by Berger, Glen
A fluke. The timing of the cue got off again. And maybe the scramble that morning to prep the stage for the presentation upped the odds that something like this would happen. Kevin was sanguine about it—“just one of those things.” Nonetheless, the burden of safeguarding this show was now really weighing heavily on Randall. But he couldn’t quit—no one else could possibly take over his job. Everyone was sick about it—particularly Scott Rogers, and also Jaque Paquin, who had seen his share of accidents in his twenty years at Cirque du Soleil but especially couldn’t stand the “stupid” ones—the ones that got repeated. More safeguards were instituted—this time they were built into the computer program itself. There was no way this screwup was happening again. No way.
Would the incident get leaked? A few days went by. Nothing in the press. Looked like the coast was clear. I didn’t even want to contemplate the sort of hay Riedel would’ve made out of this.
So Tech plodded on at its surreal pace. We were getting through less than three minutes of the show per day. It didn’t feel like we were making theatre so much as stop-action animation. A giant human-spider dove from the mezzanine and hurtled over our heads as we tried to carry on conversations in the murk. Over and over again giant spiders swooped. We had been in this cavern in the near-darkness for thirty-three days. It felt like we were all trapped in a coal mine, on acid.
• • •
Months earlier it was decided that the last scene of the show needed to be set to music. As per Julie’s instructions, orchestrator David Campbell based his arrangement on trip-hop group Portishead’s musical style, attempting to replicate their heroin-fogged, spy-jazz sound. And of all the artistic risks we were taking in the show, going for quasi-operatic recitative in the mode of Portishead between a spider-lady and a superhero as the two leaped about on a net just might have been the riskiest.
The dialogue-ish lyrics sounded shoehorned into the choppy melody lines. Worse, it just didn’t sound like something Edge and Bono would ever write. However, Edge and Bono were finally done with Leg 3 of their tour. They began swinging by the theatre, and I sat down with Edge one day in the upstairs rehearsal room to give him the lowdown on the final scene.
“It’s a fight to the death, but it’s also a mating dance. It should feel intense between Peter and Arachne. Like they belong together. And yet, at the end of it, Peter demands to know where Mary Jane is.”
Edge suggested: “It’s like calling out someone else’s name during rough sex.”
Yes. That was it exactly. “So can you think of a song from U2’s past that could be a model for the scene? Something that sounds like fight music?”
Edge thought for a moment, and then mentioned “Exit” from their 1987 mega-platinum The Joshua Tree. We listened to it together. About a minute and a half before the end of the song, there’s a fantastic guitar solo—raw and relentless. It was just what we were looking for. I took the song to Julie, who was in her orchestra seat waiting for more lights to get programmed.
She stuck in some earbuds. She was into it. She tried some words over the guitar solo: “Love me or kill me! / Love me or kill me!”
Her eyes were shut. She was really concentrating. She turned to me and did that thing people do when they’re wearing headphones—she started shouting, unaware that she didn’t need to shout.
“THIS IS GREAT!!”
Now she was singing louder in the middle of the hushed auditorium, oblivious to how loud she was getting—“LOVE ME OR KILL ME!”
Everyone could hear her now; a director yelling what, after thirty-six days of Tech, sounded like a reasonable request. But she was actually singing Arachne’s soul-sick plea to Peter. It was Arachne’s entire story boiled down to five words.
It was decided that David Campbell’s scoring would be retained for the first half of the scene, but the next minute and a half should be wild U2-sounding rock, with three voices wailing—Arachne’s, Peter’s, and Mary Jane’s.
So the next day, in the small upstairs rehearsal room, a couple of guitarists, a drummer, and a keyboardist were plugging in. These were serious studio musicians—guys who had been playing songs from this show since the 2007 workshop. Bono and Edge had to come up with a song in the next hour. Julie was busy with Tech downstairs, but she had given them their orders: Come up with something as fierce as that solo in “Exit.” So when Bono said to the musicians, “I want something like ‘Cars.’ Do you guys know ‘Cars’?”—eyes squinted and eyebrows cocked.
“ ‘Cars’? You mean . . . Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’?”
