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

by Berger, Glen

  Maybe it was saying, “Need it to be.”

  Might Michael Curry have a solution? We would never know—Michael was no longer with the show. Just a week before, Julie happened upon the website for Michael Curry Design Inc. Images swam in front of her, including shots from The Lion King and Julie’s production of The Magic Flute. And all these designs were credited solely to Michael Curry. In the main, the credits were referring to Michael’s contribution to the engineering aspect of the designs, and not Julie’s aesthetic contributions. But Julie found the attribution ambiguous. She found it deceptive. In fact, she found it smacking of theft.

  She didn’t take a few breaths. She didn’t count to five. She immediately grabbed the phone and punched Michael’s number. A phone rang in Oregon. Julie’s chthonic weather system hit the West Coast unannounced.

  “It was as if I was standing outside of myself, watching myself on the phone,” said Julie, shaken and repentant in the aftermath.

  Even the most financially strapped artists choose their projects with a degree of freedom. No competent work ever gets produced with a battered ego, and cash isn’t what makes for a fruitful group venture. It’s a different currency the artist is seeking—trust, respect, the open ear and open mind. Before the end of the week, Hello Entertainment had received a note from Oregon informing them that Michael Curry Design Inc.’s schedule was too full to commit to Spider-Man at this time. Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. But not having Michael Curry would become a problem.

  But that was down the line, and at the moment, Julie was more concerned with the question of just who in our inner circle was yapping to the press. This was the autumn of ’08, and the financial markets were in free fall. Cue Michael Riedel over at the New York Post:

  In this economy, everybody’s tightening their belts. Everybody, that is, but Julie Taymor. The genius director has never met a budget she didn’t blow right past. Case in point: Spider-Man, whose budget has ballooned to $40 million, making it the most expensive production in theater history. Some of the people involved are starting to blanch at the price tag.

  Riedel knew very well that Julie spent almost her entire career working within the constraints of Off-Broadway budgets, or cobbling together productions over in Indonesia out of some muslin and secondhand bamboo. “Never met a budget she didn’t blow right past”? Come on. But it was one of the most toxic acids to be thrown at a director’s reputation: “she’s profligate, and la-dee-da in her profligacy.”

  “The musical has a rock score by Bon Jovi—”

  Hah. What a tool. It’s Bono, not Bon Jovi, you idiot.

  “. . . (Quite a good score, I’m told; the messy book is another matter)—”

  Wait—What? Who was telling him the book was “messy”?! Who had even seen the book? Damn it, Riedel, now it was getting personal.

  “Where’s all that money going?”

  The motors and winches! This wasn’t Spring Awakening. We couldn’t just put twelve chairs on a stage and call it a day. Look at Cirque du Soleil: LOVE cost $175 million! KÀ was $220 million!

  “The source adds: ‘[Julie] doesn’t care what it costs. Does not care at all.’ ”

  Who was “the source,” damn it? We all wanted to know. David Garfinkle didn’t have any answers, but he promised to root out the mole before we all became paranoid. Meanwhile, Julie had started packing for a two-month trip to Hawaii. She was heading to Lāna’i to shoot her film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, because somehow she managed to find the time that year to also prep for a feature film.

  Julie returned from Lāna’i in early 2009 to learn from David and Martin that Spider-Man’s timeline was getting pushed eighteen weeks because of set-building delays. It was our first postponement. There would be others.

  The next day at the Tsypin studio in Queens, calendars were out and being amended. Yes, we were at another set-design meeting. The whole gang was there this time. Martin McCallum was getting tetchy about the costs of the show. The proscenium was too expensive, said Martin. It needed to be simplified.

  “I did simplify it,” said George, wearily. “It’s as simple as it’s going to be.”

  And now, with the afternoon light fading, the discussion turned to the web ring.

  Of all the big technical hurdles, the web ring was the biggest of them all. If technical director Fred Gallo and his production team could pull it off, it would be a truly unprecedented engineering feat. It would generate a stack of patents. It would be a coup de théâtre to top everything we had thrown at the audience so far.

