by Berger, Glen
I tried calling you, but your voice mailbox was full. I’ll be in and out for the next week, and then I’ll be here pretty much full time! Hope you’re well. Best, Glen.
When I was typing “Hope you’re well,” the landlord was, in fact, dead.
So, no, not well. He collapsed suddenly in his apartment, cause unknown. Two of his distraught sisters tracked me down via Facebook.
“That’s just . . . Jesus, I’m so sorry. So should I wait a week before moving in?”
“No, dear, you can’t move in. He’s dead.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. Um . . . so that $6,800 that was wired—”
“There’s nothing in his bank account. I’m sorry but that money’s gone.”
“Gone?! But it was only wired last week! He spent all that money? All $6,800?”
There was weeping on the other end of the phone.
I knew I should be letting it go. But the Spider-Man investors, what about them? $6,800. . . .
I didn’t think I was a superstitious person. But I was beginning to think Spider-Man was carrying some very weird juju. Alan Wasser Associates, disburser of monies, thought so too. So Danny Ezralow and I decided a little sage-smoke from a smudge stick wouldn’t hurt. Danny had already risked setting off the smoke alarms ceremoniously smudging 890 Broadway, and we had a date to do the same at the Hilton. Or rather, at the Foxwoods. Live Nation had contracted with the Foxwoods Resort Casino to license the theatre’s name, so down came the photographs of Conrad Hilton in the vestibule, while the VIP lounge got a makeover in order to (sorta) update its 1990s suburban ambience.
All the seats in the auditorium were out, and new carpeting was laid down. Though dozens of workers and their supervisors had been camped out on the site, Julie (whose sensitivity to visual details was seeming more and more like a genetic mutation) was the first to notice that the carpeting was two different shades. Turned out there was a shipping error. Well, it was too late now—the seats were due to be installed and the timetable was tight, and in the dim light no one would notice. Except Julie.
So were we prepared? Who knew. Weaseling out of responsibility for the WMD debacle, Donald Rumsfeld talked of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. But—and this pertained to theatre as much as to wars in Iraq—what he should have mentioned but didn’t was a fourth category: the unknown knowns. According to Slovene philosopher SlavojŽižek, unknown knowns are the things that we know, or that we should know, but maintain willful ignorance about, because we’d rather not acknowledge them.
For instance, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’s first preview was November 14. At least that was the date promised in the press release blasted out that week. However, we had our own secret work schedule that put the first preview on November 6. Not only would starting previews a week earlier mean an extra week of revenue, it would also surprise the world—it would show them that this endeavor wasn’t a lumbering, ill-managed affair. That would wipe the smirk off the smirkers’ faces.
But (spoiler alert): We did not manage to have a first preview on November 6. Nor could we get it together to start previews on November 14. The miserable truth was that after one of Broadway’s longest Techs ever, we actually had to cancel two weeks’ worth of previews and raise the curtain for the first time on November 28. The smirkers were thereby able to retain their smirks, and garnish them liberally with sniggers. And back in March the tech staff had already calculated with uncanny precision that we were going to come up two weeks short. An unknown known. And those concerns of Rob Bissinger’s about the middle of the second act that we didn’t want to investigate? Another unknown known. How many other unknown knowns were lurking in our future? We didn’t know.
• • •
August 8, 2010. The first day of rehearsal. Wow. Yes. Finally. At the New 42nd Street Studios (sited conveniently next door to the Foxwoods), we were going to spend the next four weeks. With scripts still warm from the Xerox machine stacked enticingly on a table, Michael Cohl, Jere Harris, and David Garfinkle went around the room wearing grins made up of two-parts excitement and one-part anxiety. Some quick speeches were made as Michael Cohl’s son Jacob, our documentarian, recorded it with his camera crew. And actually, we weren’t all gathered together for this milestone. Unlike the first rehearsal of nearly any other new Broadway musical, our composers were thousands of miles away. U2 was touring until early October, and we’d be well into Tech before Bono and Edge would be available to participate in Spider-Man rehearsals. But with the songs done, and the orchestrations in David Campbell’s hands, no one imagined the boys would have that much to do in New York.
