingly clunky machinery. But we were pretty sure having Peter acknowledge the cables would immunize the scene from awkwardness. Pretty sure. The trick to doing any scene with cables was remembering that the scene was not about the hardware, it was about the emotion. In this case, it was about Peter’s joy, his exhilaration. “Hook me up, Joe!” A shout-out to a crew guy almost said it better than the flying effect itself—Peter was so exuberant he was breaking the fourth wall! We just had to remember this insight when it came time to put it onstage.

  And . . . we didn’t.

  Moving on, here were two stage directions near the beginning of the script that I wrote in five easy seconds: “Arachne’s weavers make a giant tapestry”; and “The tapestry is destroyed by Athena.” Danny had a notion for how to achieve this, and recruited eight dancer-acrobats from Los Angeles who were unafraid of heights.

  With a wistful chuckle, Danny once told me how he and Julie nearly killed each other during their first project together—a 1995 production of Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman. But Julie was loyal and Julie was practical—she stuck to artists she could trust. Danny was now one of her closest confidants, having choreographed The Green Bird in 2000, and then Across the Universe. In that film, the football players careening off each other with bruising grace; the businessmen heading to work with shifting synchrony; the balletic horseplay in the bowling alley—they were all Danny’s brainchildren. One of the original members of the groundbreaking dance troupe MOMIX, he had a rakish, Jewish, and—rare for male choreographers—unmistakably heterosexual vibe. He shared many of the qualities of other longtime Taymor collaborators—talented of course, and also not easily daunted, and—crucially—good-natured.

  And now Danny was standing in front of eight thirty-foot-long loops of silk. Eight dancers stood at the ready on a platform. “Arachne’s Theme” blasted over the speakers, the kettledrums thundering. Then, on the downbeat (and it had to be exactly on cue or the whole sequence would get completely fouled up), four dancers leaped onto the looped bottoms of their silks, and—SWOOOSH—swung out directly toward us.

  Right as they reached their farthest point of oscillation, the dancers threw open their arms in unison, stretching the silk and fleetingly evoking angels or pale Luna Moths. Simultaneously, a long banner of silk launched from the floor behind the four swinging weavers—WHOOM-CLACK. The banner blasted thirty feet up in a blink, sent up by a couple of fearsome air compressors.

  The four swinging weavers were now beginning to swing backward, just as the four remaining weavers leaped onto their loops and swung out toward us. Another banner of silk launched between the two groups of swinging weavers, and meanwhile, the chorale resounding through the soundstage was suggesting to our various sense organs that some heavenly realm was opening up before us.

  In front of our eyes, eight giant horizontal silks were being woven between the dancers’ eight vertical silks. With the silks gently fluttering, the result looked like some immense pot holder made by a seven-year-old god. The air was then released from the compressors, and the horizontal silks collapsed toward the ground—CLACK-CLACKETY-CLACK—as if destroyed by a displeased goddess of wisdom. Danny Ezralow—that son of a gun—he did it. He turned two sentences’ worth of stage directions into the first showstopper of the show.

  Fired up, Julie began describing to lighting designer Don Holder how the finished tapestry could be used as a projection screen, upon which threads of light could “weave” to form an animated image, as if Arachne was “working her loom.”

  In Ovid’s telling of the myth, Arachne’s tapestry cheekily depicted the gods committing embarrassing acts. But Julie didn’t want an animated scene of humans and animals rendered in an “ancient Greek” style. She wanted “an abstract image.” She wanted the threads of light to suggest the image of a sun. It was clean, with a Zen-like appeal.

  But privately, I wondered if maybe narratively it wasn’t the best choice. We had to assume that hardly anyone in the audience would come into the theatre knowing the myth of Arachne. Therefore, we had to make sure they got—really got—the idea that the images Arachne created on her loom were so vivid that they seemed—as described by Ovid—to be alive. As I would eventually have to write for an insert in the program, “woven bulls bellowed and leapt, rivers roared, and the water made of thread splashed those who came near her tapestries.” If this concept wasn’t drilled into the audiences’ heads, if the idea wasn’t understood that Arachne was as much a master illusionist as a weaver, then the arrival of illusory supervillains in Act Two—i.e., the musical’s main plot point—would feel random and confusing.

