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

by Berger, Glen

  Meanwhile, just in from Los Angeles, David Campbell was scrutinizing the song’s arrangement with his arms crossed. He was our new orchestrator. The scrawny, tousled-haired fellow had the quickly scribbled appearance of someone out of a Jules Feiffer cartoon. The father of rock star Beck, the obliging and unassuming David Campbell had orchestrated songs on over four hundred gold and platinum albums, but this was David’s first Broadway musical—a fact all of us considered a plus.

  “Boy Falls” was our “eleven o’clock number”—a song sung by the protagonist that delivered the emotional climax of the musical (e.g., “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha, or “Memory” from Cats). There was another kind of eleven o’clock number, however, intended simply to ensure the audience would be alert and refreshed for the musical’s final scenes. These numbers (think “Shipoopi” from The Music Man, or “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story) were often memorable precisely for being so balls-out expendable. “Black Widows on the Town” was ours. As Julie acknowledged, the entire scene—being little more than a sexy arachnid tap dance—could very well end up in the landfill. But Julie wanted to give the concept its best shot, and in her mind, the song Bono and Edge penned wasn’t sealing the deal.

  Julie burst into the little studio room where Bono and Edge were camped out and demanded they write a new song with furious female energy. Forget the club-sound crap. The composers pushed back. Julie pushed back harder. No question about it—the boys were “getting bossed around by a chick.”

  Bono and Edge grouchily sent everyone out of the room, and shut the door. They emerged a couple of hours later with a hard-driving, bizarrely infectious mashup of sampled violin notes, Pixies-inspired punk-surf guitar, and Bono alternating between a bizarre falsetto and a growling Sex Pistols shout, spewing syllables in aggressive bongelese interspersed with “I’m gonna eat ya up!” The new title: “Deeply Furious.” Julie threw her arms around Edge and Bono—huge hugs of gratitude for each of them. No way was this number getting cut now.

  We wrapped up the last of the SIR sessions with the band tearing through a new rendition of “Picture This”: guitars sounding like overheating turbines; cymbals getting bashed; Edge, as Norman Osborn’s wife, singing, “Is this looove?!” over and over, with Bono bongelesing increasingly frantic syllables until it was a machine-gun rat-a-tat that finally devolved into the screams of an idealist getting tortured in a machine of his own devising.

  “It’s so sad,” concluded Julie. “Love.”

  Someone got out the champagne, and we clinked paper cups in Studio 2. And then the whole team took over a Swiss restaurant down the street, with Bono remembering to stand up in the middle of dinner to make a toast. He thanked everybody in the room—the assistants, the engineers—no one was left out. How many toasts had I seen him deliver now? Gracious toasts, amusing toasts, humble toasts, to other people, to the future, to the moment. Instead of a rock star, if he had been born in a nineteenth-century shtetl, he’d have been the badkhn—a Jewish wedding jester—getting the dancing going, working the band, delivering toasts. He would have been just fine in a shtetl. Bono hopped into a town car before dinner ended, accidentally leaving those iconic sunglasses behind on our table. He was always leaving things behind—phones, jackets—he knew this about himself. Julie sighed fondly at the thought of him, then realized, to her chagrin, that he also skipped out on the bill.

  • • •

  The e-mail from Bulgaria wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a blow. Still filming The Way Back—buried in snow and just loving it—Jim Sturgess had written to explain to Julie why his decision to decline the offer to play Peter Parker “has been such a difficult and complicated one.” But it was definitive. He didn’t want his career forever colored by his role as “the Singing Spider-Man.” So now there wasn’t a single actor lined up for our show.

  Bernie Telsey was head of one of the largest casting agencies in New York. Having cast Across the Universe for Julie (Jim Sturgess was a unibrowed unknown when Telsey brought him in to audition), Bernie’s Telsey + Company casting agency was now tasked to find thirty-one cast members for Turn Off the Dark: nine “principals,” eight additional actors to play the dozens of other parts, and fourteen dancers.