Turn Off the Dark contained thirty-seven scenes. Thirteen of the scenes wouldn’t get rehearsed that month. The opening number featured the floor lifting up into a giant ramp. So we had to skip it. The myth of Arachne with its massive loom—forget it. The death of Uncle Ben required a coordinated team of puppeteers throwing shadows up on a large screen. Any time spent trying to approximate that kind of scene in a rehearsal room, said Julie, was time wasted. Few if any Broadway musicals left more than a third of their scenes to be totally worked out during Tech, when ideally you only wanted to be concentrating on integrating sound and lights and working the transitions from scene to scene. But, as Julie shrugged, “It’s the nature of the beast.”
Watching Julie direct scenes like the “Queens Rowhouses” was like watching her sculpt. She shaped each moment with painstaking precision. Aunt May needed to stretch her clasped hands out a little farther—“Peter, you had one of your little clashes, didn’t you—” to better connote her concern for her troubled nephew. MJ needed to bow her head ever so slightly—“Just leave me alone!”—for the character’s despair to read to an audience. The result was a series of ideographs that made the scene look like dioramas in a Museum of the Living Comic Book. And if the actors felt a little constricted—a little limited in their ability to make emotional connections with their fellow actors—they were too polite, or had too much faith in Julie’s vision, to mention it. For now.
In contrast, Julie kept the blocking in the scenes between her two leads to a minimum. This was partly because Julie wanted Peter and Mary Jane to come across more naturalistically. But she also knew that Reeve Carney and Jenn Damiano were uncomfortable with choreography. Even though Danny wanted to add some simple movements, Julie thought the risk was just too high of her two stars feeling ridiculous during, say, an intensely poignant song. She was quite protective of her actors that way.
In fact, as Reeve got more and more confident in rehearsal, it was hard not to notice Julie’s fondness for her protégé growing. “Soo much better than Jim Sturgess for this part,” marveled Julie. Reeve, the gorgeous rock singer, was also humble to a fault and refreshingly free of cynicism. To Julie, he was Peter Parker, as she had been insisting for years that it was Peter Parker’s lack of arrogance that made the character so special.
“Reeve, I just love you!” Julie blurted out one day after Reeve fumbled with particular charm through an early scene with Jenn. Julie didn’t notice Jenn brooding in the hall afterward. Julie really was like a mother figure to the younger members of the cast, and of course they were seeking her love and approval. Matthew James Thomas was also looking moody in that hallway. He was eager to develop and showcase his own edgier take on Peter Parker, but Julie was adamant that we should be grooming only one actor for stardom, and that was Reeve. She said Matthew would just have to cobble together whatever rehearsal time he could find between then and opening night.
And so the weeks passed. The company was in good spirits, the feeling of camaraderie high. Julie spent rehearsals shuttling between the actors’ rehearsal room and the dance studio next door, where Danny was busy putting the finishing touches on his choreography . . . before deciding to scrap half of everything and starting over again. That he hadn’t locked down any of the dances yet was making the dancers a little impatient. But, for the moment, just a little.
And every now and then,
Julie would check in on the progress being made at the Foxwoods Theatre. By the end of August, nearly all the set pieces had been installed, and the enormous ring truss—looking like a section of a Six Flags roller coaster—was suspended high over the seats. Soon they’d be testing the deployment of the web net.
One day at the theatre, Scott Rogers detailed his grand vision to me for the Spidey-Goblin fight at the end of Act One. And either I wasn’t hearing correctly, or Scott was high.
He had just been grousing about the defeatist, sclerotic theatre world he’d been working in these last months. He had just acknowledged that it took hoouurs to program into the computer a rudimentary little arc for Spider-Man to swing in. And now Scott was telling me he was going to choreograph a fight in the air that included Spider-Man jumping over the Green Goblin from the first balcony, and landing in one of the auditorium’s narrow aisles, just inches away from a seated audience member.