  “Julie, also, are we worried about this? The story we’re telling is of a tapestry-weaving contest between Arachne and Athena, but we’re only showing one tapestry.”

  Julie looked over her glasses and asked me with the warmest affection twinkling in her eyes: “You have a better idea?”

  She knew that I didn’t have a better idea.

  “I’m working on it,” I answered, cagily.

  Julie shook her head. “I think the audience understands the weaving competition from what the Girl Geek says.”

  “If the audience hears it,” I mumbled.

  “Well why wouldn’t you hear it?” she pounced, addressing the whole table of designers. “I’m sorry—I think ‘story theatre,’ where you show everything, is a drag. I really think the most important thing is that a girl turns into a spider. That’s all you really need to know—that she’s Arachne, and she’s gonna get mad.”

  If it became a problem it would be a discussion for another day, I supposed. Anyway, an easy-enough correction somewhere down the line. Surely.

  The week was capped by two days of strenuous discussion in a hotel conference room, the whole team reviewing and re-reviewing every cable, winch, and motor-related aspect of the show. “Fly tracks,” “cable dressing,” “pick points”—really the snack table was all I could focus on. But everyone else was with it. Even producer Martin McCallum turned out to be an engineering wonk, pointing out things like how “the downstage cables have to lift the subfloor, so now you’re doing a cantilever that’s forty feet long.” It was twelve hours of that. For as many as eleven of the twelve hours, the primary speaker was Julie, who trudged through the whole show, thinking out loud and receiving confirmations or clarifications from the rest of the team.

  We adjourned with many a technical question yet to be answered, but with producers confident enough to begin looking in earnest for a place to house this spectacle. We planned to be in rehearsals for Turn Off the Dark by May 2009. Just sixteen months away.

  • • •

  There was no way Chicago was happening. The original intention was to have twelve weeks of performances in David Garfinkle’s hometown. But once it became clear just how much reconfiguring a theatre would have to undergo to accommodate the show, the idea of doing an almost-three-month run in Chicago just so it could all be dismantled and reconstructed in New York seemed ludicrous.

  “And what’s the purpose of out-of-town tryouts anyway?” we were all asking. Oh, there was a time when artists and producers could tinker with their show in the relatively “safe” environment of a New Haven or D.C. There was a gentleman’s agreement between creators and audience, between producers and media, that no one would consider the out-of-town show as anything other than “a draft.”

  But these days? At the end of the summer of 2007, The Little Mermaid mounted an out-of-town tryout in Denver, while Shrek the Musical debuted in Seattle, and thanks to the Internet and its bloggers, the entire industry back in New York, as well as scores of Broadway fans, were chattering about every single detail of the productions. It was guaranteed that Spider-Man—already proving to be a media-magnet—would be treated like a frog in a tenth-grade biology class. And those frogs never turn out well.

  And did we even want feedback from an out-of-town audience? Julie kept
a nice selection of rants in her rant cellar about “art by poll.” Were we not theatrically savvy enough to figure out what improvements were needed on our own? Wasn’t this mania for focus-grouping everything leading to nothing but bland, dumbed-down fare?

  And besides (and this reason was the head-spinner): There wasn’t much we’d be able to change about our show anyway. If our technical elements worked at all, it would be because a mind-numbing number of hours had been spent figuring out how to transition from one technical event to the next. Messing with that sequence in any way would send our whole Rube Goldberg contraption toppling.

  Which was all to say that rewriting during the preview period would have to be minimal. The script—structurally speaking—had to be pretty much the same script from the first New York preview to our opening night some fifty performances later.

  Were we anxious about this? Nope. Not with that killer reading back in July. If you looked carefully at Martin McCallum’s face, you’d see it twitch a bit when these facts were mentioned, but even Martin recognized we had no alternative.

