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

by Berger, Glen

  In the three hours before Tech each day, Scott Rogers and Jaque Paquin programmed and refined the flights in the show. And on the morning of September 26, they were practicing this newly programmed Big Jump with Brandon. The ramp rose. Brandon performed the back gainer. He stood, the ramp lowered, and the cables sent him hurtling upstage. Except . . . the ramp hadn’t yet lowered all the way to its twenty-degree angle. The timing of the cue was just a bit off. Perhaps the ramp was only five degrees off its target, but those five degrees were the difference between being deposited onto the ramp, and being slammed into the ramp.

  The force of the landing broke Brandon’s toe, and caused some hairline fracturing in the rest of the foot. By the middle of Tech that day Brandon was cheerily hobbling about on crutches, outfitted in a massive cast already half-covered in Sharpie signatures and drawings of Spider-Man. He was going to be out for several weeks. Randall implemented new protocols, with the temptation no doubt rising again to let loose a primal scream from the sidewalk.

  That same week, while Tech continued its glacial progress downstairs, Danny and assistant choreographer Cherice reworked the “D.I.Y. World” number with the dancers in the upstairs rehearsal room. Looking for new steps, Danny encouraged the dancers to improvise, and Gerald Avery—whose inventiveness had already inspired one of the number’s main moves—attempted a flip. He landed on his head. He was out cold. Gerald was taken away on a stretcher that night to a waiting ambulance, his neck immobilized by a brace just in case more undetected damage was done. There had been no culprit but the creative impulse. Nevertheless, “caution” was becoming the new watchword. Even those not dancing or flying were becoming aware that there were potential pitfalls to being an actor in this show.

  Literally.

  The pit didn’t make such an impression two years ago in George Tsypin’s studio, when little paper figurines stood near the six-inch-deep pit. In real life, the fifteen-foot-deep pit was starting to freak us out. Designed as a platform on top of a large scissor lift, it took up the space the orchestra would have occupied. (The musicians were consigned to two rooms in the back of the basement.) So this sizable amount of square footage was simply part of the stage most of the time. But it was also a “pit lift” that could deliver large props from the basement below. A two-foot-wide “passerelle” had been constructed between the audience and the front of the pit, so that an actor could cross from one side of the stage to the other when the pit was down.

  We had now begun to tech the short Geek interlude before the wrestling match. In order for the wrestling ring to be loaded onto the pit lift, the pit needed to remain down for almost two minutes while the Geeks pretended they weren’t delivering lines on the edge of a chasm. We watched T. V. Carpio and Mat Devine cross paths on the passerelle, and suddenly that two-foot width seemed lunatic. Place a foot wrong and you were falling fifteen feet onto unforgiving basement concrete. And this was how it was going to be every night? With adrenaline flowing during the heat of a performance, no one would ever stumble? With eight shows a week, we would have done a hundred shows before we were halfway into our first year. With even just a one percent chance of someone falling, it meant odds were there would be a fall by April. But maybe that was overstating the risk. How about a minuscule .1 percent chance? That still left us with an actor falling into the pit before the end of our third year.

  Julie was distressed. How did this feature slip under her radar? Not only was it dangerous, it looked dangerous. Surely it was going to distract an audience from our story. Other shows have utilized a sort-of lid that would automatically slide across the emptiness while the pit was down. But for whatever engineering reasons, the sliding lid wasn’t an option for Turn Off the Dark. None of the actors were crazy about this setup, and some, like Isabel Keating, who played Aunt May, were quite perturbed. And it did no one’s nerves any favors the day the pit lift began to rise from the basement.

  “HOLD, HOLD, HOLD,” Randall exclaimed over the mike.

  The lift stopped just in time. A member of the crew had been standing in the basement, leaning his head into the lift to check on something, when the hydraulics were suddenly activated. The lift began to rise. A few more seconds and the crew-member’s head would have been a nut in a nutcracker. More protocols were put in place. More curses were choked back. Then tech resumed.