  The idea was that after Peter leaped off the bridge to save Mary Jane, the audience would suddenly become aware of madness over their heads. Hitherto concealed in an enormous ring-shaped metal truss, a vast funnel-shaped web would begin to unfurl like a whirlpool made of netting. Through the gaps in this rope-and-wire sculpture stretching over rows and rows of seats, the audience would witness the climactic battle between Spider-Man and Arachne.

  Here was the problem: Arachne’s web was essentially a net. And for thousands of years, netting has had really only one purpose: to catch things. Fish, trapeze performers, butterflies. So: How do you reliably deploy a massive net without it catching on every stray bolt, prong, or you-name-it that was contained in a truss necessary for the automated deployment of a giant funnel-shaped web? Because a giant web all tangled up twenty feet over the audience would kill the show, just kill it, and kill it right at its climax.

  Fred Gallo—with the build and demeanor of Joe Pesci, and the brain of Archimedes—was thinking maybe the solution lay somewhere in a structure known as a “tambour,” which was basically a rolling door made of hinged slats that slid in a groove. Fred explained how a tambour-like structure in the ring truss would enable the net to emerge in a gradual and tidy fashion, averting tangles. “Tambour.” Sounded promising. We had all learned a new word, anyhow.

  The two options were to build a scale model of this ring truss for eighty thousand dollars (which might not tell us what we needed to know), or spend a lot more than eighty thousand and build half of the actual piece, and test it in the shop (which still might not tell us what we needed to know). As Fred put it, “We won’t know if it works until we build it.”

  The final product was going to cost one million dollars.

  So should we just build it? Will it work?

  Fred? Was it going to work?

  Three years later, associate designer Rob Bissinger swore to me that never again would he be so idealistic. “Never again will I fuse my heart with a project, like we’re Siamese twins, and if one twin dies the other dies. No way. Never again.”

  We all sat at that table in George’s studio: The assistant director, the costume designer, Teese Gohl, our production manager, three general managers, our producers and their assistants, and still more designers, and me, and Julie—we all sat there feeling a stake in this loony enterprise.

  If you want to build a ship . . . teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

  It was the difference between a sail-hoisting, sextant-wielding crew, and galley slaves working the oars to the beat of a dreary drum. In other words, we were collaborators.

  So when Fred Gallo shook his head, chuckled, shrugged, and finally said, “I think we can get this ring to work . . .” all of us around that table inhaled, braced in our chairs for what we were about to do, and then . . .

  We nodded. We pushed all the chips into the center. We were in. All of us. So okay, Fate—deal the cards.

  And no cheating.

  6

  * * *

  It’s a Process

  Waitaminute. I could be mistaken, but . . . in the middle of the song, does he say . . . ‘shit’?”

  Joe Quesada was Marvel Comics’ editor in chief. Securing Joe’s imprimatur mattered. Which is why David Garfinkle and I were in the conference room of Marvel Comics’ Midtown offices in late February 2009. But after about ten minutes, we had run out of things to talk about, and
with the conversation becoming awkward, David decided to play Joe one last song—the latest version of crowd-pleaser “Boy Falls From the Sky.”

  The final two minutes of this lengthy song are sung over a swirling bed of electric guitar chords increasing in intensity. The words themselves sorta wash over you, which is why it was surprising that Joe asked us when the song ended if “shit” was in the lyrics.

  David and I cleared our throats.

  “What? No. Uh . . .”

  “Maybe. Wait. Oh . . . oh yeah.”

  The lads and Julie—all of us, actually—enjoyed the existence of that one profanity in the show. It was that one pebble of grit in an otherwise family-friendly spectacle, but Joe’s voice was full of urgency.

  “Peter Parker can’t say that. He just doesn’t. Ever. For all these years we’ve been very careful to make sure Spider-Man never resorts to that kind of language.”