  A couple of Telsey reps hopped a plane to conduct open-call auditions in cities across the country. Back in New York, Julie sat behind a long table with Bernie Telsey, David Garfinkle, Teese, and me. I suppose if there were a better way to conduct auditions, it would have been invented by now. Still, it’s always excruciating for everyone—from the actors with their livelihoods on the line, to the people behind the table, who have to hear the dialogue read so many times they begin to feel real hostility toward the scriptwriter. This includes the scriptwriter.

  And by the time the auditioner had been in the room a minute, you could almost guarantee Julie’s mind was already made up. Julie was a snap decider. Not just about auditioners—about everything. Movies, shoes, sandwiches—anything you could have an aesthetic or sense-oriented opinion about, Julie not only had an opinion, but an instant opinion. (According to Julie’s mother, Betty Taymor, Julie didn’t like the wallpaper in her room and told her mother so. When she was three.)

  Of course, that was Julie’s job, wasn’t it—a job that had left her buried in a pile of shiny awards: to cultivate a well-defined, compelling aesthetic and make choice after choice based on that aesthetic. And each of those decisions shuts a few doors; ferries the work closer to finality, with only hindsight revealing which decisions were inconsequential, and which ones were a bullet dodged, or a time bomb triggered. With such stakes, some dithering would be understandable. But when two roads diverged in a yellow wood, Julie rarely broke her stride. The snappiest decider I’ve ever known.

  Nevertheless, here in the audition room, Julie would—practically without fail—give the auditioner her full attention all the way to the end. She didn’t betray her thoughts. Her rules for herself and the others behind the long table were unspoken but clear. No eating during an audition. No taking notes during an audition, certainly no doodling. No whispering. No looking at your watch or your phone. Smile warmly with the hello, be gracious with the parting thank-you.

  Pent-up impatience and disappointment got vented between auditions.

  “Bernie, what would make you think this person is right for the show? In any way right? Haven’t these actors been screened first? How many more like this are we gonna see?! Because this is just a huge waste of time!”

  And Bernie would shrug, sigh contemplatively, and say, “Well . . . it’s a process.”

  Julie’s eyes would then turn skyward. From the throat, something guttural.

  The exchange occurred enough times to get predictable.

  It was a process.

  Julie believed she had made it eminently clear what she was looking for: the charismatic; the authentic; crags, heavy brows, crazy noses. The human masks she’s been sculpting all her life had honest-to-God features. It was better to have that, better to have uniqueness, than generic handsomeness. Don’t show her the blown-dry, the slick, the suburban, the—you know—the musical theatre type.

  But Bernie also knew that the voices had to be blendable, the acting had to be competent, first choices were rarely available, and discernment and compromise would yield the results we were hoping for. In other words, it was a process.

  The roles of the Geeks were filled with a young and motley foursome, including Mat Devine, lead singer of post-punk band Kill Hannah (whose honest, hilarious reading of Peter Parker nearly nabbed him the lead), and T. V. Carpio, who would play the smartass Girl Geek, Miss Arrow.

  Actors who have achieved a certain renown almost never audition for roles. So for Norman Osborn/Green Goblin—a role that could provide a nice star turn for an A-list actor (and a whole second act to relax in the dressing room)—Julie drew up a wish list of actors, and sent it to Bernie. In the meantime, Julie was particularly eager to see Patrick Page read for the part. (“T
he best Scar we ever had,” said Julie of his performance in The Lion King.)

  We were unaware that when Patrick showed up for his Goblin audition, he was in the midst of a months-long breakdown. Overcoming depression long enough to get out of bed and make it to the audition room, Patrick handed the rehearsal pianist some sheet music, stood at the back of the room, fixed a grave stare at the folks behind the long table, and walked very . . . slowly toward us as the relentless chords of Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” began to play: Welcome to my Nightmare . . . Welcome to my breakdown. Patrick Page has a deep bass voice. Huntington Lighthouse–foghorn deep. Combined with this ironic, insidious song, it made for a perverse, intense audition.

  However, Alan Cumming—who hadn’t read the script or heard any music—sent word that he would do the part. And just like that, Alan was in. Julie didn’t even know Mr. Cumming had been asked. But this willowy, Scottish-born actor turned in what Anthony Hopkins called a “terrifying” performance in Julie’s Titus, and had just played the scheming Sebastian in her Tempest. If he wasn’t our first choice for the role, he was certainly a serious actor, and definitely a name, so Julie wasn’t complaining.