  It was now October 5. None of the scenes had been perfected. They were just being sketched in. We had gotten through thirty-seven minutes of the show in fifteen days. We were getting twenty-one seconds closer to the curtain call with every hour of Tech.

  • • •

  “You’ll keep the show open at least a year, won’t you? No matter what? So that it can find its audience?”

  Julie exacted this promise after threading her arm through Michael Cohl’s, while Danny and I accompanied them on a stroll to a Times Square Italian joint during the Tech dinner break. Michael gave her his word. “Absolutely. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to take a year,” he said, and then shrugged. “But then again, maybe it will.”

  It had already become a ritual that month. The four of us—producer, choreographer, director, co-bookwriter—would plunge, full of bonhomie, into the Midtown crowd to spend the dinner hour together, chatting about Tech, with Julie and Michael talking airily about all the future projects they would be doing together. Michael only got involved with things that fired him up, whether that meant producing a documentary on folksinging gadfly Phil Ochs or fighting to expand government health care in Canada. The profit margin? For Michael, it was in the mix, but it almost never took precedence. Julie had been looking for just that sort of producer her entire career.

  So at the end of dinner, the check arrived. Each night one of the foursome paid for the rest of us. Whose night it was to pay was rigorously enforced. It meant for every four nights, I had three nights of free meals, and one night where I had no choice but to blow through my entire per diem for the week. The staff, the crew, the cast—they were all receiving weekly salaries. The “creatives,” on the other hand, don’t get paid until performances begin.

  I had gone over seven months now with hardly any income because I had been working exclusively on Spider-Man. And every week I sent most of my per diem back to my family, as if I were a migrant worker working the orchard circuit. My shirts were getting holes in them but I didn’t have the funds to replace them. It was driving Julie to distraction, and one day she slinked up to me, jabbed her hand into one of the holes, and yanked down until half my shirt was in shreds. But I kept wearing the shirt anyway.

  “But promise me when we open,” said Julie, “when you’re rich—”

  “I’ll buy a raft of shirts, I promise.”

  I was going to make a million dollars off of Spider-Man.

  “Oh, even more than that,” assured confident colleagues. Was it possible that I was actually going to be out of debt before the end of the year? That seemed . . . just . . . preposterous. But Julie swore it was going to happen.

  In the meantime, lunches and breakfasts were out of the question. I borrowed an awl from a stagehand to put another hole in my belt. Julie was losing weight too. She was simply forgetting to eat, to go outside even. There were too many details to work out during breaks: The inflatable Bonesaw McGraw kept leaking. The walls of Peter’s bedroom were too heavy for the puppeteers. And then there was the bed.

  After Uncle Ben died in his arms, Reeve was supposed to stagger in a daze toward his bed and sing “Rise Above.” How would the bed get there? It was a remote-controlled bed with concealed wheels and motored by a friction drive mechanism. It could putter to the precise spot you needed it.

  So as Reeve sang in an outpouring of bitterness and grief, the bed trundled onstage.

  When the ones who run the firehouse . . .

  The bed stopped short, and then inexplicably wheeled stage left.

  Are the ones that start the fires . . .

  Reeve was singing directly to the memory of Uncle Ben, g
roping for answers to a senseless death. The bed, meanwhile, was making a three-point turn. Reeve would have really liked to sit on that bed, but it was heading downstage now, on a diagonal. Reeve followed it, as he honored his murdered uncle:

  And you said rise above!

  Open your eyes up! . . .

  The bed finally looked like it was parked. So, still singing, Reeve began to sit, but there was no bed underneath him, because it had just lurched backward. Julie grabbed the God Mike.

  “Can we try this again, please?”

  A solemn piano vamp accompanied Reeve walking downstage with heavy tread.

  When the ones who run the firehouse—

  The bed meanwhile inched forward. Then zipped forward, missing its mark. I could hear Julie mutter, “What the—? Who’s controlling this?”

  And you said rise above! . . .

  The bed backed up a little. And then a little more. Reeve was spiking the high notes with lacerating regret. Julie eyed the bed.

  Open your—

  The bed zoomed forward.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake—!”