  Given the show’s financial and technical parameters, David Garfinkle and Martin McCallum had a pretty clear idea what kind of New York theatre they were looking for: a big one.

  There were only three non-Disney-owned Broadway theatres that could comfortably house Turn Off the Dark and two of them were booked (with Wicked and Shrek). This left the Hilton Theatre. Since first opening in 1998 as the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, the 1,800-seat theatre had been consistently described as a barn. You usually don’t want to perform a Broadway show in a barn. Intimacy is what you’re going for. But if you’re swinging spider-men and other spider-like creatures over the audience’s head, a “barn” suddenly doesn’t sound so bad.

  Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein was currently running in the Hilton, but it had gotten poor reviews. It became an open secret among Broadway insiders that Turn Off the Dark was circling Young Frankenstein like a starving vulture. Finally, in January 2009, Young Frankenstein gave up the ghost, and the theatre was ours.

  Julie was disappointed. She didn’t want Spider-Man on Broadway. Bono and Edge weren’t married to the idea either. If the show was on Broadway, it was just going to be judged by the same old hidebound Broadway criteria, and this show was different. (“Let’s not even call it a musical,” said Julie to her cocreators. “It’s a ‘circus-rock-and-roll-drama,’ so let’s start calling it that.” And we did. Every chance we got.)

  But settling on a theatre meant that the Hilton’s specific dimensions could start getting inserted into the blueprints and plugged into flight-programming equations. Set design meetings could finally begin in earnest. And I started thinking a lot about that quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the same fellow who wrote The Little Prince: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

  Because if we were merely servants doing one person’s bidding, then we would never get this massive ship built. Julie had inspired us all with her vision of a dream-island not found on any map. So through the winter, spring, and summer of 2008, meetings scheduled to break by dinnertime routinely went well past midnight, the weather and light of Queens shifting outside those warehouse windows of George Tsypin’s third-floor studio.

  Martin McCallum said certain cuts to the set had to happen if our budget was going to retain a semblance of sanity. The big snag budget-wise was the flying. Those motors and winches were far too expensive to buy. So they had to be rented. But, oh man, were they expensive to rent. And the extra crew needed to supervise the flying was also boosting the price tag. So we had to trim the budget wherever we could. Julie did not—

  Wait, I’m going to start another paragraph here, because this really needs to be stressed—

  Julie did not balk at the idea of cutting down production costs. She heard the concern in Martin’s voice, and she leaped into the breach. What was important? What wasn’t? What about those giant beakers in Osborn’s laboratory—did we really need three? No? Great, cut a giant beaker.

  We understood this was a business venture, and we understood that some of the stuff was expensive, but if we got rid of too much of the good stuff, we wouldn’t sell as many tickets, right? And what was the real worry? Because it wasn’t as if we couldn’t find some extra funds. As David Garfinkle told Julie and me on several occasions, “If there’s one thing we don’t have to worry about, it’s money.” Heck, there was a waiting list of investors hoping to get a piece of the action. And if it took an extra month or two of performances to recoup those extra funds—so what? What was an extra month or two when you took the long view—the years the show was going to run, the other productions it was going to spawn. “But yes, Martin, we hear you, and look—we just cut a giant beaker!” Just so long as he didn’t make us lose the model subway train with the little working headlight that crossed the stage after the bullying song. Totally unnecessary, that train. But just so cool.

  After yet another meeting, Julie and I staggered in the middle of the night to her upstate home, where she collapsed into a chair.

  “I feel old,” she reported.

  Old. She had just been presiding over fifteen hours of design meetings without a break. I was feeling like one of those small dried fish in a Chinatown barrel of small dried fish, but Julie? She was looking fine. When it came to Art, she had the stamina of a washing machine. She was wearing a ridiculous knit hat from Peru or Tibet, drinking a can of Foster’s, and keeping me up trying to nail down a way to end the show; trying to find a way around our technical obstacles. It was four a.m.

  “What is it you want to see?” she asked me, circling back to the question of Arachne’s transformation.

  “Well . . .”

