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

by Berger, Glen

  In 1984 he salvaged the Jacksons’ flailing Victory tour, and his experience on that job opened his eyes to a new and potentially lucrative way to put a tour together. Call it “cross-collateralization”—treating a tour as one big market instead of eighty separate markets. In 1989, he had a chance to apply that knowledge while working for his single greatest love: the Rolling Stones. “Best band ever,” he would later insist to Julie, whose loyalty to the Beatles had been intensified by her time on Across the Universe. “Sure. The Beatles were great,” Michael conceded. “But they’re not the Stones.”

  Before Michael Cohl became their promoter, the Rolling Stones netted twenty-two million on their Tattoo You tour. The Cohl-managed Steel Wheels tour? It brought in $260 million. (By 2010, he had refined the model—the Stones’ A Bigger Bang tour almost tripled the Steel Wheels total.) The Michael Cohl model for rock tours was born. Other rock groups wanted in, and partnerships with bands such as U2, the Who, and Pink Floyd followed. As Fortune magazine would put it, Michael Cohl was now “The Howard Hughes of Rock and Roll.”

  But Michael had also dabbled in Broadway, with producing credits for Spamalot, as well as the notably unsuccessful Lord of the Rings musical. And after taking a cursory look at the Spider-Man accounts, he was ready to take a deeper plunge. Which is why he was now meeting Julie in the PRG conference room, along with Bono, Edge, and the chairman and CEO of PRG, Jere Harris.

  The auburn-mustached Jeremiah Harris—though looking about as theatrically bohemian as a mid-level executive for General Motors—had more theatre blood in his veins than all the rest of the Spider-Man gang combined. His great-grandfather was a theatre manager in England, his grandfather was a company manager for preeminent producer/director George Abbott, and his father produced over two hundred Broadway shows. And that was just on his father’s side. Jere would eventually found PRG (Production Resource Group), a global supplier of lights, scenic fabrication, and anything else falling under the category of “entertainment technology.”

  When Tony Adams struck out on his own in 2002, Jere offered him space in his PRG office on Ninth Avenue. Hello Entertainment, consisting of just one desk at first, eventually expanded to occupy one side of Jere’s office. So it was a natural development for Jere Harris to become an early investor in Spider-Man, while PRG was contracted to manufacture all of Spider-Man’s set elements.

  But Jere didn’t just want to save a show he was heavily invested in. He wanted to save the jobs of his colleagues, friends, and relatives who were either helping build the show or were employed as crew over at the Hilton Theatre. And thus it was agreed upon at this meeting in the PRG conference room that David Garfinkle and Hello Entertainment would cede control to Michael and Jere of Goodbye Entertainment. Yes—a bit pointed, that. “Goodbye”—that’s what the new producing entity was called.

  But now congratulations were in order: Michael and Jere had just acquired the finest migraines of their lives.

  • • •

  “Turn Off the Dark.” The Hilton had been dark for three months by the time Michael Cohl’s and Jere Harris’s new roles were officially announced (in a press release also announcing the casting of Reeve Carney as Peter Parker). With the show hemorrhaging money in rent payments, Michael and Jere now needed to raise at least another twenty-four million to cover a budget that was hovering around fifty-two million and ticking ever upward.

  The more the producers examined the patient stretched out on the table, the more appalled and rattled they became. With forty stagehands needed to operate the backstage rigging, operating costs were going to be $1.1 million per week (a good $300,000 more than any other musical currently in town). This number meant that even with every single performance sold-out, it could still take over four years to break even. Michael and Jere nevertheless rolled up their sleeves, called for sutures and clamps, and dove elbow-deep into the mangled finances.

  • • •

  “Well, Ben Brantley has just revealed his bias. So unprofessional. Fuck him.”

  It was November 16, and Julie Taymor had just read the New York Times’ head theatre critic’s review of the stripped-down revival of Ragtime. Ben Brantley had managed to reference Turn Off the Dark in the review.