  “Hold, please.”

  Julie asked Rob Bissinger what the deal was. Rob reported: “There might be something wrong with the remote control. But we suspect it’s the wheels. They’re having a hard time with the crevices in the floor.”

  The bed required the sort of solution NASA engineers devised for the Mars Rover to get over rubble. The bed was sent to the shop. Money would be spent.

  I had a dream one night that week that Tech was going so slowly, we were beginning to witness creatures evolving onstage, as if we had shifted into a geologic time frame. There were days, however, when we were positive the show was going to be a mega-smash because everything once in our heads was now happening right there onstage. Look! The buildings were lit as if it were dawn in heaven. And now the floors were rising, and Brandon Rubendall’s replacement—Kevin Aubin—was set to do the Big Jump.

  The drums kicked in, the guitars howled, and Kevin launched into the air. After he landed, the tilted skyscrapers straightened, the lights bathed the set in violets and reds, and Kevin was sent backward toward the fully lowered ramp.

  “WHOO!” shouted Julie. Meanwhile, right behind her, Stan Lee was one big grin. That’s right—Stan Lee himself. About to turn eighty-eight, he showed up the evening of October 6 in his leather jacket and aviator glasses, looking more hale and with-it than any octogenarian had a right to be.

  And now he was watching the stage turn to strange sumptuous purples as Kevin Aubin was lifted straight up twenty feet and swung off stage right, with skyscrapers gliding toward the center of the stage before leaning in a variety of unexpected angles. Another Spider-Man zipped across on a cable. And all the while, the entire Upstage Cityscape Backdrop (actually one huge dial) turned around in circles to give us all vertigo. It was all just so cool.

  “WHOO!” exclaimed a bunch of us.

  Blinding reds shifted to trippy sepias as still another Spider-Man swooped stage left to stage right near the front of the stage.

  The aerialist got a nice long “WHOOOO!” from Julie.

  “. . . And hold.”

  While we were whooing it in the orchestra seats, Randall was in his box sweating bullets. Losing years off his life. Strategizing just how he or anyone was going to make it through this whole number without stopping. Without dying.

  We did make it through other sequences that night, including several featuring Chris Tierney, who was assigned the swinging Spider-Man role known as “the hero flyer” because it had the most difficult aerial parts.

  “I’ve trained a lot of people on the wires over the years, but I’ve never seen someone take to it as naturally as Chris,” marveled Scott Rogers. Chris Tierney had a photograph of himself as a toddler in a Spider-Man costume. It was a dream for him to swing around the theatre, and you could tell by that extra little panache he put into his moves. Yes, we only got through two minutes of stage time that night. (We were conditioned by now to not expect more than that.) But when Chris Tierney swung over our heads at fifty miles per hour, we were all seven-year-olds again, especially eighty-seven-year-old Stan Lee. The “circus” part of our “circus-rock-and-roll-drama” was still on track.

  An hour later, in the lobby, Stan Lee was signing the scripts of several starry-eyed actors and dancers, slapping backs, slinging jokes, posing for pictures, and proclaiming for Jake Cohl’s cameras that the show was going to be the most magnificent thing ever. He gave Julie several hugs—“You’re a genius, and I love you,” he said—and then headed out to the limo waiting for him. Did any fanboy want to pick a fight now? We had Stan the Man himself, on camera, giving the show his blessing. If that didn’t inoculate us from the doubts of the doubters, what would?

  And yet. These confidence-boosting days alternated with other days. Days where the distance between our ideal and our reality was so vast it was difficult to fathom. Just a few days after Stan Lee’s visit, we had come to the scene where Patrick Page (as Norman Osborn) was supposed to step into a massive DNA something-something contraption, and then emerge through lights and smoke sixty seconds later as the Green Goblin in all his hideous, startling DayGlo glory.

  But that didn’t happen. Sixty seconds wasn’t nearly enough time for the quick-change. So we watched Patrick cradling his dead wife, delivering a Shakespearean revenge-tragedy monologue, but meanwhile looking like a guy who took off his shirt and then had a little incident while grilling some steaks.