  For our villainess, Telsey + Company had already sifted through over three thousand potential Arachnes: Israeli pop idols, American movie stars, indie rock standard-bearers, Balkan and Ukrainian chanteuses self-promoting on MySpace. So when Natalie Mendoza seemed to jump effortlessly through our hoops, we didn’t trust our eyes and ears at first. Raised in Hong Kong and Australia (with roots in the same Filipino communities as T. V. Carpio), Natalie’s looks were unplaceable, but beguiling. And there was a real Bronze-Age power in her rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (its sinuous psychedelia was a good fit for Arachne).

  However, Natalie’s take on Arachne’s solo in “Rise Above” was marred by pop stylings. The little hiccups and faux-bluesy melismata were American Idol’s fault. The TV show’s influence had infected practically every auditioner. From the beginning, Julie, Edge, and Bono had insisted on the “straight tone” for Arachne. Listen to the Bulgarian Women’s Choir—it had to be that, it had to feel ancient.

  “That’s why, musically speaking, I think The Lion King worked,” Julie once mused to Edge. “The African music in contrast to the contemporary pop. The mythic set against the mundane of Elton John. Well, not mundane, but—well, you know what I mean.”

  “ ‘Mundane’ in the best sense of the word,” suggested Edge.

  Kimberly Grigsby had been the music director of Spring Awakening, and so had experience getting the worst pop inclinations out of a performer. A couple of months later, after a few sessions with Kimberly, Natalie Mendoza returned for another audition. The rumors were that she had just come back from the Himalayas, the home of her longtime guru. True or not, she didn’t seem like the same woman we had seen just two months before. Looking demure yet formidable, dressed in a white tunic with a sort of understated diadem throwing off subtle flashes in the light, Natalie now had the aura of someone who grew up in a mythical city east of Nepal and west of the moon. Her singing was straight and pure, her eyes spoke of millennia endured in loneliness and longing. In her voice you could hear the capacity for selfless love and remorseless violence. After three years and three thousand possibilities, we had found Natalie Mendoza, and Natalie Mendoza had found Arachne. She was in.

  Meanwhile, the field had been narrowed down to two potential alternatives to Jim Sturgess. Matthew James Thomas came straight from London, where the twenty-one-year-old was most known for his role as “quick-witted singer-songwriter” Jez Tyler in Britannia High (he was still sporting the role’s distracting, forehead-obscuring swoosh of bright blond hair).

  The other potential Peter Parker, after the dozens we had screened . . . was Reeve Carney. No question about it—his mere presence in a room generated buzz. “Who is that guy?” more than one tingling actress asked Julie after killing time in the waiting room with Reeve. He had recently begun his suspenders-with-jeans phase, and he was actually getting away with it. Even so, Reeve’s acting chops were worrying. In The Tempest, he was an earnest prince in a movie where close-ups, intimate scenes, and editing could play to Reeve’s strengths. But could he put across angst and comedy in a two-thousand-seat theatre? Peter Parker’s humor was what set the character apart from practically every other superhero. If Peter wasn’t funny, the show was going to be in trouble, and Reeve’s strong suit was definitely not comic timing.

  But with the first rehearsal day bearing down fast, we had to make a decision. Because of the physical demands of the role, Wednesday and Saturday matinees were entrusted to Matthew James Thomas, who would get to move to America (he talked endearingly during auditions about the awesomeness of New York). But the new face of Spider-Man would be Reeve Carney.

  Soon after Reeve was cast, his band released their first-ever single, “Love Me Chase Me.” In the video, Evan Rachel Wood played Reeve’s lover. They looked good together. Evan two-times him, then kills him, but they still looked good together. Which was excellent, because Evan just notified Julie: She had decided to play Mary Jane after all.

  Danny Ezralow had already put the multitude of prospective dancers through a grueling all-day boot camp. (After watching the dancers krump, leap, and tumble for six hours, all the work we non-dancers had been doing in audition rooms suddenly seemed so constipated.) Danny’s list was now winnowed down to a couple dozen dancers.