Yeah, they knew it. It was a New Wave hit from 1980. It made famous use of the Polymoog synthesizer. Few songs in the universe sound more “1980.” It had that stiff, staccato sort of groove that made it fun to do the robot dance to. If you were eleven years old. Nonetheless, Bono started humming the groove. And keyboardist Billy Jay Stein, looking amused (he tended to look amused), started playing the theme. Bono kept humming, but now he was putting his throat into it. Repeating the groove slowly. Moving his body just a bit. And something in the room shifted. You could feel it. As if, watching and listening to Bono, we all suddenly heard something in “Cars” we had never heard before.
Sex.
Guitarist Matt Beck began to take up the groove. Now Bono was humming another musical phrase over the groove. Edge had his guitar out, and something new and wilder was emerging. And the room was getting loud. Conductor Kimberly Grigsby was smiling in disbelief. She glanced my way—Are you digging what’s happening here? Musical alchemy was what was happening. “Most incredible hour,” Kimberly said afterward, nerves still tingling. Onstage this was going to be a very righteous tune. And yet . . . it wasn’t.
This “Love Me or Kill Me” session was the culmination of all the music—all the multivaried soundscapes—Bono and Edge had generated for the show in the last five years. All the infectious grooves, hummable hooks, moving anthems. And the audiences that began arriving a month later just couldn’t hear it. There were issues—orchestration issues and profound mechanical issues, and mysterious hard-to-nail-down issues that banjaxed the composers’ efforts; killed this enterprise’s whole sonic dimension. And the first inklings of the issues only came to light when the full orchestra was finally assembled and the music was played through sound designer Jonathan Deans’s speaker system in a full auditorium.
The result: Despite demos exhibiting a wide and unpredictable palette, Ben Brantley of the Times said nothing at all about the music when he wrote his review in February. Nothing except that it “blurs into a sustained electronic twang of varying volume, increasing and decreasing in intensity, like a persistent headache.” Not great material to pull for a marquee quote. Except maybe “Intensity! Like!”
Anyway, that was in the future, which was not for us to know. It was the present that we had to deal with. And the present included a new Michael Riedel New York Post article. He broke a story on October 28 with the headline “ ‘Spider-Man’ Safety Scare: Actor breaks both wrists in failed stunt.” I scanned through it that morning with a good idea where all this was heading:
. . . The most expensive and technically complex show ever produced on a Broadway stage. It may also turn out to be the most dangerous . . .
. . . blood-curdling accident . . .
. . . stunt went horribly awry . . .
This was the day it started. The day the heat lamps got turned on. They would take a while to warm up, but eventually they would be glowing something crazy. Within a week, news not only of Kevin Aubin’s wrists, but also Brandon Rubendall’s foot, was out. News would beget news, which would beget scrutiny, which would beget news. The Foxwoods was going to become a fishbowl. Containing a bunch of increasingly stressed-out fish.
10
* * *
We’re Not Ready
Reading comic books as a ten-year-old, I thought J. Jonah Jameson was a bit of a stretch. Why would someone be so monomaniacally determined to bring a man down? Especially when it was obvious that
Spider-Man had nothing but good intentions? I enjoyed the character of J. J., sure; he made for an amusing, extra source of stress in Peter Parker’s life. But was he really a plausible human being?
I eventually grew up and figured out there was no such thing as an implausible human being. So of course our good-intentioned Spider-Man show had its own Jameson. He was gunning for us, and finally I had to stop asking why and just figure, fine. Fine.
And at first Michael Riedel’s articles were just a nuisance, like a gnat flitting around your face while you’re trying to have a conversation. But as November progressed, as his articles started getting more sadistic, he was less gnat and more mosquito, taking sips of blood and leaving behind a wheal that itched like hell. By the end of 2010, when his articles were doing some serious damage, he wasn’t just a blood-sucking mosquito; he was a parasite-carrying blood-sucking mosquito depositing the larvae of an elephantiasis-causing filarial worm under the skin of our show.
Not to put Riedel in a negative light or anything.