  And there was nothing we could do about it. Come opening night, we were going to be a laughingstock. Julie turned in her seat and looked at me with a strange expression. Then she said, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking and feeling, “Just watching it all disappear down the dreamhole, huh?”

  I didn’t say anything. Did she really just intuit the thoughts jackknifing through my head? And did she really just suggest she was thinking them too? That all our aspirations, all our work, were going to be for naught? I don’t know how deep she buried her fears after that day. But she would never say anything like that out loud again.

  She tasked the costume department to come up with a solution. Fingers were crossed. And we couldn’t sink too far down in despair anyway because now we were working on the Spider-Man–Goblin climactic battle. And everything Scott Rogers described back in August? His whacked-out plan? We were watching it happen above our heads. Thirty hidden motors were controlling the speed, height, and trajectory of these two dancers wrestling and winging through the air. And it was amazing.

  Michael Cohl laughed. “There’s the climax of the show, right there. And we’ve put it at the end of Act One!”

  Hah, hah—yeah, it was quite a spectacle. But of course, it wasn’t the climax of the show—we trump it at the end of Act Two with an immense funnel-shaped web that descends from the—oh. Right.

  We didn’t have that anymore.

  Back at my apartment that night, I thought about what Michael said. Five and a half years earlier, I landed this musical bookwriting gig by writing the very scene we teched tonight—the scene that culminated in the Spidey-Goblin aerial battle. I wrote it as a lark. Took me a night. I of course had no idea at the time how much money and hardware and ingenuity and effort would go into actually rendering the thing. And when I wrote it, I had no notion where it would go in the show. It was a scene that opened with the Goblin singing a takeoff of Rodgers & Hart’s “Manhattan”—“I’ll take Manhattan / And then I’ll flatten / All of Queens . . .”—and ended with the weight of the Steinway dragging Goblin off the side of the building to his death.

  The piano was in the scene because in May 2005, instead of going to sleep thinking about baseball or sex, I went to sleep every night fantasizing how not even Fox News could spin President Bush’s assassination as something heroic if it was due to a large piano falling on top of him. Up for this Spider-Man gig the same month, grasping for some musical-theatre-appropriate method for the Goblin to murder the citizens on
the street down below, I remembered my nightly sleep aid. And that was why a piano was in the Chrysler Building scene.

  So . . . should Michael’s casual comment get some consideration? Could you put the Spider-Man–Goblin Chrysler Building scene and aerial fight at the end of the show? I spent three minutes that night gaming it out. It would mean the Goblin doesn’t die at the end of Act One. Oh. Well that would mean there wouldn’t be a web-fight between Spider-Man and Arachne at the end of the show because Arachne wouldn’t be the main villain of Act Two. So, of course not—you can’t move the Goblin fight. Good. Glad we settled that. I went to sleep that night thinking about sex and baseball.

  • • •

  The last time we had a group sales presentation, it was back in 2009, a few months before David Garfinkle found nothing but lint and mouse droppings in his coffers. Any excitement and goodwill we kindled with those agents at that sneak preview got dampened a year ago. So now, on October 19, a number of sales agents and ticket brokers were filing into the Foxwoods to get wooed anew. A presentation was going to cut into precious Tech time, but we didn’t have a choice—we couldn’t sneeze at the folks who were wondering just how much energy they should put into selling Spider-Man tickets.

  The program began with Kevin Aubin performing the Big Jump. Four sales agents sitting in the front row shrieked in fear and delight. So far, so good. Kevin sprung backward, and . . . eesh . . . he landed pretty hard on that ramp. But he seemed okay—he was now scuttling down the ramp, and . . . oh God, was that a grimace flickering across his face? The presentation continued. The sales agents seemed impressed with the stunts. They filed out of the theatre at the end of the demonstration chatting chirpily. Maybe there wasn’t quite the same level of enthusiasm as the 2009 showcase with Bono and Edge. But at least none of them guessed that Kevin Aubin broke both of his wrists right in front of them.