  “Despite the vulgar shadow cast by the $50 million Spider-Man extravaganza in the making . . .” wrote Brantley, “the trend on Broadway of late has been toward small productions of big musicals . . . that put the emphasis on words and music as guides to human ambiguity.”

  Knowing nothing of the script, the music, the direction, or the performances, the lead critic of the newspaper-of-note had already declared our show “vulgar.” Julie and I railed.

  “Where does he get off?!”

  “Is it any wonder print is dying!”

  “He hated The Lion King too,” recalled Julie—her pique so adorably fresh over a review that had come out twelve years earlier.

  But Ben Brantley didn’t hate The Lion King. In fact, he spent most of the review ladling out the sort of effusive praise that any producer or creator would kill for. What Julie was still remembering 4,378 days after the review went to print was this sentence: “Ms. Taymor’s strengths have never been in strongly sustained narratives or fully developed characters.” Though Brantley embedded the sentence in a positive paragraph about Julie’s reach for cosmic-scaled themes, it was that sentence that lived in Julie a dozen years later. But Michael Cohl’s call distracted her from her brooding: The money was finally in place.

  A week later, however, we were still ten million short. David Garfinkle’s go-to phrase “Almost there” was adopted by Michael. By the end of November, the e-mail from Michael was “Happy Thanksgiving. Almost there.” He hit up a Texas oilman. And two brothers who were entrepreneurs in Mexico. By December 8, the money was “in the bank.”

  A month later, the money was now in the bank. Except it wasn’t.

  By February 14, 2010, word was that work could resume at the Hilton on Wednesday. But three Wednesdays later, the Hilton was still quiet. However, finally, on March 8—seven months after the money ran out and the Hilton went dark—the theatre stirred with life again. All the funds had been secured, and they were now being judiciously disbursed. Michael Cohl and Jere Harris had performed the greatest act of financial CPR in the history of Broadway. They renegotiated production deals, restructured the production company, and raised (as well as personally shelled out) scads of cash for a conspicuously fallible show during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It was an epic feat. Hercules-mucking-out-the-Augean-stables epic.

  But to what end would remain to be seen. That very same day—March 8—Evan Rachel Wood officially ended her involvement with the show. Scheduling snarls, lingering vocal cord issues—whatever Evan’s reasons, Julie didn’t press the point. A month later, Alan Cumming accepted a role on CBS’s The Good Wife. Still intending to be the Green Goblin in Spider-Man, he contended he’d be able to do both roles, perhaps having to skip a performance here and there. After a week of agonizing, Julie instructed the producers to release Alan from his contract (and to stop mailing him his monthly retainer). Every audience deserved the chance to see the first-stringers, she decided. The press would spin it as “more troubles for the troubled show,” but fuck the press.

  However, it couldn’t be shrugged off—seven months of obtrusive reporting and chat room mockery had effectively switched out the default descriptor for our show. The “highly-anticipated Spider-Man” was now “the troubled Spider-Man.” It was a stench that would take a lot of scrubbing to get off. Seven months of extra rent payments and restructured deals had sent the budget to a morbidly obese sixty million. And the worst part about the budget was that it wouldn’t be reflected onstage—it was still a thirty-million-dollar show, dragging a thirty-million-dollar bag of waste behind it. Julie—with her alleged disregard for budgets—was now being compared to Greece. To rioting, financial-market-crashing Greece.

  And she wouldn’t be able to prove them al
l wrong—all those jeering prognosticators—until the show opened. Six more months of this ridicule and then we would silence their scoffing. Oh, we’d have the last laugh, all right.

  And we wondered if maybe Tony Adams was pulling a cosmic string. Because as Rob Bissinger confirmed—we simply were not ready Tech-wise the previous autumn. With this extra year, the designers and Tech staff had time to work out many of the outstanding issues. Had the original schedule been carried out, great concussing snafus would have caused weeklong delays, possibly in the middle of the rehearsal period, possibly with irreparable consequences. It was actually such an uncomfortable thought nobody dwelled on it.