After all, Michael Riedel was avidly read—he had found his niche in the Broadway ecosystem, and good for him. Plenty of shows shrugged off Riedel’s “reportage.” Other shows were weakened by his disclosures, and when those shows closed, a Broadway theatre became available again, and a new show moved in. It was, as Mufasa would say, “the circle of life.” Only occasionally did someone actually take a swing at Michael (like director David Leveaux, who became a folk hero when he slugged the guy at the Angus McIndoe Restaurant on Forty-fourth after a particularly annoying 2004 article).
Riedel’s first article covering Kevin Aubin’s accident was at least accompanied by some paragraphs making the aerial work sound pretty exciting. His next article a few days later spilled the news that the show was indeed postponing the first preview by two weeks, and moving opening night from December 21 to January 11. He reported that the “bone-breaking Spectacle of Insanity” was “headed off the rails,” predicting “Taymor and her band of flying daredevils are going to have to ratchet down the special effects so that nobody gets killed.”
Patrick Healy couldn’t bear to be scooped, particularly by Riedel. Having covered Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary and now contributing to the Arts Beat at the New York Times as their theater reporter, Healy had begun to step up his coverage of the show. So it was Healy who broke the news that a couple dozen stunts still weren’t ready to be performed in front of safety inspectors from the New York State Department of Labor.
Blogs and Internet zines linked to the Healy and Riedel reports, and chatter about the show increased exponentially. All of which would have been terrific publicity-wise, except certain words about the show—words like “dangerous” and “troubled”—were blooming like an outbreak of red tide.
To release some tension from all this exposure, Julie and Danny had taken to beating up our giant Bonesaw McGraw in the lobby, calling the inflatable dummy “Michael Riedel.” Less innocuously, patience was getting thinner and tempers were starting to flare inside the auditorium as Tech continued. With more and more frequency, curt demands and out-and-out browbeating were being directed toward the staff, particularly Randall White. Dancers were getting scolded for not incorporating the latest revisions. The crew was getting muttered about for appearing to lack the aptitude to handle such a show. Say each person in that theatre spotted Julie and Danny a hundred “Goodwill Points.” The director and choreographer had now begun to expend those points. At this rate, the points would be used up sometime around January 11. So long as we opened on the eleventh, we’d be okay, and this shift in tone was merely digging the heels into the horse’s side for the homestretch. So I didn’t say anything. I didn’t try to change anyone’s behavior—not Danny’s, not Riedel’s, not anyone’s. But that old earnest Bing Crosby song kept playing in my head, and it’s so uncomplicated it breaks my heart: “Never treat others with scorn / We’re only here ’cause we’re born.”
• • •
Oprah Winfrey was in the theatre. Bono would be bringing several people into the theatre that month, and one never knew who it was going to be next. But Teese Gohl, music supervisor, wasn’t looking impressed. In fact, today, with the full orchestra in the Foxwoods for the first time, Teese was looking highly unamused. Getting the EQ right in this theatre was proving a challenge, not least because the orchestra had been packed into two rooms in the basement in the back of the theatre. The music from those two rooms was translated into electricity, which then traveled via thick-ass cables hundreds of yards up stairs, around corners, past offices and dressing rooms, until it was eventually dispersed as music through speakers hung throughout the auditorium.
Who knew what would get lost in the translation. “Jonathan Deans is a rock star,” said one starstruck young sound engineer to me who was seeking our sound designer’s autograph. Jonathan’s work on shows like Cirque du Soleil’s LOVE was renowned. So we weren’t worrying. But—and few of us knew this yet—Jonathan himself was worrying. Our biggest and most crucial speakers had been hung right behind two large immovable set pieces. This arrangement would end up turning all the music in the show to mud. Months later Michael Cohl would blame Jonathan Deans’s Britishness for this acoustical cock-up.
“He was too damn polite! He should have been raising hell!”
For what it was worth, what Oprah Winfrey heard that day blew her away. As Tech continued that day, Bono and Oprah sat together and watched on Julie’s iPad video clips of scenes already staged. Bono had seen these clips before, but he seemed just as thrilled with them as ever. And, of course, if Bono’s enthusiasm infected Oprah—television-hosting, magazine-owning, public-opinion-shaping Oprah—all the better. Bono’s a shrewd fellow.