  So now in a Telsey agency audition room, headshots of all the actors and dancers still being considered were taped to a wall. Bernie moved pictures around, discarding some, replacing others, as a consensus began to form. Within an hour, the only photos left on the wall were of those performers who would be in our show. It was June 23, 2009. Turn Off the Dark was cast.

  This thing was actually going to happen.

  Because of delays getting building permits to renovate the Hilton, the show had just been pushed another five weeks, putting opening night sometime in April 2010. But! Spider-Man was swinging in front of a full moon and shooting a shimmery web on posters now on display outside the Hilton Theatre. Inside the theatre, plaster was raining down as renovations got under way.

  And Alan Cumming finally signed his contract.

  Holy crap, this thing was actually going to happen.

  By the end of July, Danny Ezralow had secured an apartment. His wife and young son uprooted from Los Angeles so they could be with Danny in New York for the next nine months.

  “Have you found a place yet, Glen?”

  “Shit. No, Danny. I forgot. I’ll get on it.”

  I trawled through apartment rental websites and found a groovy little studio in the East Village. I’d be abandoning my wife, who was going to stay upstate all autumn tending to the needs of our three little ones. It’s not what she bargained for. I felt rotten. We had moved out of the city because no one seemed to care that I was in the city when I was in it. And, wouldn’t you know—now that we had left it . . . well, no matter—this was for a good cause. I was going to finally get our finances back in the black. It was just three months. It would be like heading off to sea in a whaling ship. I just needed to make sure I brought back a whale.

  I wrote the general managers at Alan Wasser Associates. I would be subletting and it was time for them to send the first month’s rent and security deposit to my landlord. They promised to do so.

  A week later, the landlord called me: “So where’s the money?”

  “They haven’t sent it yet?”

  “Hey!” said the landlord. “I’m letting the apartment go if I don’t see the money this week. I’ve been screwed before by theatre people.”

  “Yeah, theatre people are the worst. Well, don’t worry. This is for Spider-Man. We’re good for it. I’ll just give them a call.”

  I reached one of the general managers.

  “We can’t give you the money.”

  “Why not?”

  A pause. A sigh.

&nbs
p; “Glen . . . I wish I could tell you. But I can’t.”

  “?”

  I called Erin O over at Hello. She’d know why there was weirdness. She knew everything that went on with the show. It was probably some mix-up with my contract. But Erin didn’t answer her phone at Hello. And, damn it, Danny had put the fear in me—I was going to be homeless if I didn’t secure an apartment soon. I called Erin on her cell phone.

  “Hi, yeah, I didn’t answer my phone at Hello because I’ve been let go.”

  “?!”

  “Yeah. Happened last week.”

  “But you’ve been there since the beginning! You and Tony Adams!”

  “Exactly. I was Tony’s assistant before I was David’s. And Tony’s not around anymore.”

  “Oh man, that sucks. I’m so sorry. So you don’t know what all the weirdness is about.”

  “Well . . .” She sighed. “I would just check the newspapers tomorrow.”

  “?!?!?”

  • • •

  Should Broadway’s Spidey sense be tingling? Rumors have spread among legiters that the production sked for incoming mega-musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark may be threatened. The extensive work being done to prep for the technically demanding show, both in the shop constructing the physical production and in the theater where Spider-Man is due to bow, is said to have stopped . . . The halt is attributed to cash flow obstacles . . .

  —Variety, August 6, 2009

  “Julie?” My voice was pitiful.

  “Yeah. It’s bad. David is twenty million short.”

  “Godalmighty.”

  “Yeah.”

  “For a moment there, it sounded like you said ‘twenty million.’ ”

  “I’m gonna make some calls.”

  The one thing we didn’t have to worry about was money the one thing we didn’t have to worry about was money. . . .

  There was a twitching on my web this week, and when I crawled out to see what I’d caught, there—all tangled up and weary from the struggle—was Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man. . . . This show is in chaos, plagued not only by financial problems but also by a nasty internal power struggle.