  Nor did Julie dwell (or maybe she dwelled for just a minute) on the fact that over these last six years, the person who had made the most money off of this project was . . . Alan Cumming.

  8

  * * *

  Smudge Sticking

  So as we scrape up the last remaining residue of faith from our beaten souls . . .

  Rob Bissinger’s e-mail to me from mid-March captured the buoyant optimism of the period: “Met with Julie and the production team this morning to go over schedule (Impossible), budget (Still Ridiculous), and next steps. . . .”

  Even though November 14 was now the Marvel-approved date for our first preview, and even though it was a full eight months away, Rob Bissinger reported that the tech folk didn’t think we’d make it in time. The funds were released just a little too late. Michael Cohl tacitly acknowledged the reality, but felt it would be easier to negotiate for an extension from Marvel once everything was going full-bore, rather than to try wheedling for one now.

  In the meantime, we had a theatre to renovate, flying to program into the computer, Mary Jane auditions, and one more music workshop with the lads before they disappeared for the second leg of their 360° Tour. I could hardly focus on any of that, though, because my finances had hit rock bottom. I attended (for free) a Grapes of Wrath oratorio at Carnegie Hall and commiserated to the point of tears with those miserable Okies. I’d be breastfeeding for nourishment next if I couldn’t find a way to make it to the first Spidey paychecks in December.

  The Sear Sound studio sessions at the end of April weren’t as freewheelin’ as the previous music workshops. Some of the songs seemed like they just didn’t want to get translated from Edge’s GarageBand demos to a live band. Edge and Bono had finally replaced the bongelese in “Deeply Furious” with written lyrics. As a nod to the Neil Jordan era, it was about all the shoes Arachne’s spider-henchwomen were putting on their eight legs to hit the town. So now instead of one male singer (Bono) singing nonsense syllables in a perverse falsetto, we had five women singing comprehensible words in unison in a comfortable range. And it just wasn’t working. The lyrics for the chorus were a whole other issue:

  Shoe shine chamois

  A shoe shoe shoe

  Shoe shine chamois

  A shoe shoe shoe

  I was getting woozy from all the shoes. But that aside—chamois? That’s what was written on the scrap of paper from Edge. The dictionary said it was a piece of soft leather used for polishing things like shoes. Ah—so now I got why it was in the song. Except . . . I still didn’t get why it was in the song. And hang on—in the demo, they were singing “sham-WAH,” which was how the French pronounced the word. But the actual pronunciation in English was “SHA-mee.” The demo was subsequently corrected, except the stress was put on “mee” because even though “SHA-mee” was technically correct, it sounded awful when you sang it. But now Teese was instructing the female singers to sing the word with the correct pronunciation. With confusion blooming, I was deputized to sort it all out. And those are two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

  Meanwhile, Julie and I had seen the definitive Mary Jane the day before in auditions, and we just needed our two composers to sign off on her. However, so as to give Edge and Bono something to compare our Mary Jane to, we also called in our runner-up, Jenn Damiano. Only nineteen years old, Jenn was already a Broadway theatre veteran. She was cast as the understudy for the lead role of Wendla in Spring Awakening, but was prohibited from performing the part because she was only fifteen, and it required nudity. By the time Jenn was auditioning for Spider-Man, she had already nabbed a Tony nomination for her performance in Next to Normal, in which she played dark-cloud-toting teen daughter Natalie Goodman.

  For this audition on April 30, Jenn brushed the hair out of her face with angsty grace and sang “No More” with Reeve Carney. The two looked good together—like they belonged in an “audition-room-themed” photo spread for Italian Vogue. Julie’s snap-deciding mechanism went on the blink. In fact, after the audition, no one except Bono could be definitive about which actress to cast:

  “Jenn has that purity we’re looking for. She’s the girl next door.”

  “Next door to you, maybe, back in Ireland!” returned Julie. It was hard picturing this pale, Celtic-looking beauty growing up in a broken home in Queens. But since everyone else in the room couldn’t make up their minds, Jenn Damiano became our MJ.