  David and I assured Joe that we got what he was saying, and that we’d talk to Bono and Edge about it. And I really did get it, and two years later it would wind up affecting decisions more consequential than what to do with a four-letter word. What Joe unintentionally put in my head was that we had been entrusted with a living artifact; that Spider-Man wasn’t globally popular by accident; that Spider-Man was an icon and that our job was not to be iconoclasts.

  David and I left the Marvel offices fretting that the word was the one lasting impression we left with Joe. But the next day, Joe Quesada sent a tweet to thousands of followers:

  G’morning, Marvel U! Woke up with Spider-Man Musical songs in my head. Curse you Bono and Edge, why do I love you so?!?!

  The tweet was money in the bank. Turn Off the Dark was on a roll. Opening night had finally been officially announced. Group tickets were actually on sale. That same week, U2 released its twelfth studio album, No Line on the Horizon, and Rolling Stone magazine gave it five stars out of five—“their best album since ’91’s Achtung Baby.” And asked about Spider-Man on the red carpet before the Oscars, Evan Rachel Wood not only confirmed she was “definitely going to do it,” but added, in front of the live cameras to millions of viewers, that “the show is incredible.”

  And Jim Sturgess? Was he in? Julie was hopeful, but was still waiting to hear back from him. He was busy shooting Peter Weir’s The Way Back, so he wasn’t answering any e-mails.

  Then, on March 10, 2009, Evan sent word to Julie that she couldn’t play Mary Jane after all. No explanation why. Maybe Marilyn Manson didn’t want his girlfriend in New York City while he lived in Los Angeles. It didn’t matter. She was out.

  So we needed to find some singers, and quick. Because in the auditorium of The TimesCenter in two weeks’ time, a few hundred ticket agents were going to be treated to an hour-long teaser of the show. How aggressively these agents were going to push Turn Off the Dark over all the other Broadway shows vying for attention depended on how carbonated this teaser could get the agents before they headed back into the street.

  So a few singers from the 2007 workshop reading were recruited, including T. V. Carpio. But with Jim Sturgess skinning deer on set in Bulgaria and in no hurry to leave, who was going to deliver the big Peter Parker songs?

  Knowing Julie was on the lookout for a young, up-and-coming actor to play Peter Parker, T. V. Carpio told Julie the year before to check out Reeve Carney, the lead singer of an L.A.-based band called Carney. When Julie caught a Carney show in New York, she agreed with T. V. that the young man with the unfairly gorgeous face and dreamy tenor voice was destined for great things. But was he dweeby Everyboy Peter Parker? With that long hair, and that bone structure, he was more like royalty. Ah, wait! Julie ran him through a quick audition, and Reeve—with almost no acting experience—was on a plane to Lāna’i to be Prince Ferdinand in Julie’s Tempest playing opposite Helen Mirren, Alan Cumming, and other luminaries. As Julie recalled later, he was the only one who auditioned for the role who convinced her that “he believed in love.”

  But Julie still didn’t know if Reeve could pull off Peter Parker. And Reeve, for his part, was devoting himself full-time to his band, working alongside his brother and lead guitarist, Zane, another handsome and lanky Carney. (The lankiness was part of a genetic legacy shared with their great-granduncle, Honeymooners comedian Art Carney.) However, with no other charismatic young singer available on quick notice, Reeve was summoned to New York, and after a day of rehearsal, he was sent with the four other singers to the green room at The TimesCenter to await their moment onstage.

  Meanwhile, a room was quickly set up for a photo shoot, so that there would be a couple of pictures of the creators for the Turn Off the Dark website, which was going to launch in a month. Edge, Bono, and Julie posed as if for an album cover—arms crossed, no smiles.

  Unexpectedly, they then beckoned me over. God no. I’m not tall, but somehow I’m almost a head taller than my three collaborators. I was in my father-in-law’s old jacket, and my hair that day was late-period Beethoven. But I hooked a thumb into my pocket, and the results on the website a month later were what I expected—I looked Photoshopped into the shots. But the pictures, with pride of place on the site, clearly trumpeted, “These are the four creators. If you love the show, thank these four. And if you don’t, it’s probably the fault of that guy.”