“Really?”
“Yeah! About here. Row G. And then he’ll leap up and smack right into Goblin. And then they’ll have this tussle in the air as the Goblin’s flying around over the audience, trying to knock Spider-Man loose. Which he finally does, and Spider-Man falls, but about halfway to the ground, he shoots two webs—THWIPP—and they hit the Goblin, so Spider-Man stops falling, and now he’s dangling below the Goblin—”
“Really?”
“So then the Goblin starts accelerating over the audience to dislodge this guy. Oh—I forgot the first part—Spider-Man jumps onto Green Goblin’s back while Goblin’s flying, and he rides the Goblin like a surfboard. . . .”
“Really?”
Scott was describing this scene as the programming process was continuing in front of us: A sandbag about the size of a large punching bag was being used as a human proxy. The bag was hoisted up with the hope that it would arc gracefully over the seats and then loop around the stage and finally land on a little platform behind the proscenium. CRASH, straight into the proscenium it went. Scott called in an adjustment to the programmer. Up went the sandbag. CRASH, into the proscenium. Another tweak, another trial, another error, and so it went until it was time for the crew to take their next break.
If, by our first preview, our Act One climax was anything other than a swinging sandbag, it would be a miracle.
By August 27, we had rehearsed all the Act One scenes that we could rehearse. And all the dances had been roughly choreographed. So, with all the actors and dancers assembled, we staged a barebones “stumble-through” of the act in the large rehearsal room. The female dancers surprised themselves with how stirring and eerie their newly learned Bulgarian harmonies sounded as they portrayed Arachne’s weavers. Peter Parker’s first encounter with the bullies at Queens High started effectively comic but soon turned brutal as the dancers—high-spiritedly executing Danny Ezralow’s rough-and-tumble choreography—terrorized Reeve, who was defensively crouching when he wasn’t being carried aloft like a human sacrifice. In the aftermath, Reeve gathered his scattered books and sang, with spirit broken, “Don’t talk / Just walk / Going nuts / Hate my guts . . .”
Watching from a corner, I suddenly heard what sounded like sniffles. I looked over, concerned that our cast was coming down with colds. But no—several of the actors and dancers had . . . tears in their eyes. They were . . . moved? Now it was two scenes later, and bright smiles were on all their faces. Reeve was singing “Bouncing Off the Walls,” convincingly playing a fellow jacked up on his new spider powers and goofing around, with our four Geeks singing backup and dancing like unfettered idiots.
And then, just a couple scenes later, Uncle Ben was dead—run down by a carjacker—and Reeve was singing with bitter disillusionment the first stanza of “Rise Above.” The cast’s tears flowed again. And so it went—the entire act hurtling us from manic highs to heart-shredding lows before resolving into sweet catharses.
As people could sense today, something alchemical was going on. Your directing and designing aside—your understanding of theatre has enabled you to create a profoundly effective story. Yeah, I wrote more of the words in the script, but the beat-to-beat narrative—that was totally your vision. . . . And it seems to work on the audience on a physiological level . . .
Because I had to write her that night. I had to let Julie know that I had her back. We saw confirmation that our aspirations for this piece, birthed all those years ago, were still intact. Without the benefit of any expensive spectacle, the stumble-through delivered real laughs, authentic tears, and awe. We had come this far and she was going to know that her collaborator was also her grateful pupil and also her most ardent defender. So I closed with a thick slathering: “Just wanted to say what a gift—what a mind-cracking, heart-swelling gift—it’s been having these front-row tickets to you . . .”
She wrote back just this: “I wish you could see my eyes.”
One year later, my gushing e-mail was quoted in the New York Times because it was included in the initial disclosures that were submitted by Julie Taymor, the plaintiff, in Taymor, et al. v. 8 Legged Productions, LLC, et al.
That second “et al.” referred to me. In other words, I was being sued for treachery, while I got to sound to the news-reading public like a world-class suck-up.