Shrewd enough, in fact, not to show Oprah the second act opening—an introduction to six supervillains staged as a sort of fashion show. It was entitled “The Ugly Pageant.” And, eesh, was it ever. When Edge laid down a fun, fuzz-guitar, pop-punk trifle for the Ugly Pageant five years before called “Spider-Man Rising,” Julie wasn’t so hot on it. But when Dwayne Clark put on a Jamaican accent for his 2009 audition, Julie’s eyes lit up. Could he, perhaps, try “Spider-Man Rising” as a Rastaman? Putting a reggae spin on “Spider-Man Rising” finally made the song acceptable to Julie’s ears.
So a year and a half later, Dwayne was now onstage as a Jamaican busker, decked out in dah dreads.
“But what’s that?” Julie squinted.
The thing he was toting on his chest was not what she had asked for. She wanted our busker to play the bucket drums. The props department simply needed to drill some holes in a couple of plastic buckets, put some string through them so the man could wear them from his neck, and for twenty bucks’ worth of materials we’d be good to go.
But what was delivered—with its reinforced harness and welded metal—looked like the thousand-dollar custom-made thing that it was. In the props department’s defense, they couldn’t believe that Julie Taymor really wanted actual plastic paint buckets in a show as hyperdesigned as this one, where even Peter Parker’s camera was a large, forced-perspective object beautifully rendered in grayscale.
Eventually, Dwayne was provided plastic bucket drums. But it turned out reggae loses some of its integrity when it’s sung next to dancers in brightly colored “citizen” costumes that included a nun, an underwear salesman, and a beauty pageant winner named “Miss MetroCard,” while elaborately costumed supervillains such as Carnage and Kraven the Hunter slashed and stomped down a fashion show runway. It turned out, in fact, that in such a context, your Rastaman was going to seem less like Bob Marley, and more like Jar Jar Binks.
In addition, there were ungainly and unsightly puppets (that Michael Curry definitely didn’t design). The Geeks’ dialogue couldn’t be heard over the din of the music. And whenever the verses of “Spider-Man Rising” were sung by the whole company, the arrangement and the bright costumes combined to make the song sound like something composed for a morning-television show for toddle
rs. The only time I’ve ever used the phrase “a hot mess” is right here, in this very sentence, and I’m using it to describe our Act Two opening as it existed in mid-November 2010. Two weeks before our first preview.
• • •
But of course, it wouldn’t be Tech if every possible problem didn’t rear its head. Turn Off the Dark was going to be a massive hit. There were problems. They’d be solved. Maybe not by November 28—we had given up on that idea. But by the beginning of January—by the time the critics started to attend—we’d have it all sorted out.
We did, however, need an ending for our show on November 28 and, as of November 12, we no longer had one. The “Plan B” for our web net got scotched because the material kept ripping when actors started climbing on it. So we had two weeks to come up with a “Plan C.”
And there were still more than a dozen aerial moves that had to be approved by the safety inspectors from the Department of Labor. If they didn’t allow us to land Spider-Man in the aisles, Scott Rogers would have to reprogram half of the Spider-Man–Goblin battle, and we would be so screwed. And our two now-very-public injuries were prompting extra stringency from the inspectors.
There have always been injuries on Broadway. Even Mary Martin in Peter Pan broke her arm when she was accidentally flown into a brick wall. The star of Wicked—Idina Menzel—fell through a trapdoor the night before her final performance and cracked a rib. Before a performance of The Little Mermaid, actor Adrian Bailey fell through a trapdoor and sustained a broken back and a shattered pelvis. But were the injuries on other shows an endless source of hyperventilation in the media? The feeling inside the Foxwoods was that we were getting a bum deal, and if this narrative about a reckless show wound up pressuring the inspectors to castrate our best aerial bits, we were going to lose millions at the box office. And what did Riedel have to say about that? Of the show, he crowed, “I’ve got my foot on its neck, and I’m having too much fun to take it off.”