  The auditorium was packed. The media had been barred entry, but a blogger or two managed to get in (and, of course, the Post’s Michael Riedel). The guitar riff from “Boy Falls From the Sky” silenced the crowd, and David Garfinkle appeared at a microphone, gamely smiling under the lights. “Today we are thrilled to be presenting you a behind-the-scenes look at Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark!”

  After a four-minute sizzle reel of highlights from our Los Angeles flying workshop, Julie proceeded to wow the crowd with pictures of the set and some trippy supervillain costume designs that Eiko Ishioka had dreamed up after finishing her last gig designing the costumes for the fourteen thousand performers at the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony. (The onus fell on Spider-Man’s beleaguered associate costume designer, Mary Peterson, to decipher Eiko’s severely broken English.)

  Julie then spoke warmly of Bono and Edge before calling them onto the stage amid hugs and starstruck applause. Edge and Bono swore that without Julie Taymor, they would never have thrown their hats into the ring.

  “As far as I’m concerned, Julie is a national treasure,” Bono averred. “We call her our mentor and our dementor. Because we’ve never met anyone more unreasonable than us.” He turned to Edge.

  “It’s kind of nice getting bossed around by a chick, isn’t it?”

  Edge shrugged daintily. “We like it.”

  Our five singers were then introduced, “Rise Above” began to play, and Reeve stepped up to the microphone. Wearing a lot of long hair and jewelry handmade by his mother, he emoted with closed, fluttering eyelids while contorting his body like Joe Cocker. He usually sang with a guitar strapped to him, so he was feeling very exposed, but he was hiding his discomfort well enough. As skinny as the microphone stand, he conjured up one of those 1940s caricatures of young, raw-boned Frank Sinatra. As Riedel would report the following day—he succeeded in “fluttering the hearts of all the ladies in the auditorium.”

  In fact, an out-of-character Riedel was all positivity about the event. And he wasn’t alone—the verdict was unanimous among those who wrote about it. At the post-event cocktail party in the Westin a couple of blocks away, you could hear bubbly chatter coming from happy Spider-Man investors.

  But along with our two composers, Julie and I were ushered upstairs. In a fluorescent-lit conference room, over some dismal chicken breasts, a dinner meeting ensued with Marvel’s David Maisel and Amy Pascal, the cochairman of Sony Pictures. David and Amy were concerned about the dark and less approachable second act. But Julie deftly pivoted to the subject of publicity. With the enthusiastic backing of Bono and Edge, she pitched her latest idea: a worldwide one-night-only live broadcast of Turn Off the Dark on a thousand movie scree
ns on the musical’s opening night. Amy and David promised to look into it.

  Of course, if the date of opening night were to change after a thousand-screen, international opening had already been booked, the headache would be epic. But why would the date of opening night change? Anyway, the important thing was that we all understood that now was the time to capitalize on the excitement this project was generating. Agents were jockeying for private auditions for their clients. Opening night parties, like the one at Sardi’s for Exit the King that month, were buzzing with gossip about the show. Amateur actors from across America were posting unsolicited audition videos on YouTube.

  And Lesley Stahl and the 60 Minutes crew were now swinging by SIR Studios to film a few minutes of our last music workshop—part of a segment CBS would be airing the night of our first preview. Bono had been enjoying the rare experience of watching others perform his tunes at this workshop. Nonetheless, he shook the cobwebs out of his throat, took a mike, and performed “Boy Falls From the Sky” while the cameras rolled.

  The song had some punishingly high notes, but Bono rose to the occasion, transfixing the film crew as he davened into the microphone, the band behind him urged on by Kimberly Grigsby (our newly hired vocal coach and conductor), who was counting time with snapping wrists and slicing hands, while stomping and undulating on a platform in front of Bono in her bare feet. Lesley Stahl had entered our studio cordial but all business. She left a couple of hours later a gooey-eyed fan.