  But seriously. It was four a.m.

  • • •

  When Marvel sent their notes to Hello Entertainment after the workshop reading in the summer of ’07, they listed three concerns under the heading “Specific Reasons why the Musical, if Unchanged, Will Adversely Affect Marvel’s Brand.” They wanted to make sure that 1) secondary characters (like Arachne) didn’t overshadow primary characters; 2) the show didn’t get too sexy; and under 3) they wrote: “Marvel requires that the technology in all respects be cutting edge.”

  Good. No argument from us. In fact, this note seemed to be encouraging Turn Off the Dark’s producers and creators to spend some extra coin. Which is why a contingent of designers, as well as Martin, David, Julie, and I, were on Long Island one Monday in August 2008, in a small office space in an anonymous industrial park near the Westbury LIRR stop. We were in the market for some cutting-edge technology.

  In keeping with the skill-set described in the ancient myth, Arachne’s superpower was her ability to create “lifelike” images in order to captivate (literally “hold captive”) her audience. With Arachne’s supernatural artistry, she would deceive the citizens of New York. She would make it appear as if the adversaries Spider-Man had already dispatched had returned. Arachne was hoping the illusory “Sinister Six” would sow the citywide panic that would draw Peter Parker out of his self-imposed retirement.

  The best reason for bookwriters to devise such a plot would be so that the production could exploit cutting-edge 3-D technology; to trump the eye candy of Act One with imposing, terrifying holograph-like villains who suddenly appeared and vanished again onstage or—better yet—in the aisles next to delighted and petrified young ticketholders.

  In fact, if that 3-D technology wasn’t feasible, then coming up with such a plot would be . . . weird. And now a year after the workshop reading, we were learning that the technology wasn’t . . . maybe all that . . . feasible.

  Those ghosts in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion attraction were nearly the effect we were looking for, and the Imagineers cooked that one up back in the sixties. We thought surely there had been advances. And indeed, a fashion show for Diesel in the summer of ’0
7 presented live models walking a catwalk while manatees and giant sea turtles swam through empty space right next to them.

  That. We wanted that. The effect was created with an antique technique known as Pepper’s ghost. But the illusion relied on mirrors, large panes of glass, and projectors. And after hours of set-design meetings it was determined that our whole production would have to be configured solely for the purpose of achieving this optical illusion, when it had already been rigidly configured to achieve the dozens of other effects required in the show.

  So in a last-ditch effort to get three-dimensional illusions into Spider-Man, we took a train to Westbury to meet with Gene Dolgoff, 3-D pioneer, and the fellow responsible for those security holograms on credit cards.

  Gene wasn’t promising us two-dimensional images that appeared three-dimensional. He was promising actual three-dimensional projections. He patiently explained the technology to us, but we couldn’t be confident that this would actually work in a theatre. Halfway through the tour Julie got a headache from looking at all the blurry imagery. We left Mr. Dolgoff ’s office thinking 3-D was perhaps the way of the future, but the Sinister Six’s future was going to have to be strictly two-dimensional.

  So where did that leave us?

  We had already imagined that most of the Sinister Six’s apocalyptic hijinks would be presented as “news clips” on George Tsypin’s thirty-foot-tall LED screens. So now we just needed to make it clear to the audience that no one had actually witnessed these horrific acts firsthand. This framing would give us the wiggle room for Arachne to claim later that the Sinister Six and all their scenes of destruction were just illusions.

  This plot-contortion seemed like a bit of a stretch. I informally polled the team. Everyone shrugged the “Whaddyagonnado?” shrug, and it was true that there was nothing to be done.

  But.

  Without the audience really experiencing the illusions as illusions, would the audience truly comprehend the most important plot point in the show? For the first time since beginning work on this Spider-Man thing, a little vein in my brain began to throb—a nagging pin drop of a voice that said, This show won’t be everything we want it to be. I ignored the voice. Told no one else about it. Except . . . and I couldn’t be sure because the voice was so soft, but . . . maybe the voice wasn’t saying, “Want it to be.”