  “For what it’s worth,” said Reeve later, “it felt really good singing with her.”

  (Bono almost missed the auditions altogether. He showed up late, wearing a black blazer and, jarringly, a tie. He apologized, said he got “held up with stuff.” Two weeks later, surfing the Daily Kos website, I was struck by one particular behind-the-scenes pic by White House photographer Pete Souza. It was of Bono, in black tie and blazer, getting a big smile out of Barack Obama in the Oval Office. The date of the photo: April 30. “Held up with stuff,” he said. The mind reels.)

  • • •

  Dangling from the high ceiling of the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square were two different flying rigs. It was nine a.m., July 19—the first day of aerial training. A dozen and a half Spider-Man company members were going to spend the rest of the summer figuring out how to shift their weight while suspended by one or two pick-points. They were going to get comfortable with heights. None of these performers were going to see a script for another three weeks. But, it was beginning.

  Danny Ezralow supervised the training that morning, and then headed up to 890 Broadway to begin choreographing his eight male dancers. He tackled the “Boy Falls From the Sky” sequence first. It promised to be the climactic moment of the show if the audience bought into the concept: spider-men appearing one by one and moving in a sort of “superhero tai chi” behind Peter Parker as he strode with increasing determination through the empty streets of Manhattan and sang about the return of his powers.

  If the audience didn’t buy into it, we were so dead. It would be eight masked, Spandex-clad interpretive dancers behind a guy who was singing while jogging on a treadmill. Danny made his male dancers strip down to their shorts, because, damn it, the choreography in the show was another front in a war. Danny and his recruits were going to figure out how to defend the show from becoming the neutered, cheesy embarrassment Turn Off the Dark was always at the risk of becoming. “Boy Falls From the Sky” needed to be about skin and sinews; it needed to be about bruised muscles flexing, torsos twisting.

  Danny also began work on the sadistic “Bullying by Numbers,” and the martially severe “Pull the Trigger,” and before the end of the first week, the stage manager’s daily report was describing friction rashes, banged heads, shoulder pains, and intercostal strains in the back. Normal stuff. Dancers generally shrugged off these knocks with the stoicism of pro footballers. Which was fortunate, because Danny was having them fling themselves in the air as if blown up by IEDs, crawl military-style on their elbows, and spring to their feet via an eye-catching but grueling maneuver called a “kip-up.”

  And after a week, the dancers still had no idea what the show actually was. So Julie and I visited the dance studio one day and spun the whole tale for them. “Anyone confused by any of the plot points? No? Great.” Rob Bissinger, however, found a moment with Julie and me in the lobby of the theatre.

  “You know h
ow we’ve just spent the last year trying to get investors for our show?”

  Yeah?

  “Well,” Rob explained, “I was the guy taking these potential investors step by step through the show. I would do a little show-and-tell with our model of the set.”

  Okay. . . .

  “So,” continued Rob, “I’ve told the story of the show, like, a hundred times. And it’s a great story. It’s really great. But . . . it’s weird, but . . . there’s this place, in the middle of Act Two . . . and every time I got to it . . . something . . . just didn’t make sense. . . .”

  This could have been the beginning of a long conversation. It could have launched a serious and thorough examination of just what plot points were jamming the gears in Rob’s presentations. But instead? I may have raised an eyebrow. Julie may have offered a thoughtful “Hm.” But the conversation lasted only another thirty seconds. And once Rob was out of earshot, we shrugged it off. “He should have called us last year if there was something he didn’t get. Right, Glen?”

  “Right.” Nothing to worry about.

  Besides, I had more pressing matters to tend to. I needed to get an apartment. (Danny and his family were now beginning their second year in their Spider-Man–bankrolled downtown pad, after last year’s Turn Off the Dark financial crisis left them stranded in New York City.) I found an apartment just a couple of blocks from Julie’s digs, and Alan Wasser Associates wired a $6,800 deposit to my new landlord. I sent the landlord an e-mail to let him know my plans. I could barely contain my excitement.