If you’re trying to decide if it sounds better for the press to call you a “traitor” or a “toadie,” things have clearly not gone according to plan.
—from My List of Lessons Learned
• • •
A nerve-wracking promotional event was scheduled for September 10. Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos was going to host Ms. Taymor, Bono, and Edge, and then the segment was going to culminate with Reeve Carney singing “Boy Falls From the Sky” live from the Hudson Theatre. After doling out glimpses of the show to a few dozen or a few hundred people at a time, we were about to flash an audience of five million.
Julie had already proclaimed that there was no way she was taking “shit” out of “Boy Falls From the Sky.” It was the acid test—either Turn Off the Dark got bowdlerized into a shopping-mall holiday show, or our artistic integrity remained intact. She was serious. So now we were less than twenty-four hours away from the prospect of Reeve singing “shit” on a cheery morning television program, with the subsequent media frenzy (“Sh*tstorm for Broadway’s Spider-Man!”) all but guaranteed. All of our work, and one word was going to tank it all.
After a short, spirited debate with Michael Cohl, it was agreed that as a temporary measure, the word-in-question would be altered to “trash.” Reeve was informed the night before the performance, and so long as months’ worth of muscle memory didn’t kick in during the live performance and change “trash” back into “shit,” we’d be just fine.
The next morning George Stephanopoulos got Edge and Bono to tell the abbreviated history of the project via video feed, Julie shared some costume designs, Reeve and his band launched into “Boy Falls From the Sky,” and “trash” was sung, accompanied by a freakishly loud sigh of relief from somewhere in the audience.
Within hours, the whole thing was up on YouTube. The comments section was depressing. We clearly still had our work cut out for us when it came to persuading the fanboys that our show was legit. So Julie and I went over to the PRG offices directly after the event to discuss the latest advertising campaign proposals with Michael Cohl and Jere Harris. Bono was being patched through on the speakerphone. “Very blue cheese,” was what Bono called the proposed radio spot. He didn’t want to be associated with something so square. Julie not only thought the spot was awful, she seemed really agitated about it. Michael Cohl, trying to keep things relaxed, promised we’d come up with something good.
“We’ll put Glen on it. Glen’ll save the day,” laughed Michael as he clapped me on the back.
Bono seconded the sentiment, and was launching into another possible angle for the radio spot when Julie muttered something and abruptly got up from the table.
“Great. Then you’re on your own,” she said.
She was out of there. Out of the conference room, out of the offices, headed for the elevators.
Michael looked at me with a “What just happened?” face. Bono, unaware that Julie had scarpered, was still spinning radio ad ideas. Jere silently mouthed, “Did something set her off?” Michael shrugged, and mouthed a “What should we do?!” I mouthed a “Should I go after her?” We were behaving like actors in a silent movie because Bono was in the middle of a monologue on the speakerphone and it was best he didn’t know that everything had just gone weird. But now Bono was waiting for a response to his proposal and hearing only silence. “Guys? . . . Hello?”
I knew what set her off. It was the implication that I was the one doing all the creative wordsmithing for the show. Julie, after all, was the one making most of the suggestions about how to fix the ad campaign. Feeling unappreciated, uncredited, she lost it. I dashed out of the office to try to catch her. I found her pacing, still waiting for an elevator. As soon as she saw me, she vented and then vented some more.
And as I listened to her, I realized what set her off wasn’t even what really set her off. This display was happening only hours after she was on television, revealing details of her unfinished show in front of millions. It was easy to forget how that sort of thing puts you in a profoundly vulnerable state. Surely I was watching biochemistry on display—any amount of adrenaline, vasopressin, and norepinephrine had gotten released that morning, and the fight-or-flight chemicals were still flooding her system. I mean, surely.
And no doubt an extra dash of jitters was due to the fact that Julie’s Tempest was receiving its world premiere in Venice the next day. She was heading to the airport in literally a couple of hours. In fact, she was so anxious to leave for Italy that one part of her brain probably just seized command and instructed her body to leave the advertising meeting before the meeting was even over.
