by Berger, Glen
We had thirty seconds to spare.
And not that night, and not the next day. But. The day after that, we would learn that rushing through those two hours of Tech might have screwed us. Might have truly and royally screwed us.
• • •
Michael Cohl, Julie, Danny, and I were walking back to the theatre after the dinner break, sifting our memories for tales of disastrous first previews of shows that eventually went on to success. Michael related how the first preview of Les Misérables in London was over four hours long. We were certain our show that night—with a gruesome number of delays—would be a minimum of four hours. So it already felt like our show had entered an exclusive pantheon—Les Miz and us!
“How long can the show be tonight? Are there union rules? Can we go past midnight?”
“Would we serve midnight snacks to the audience if it came to that?”
“Someone could do a White Castle run. Buy two thousand sliders—”
“That, and free drinks and maybe they won’t burn the theatre down. . . .”
We reached the theatre and there was already a line of people around the block. Just one year earlier, the theatre was shuttered, with Michael Cohl trying to get his head around the Spider-Man account books. Now the Foxwoods’s lobby was about to be packed with more people than the theatre had seen for years.
And we weren’t ready.
Looking at the long line of eager people, I couldn’t help feeling like Bernie Madoff the day before his Ponzi scheme unraveled. These good people didn’t know what they had bought a ticket to. But then again, neither did I. The Department of Labor had signed off on all the aerial moves. Spider-Man could land in the aisles. With a little bit of luck, we’d be able to string some scenes together, deliver some of the beautiful moments, and the audience would see a spectacle like nothing they’d seen before.
Backstage, just before curtain, the company gathered in a circle. While waiting for the circle to form, I checked the floor again, and instantly found a daddy longlegs. And in such stupidly plain sight I thought I was hallucinating at first. Good—I was going to dwell on that guy tonight if things went weird. Michael read a note sent by our absent composers in Australia. Julie delivered some words. The usual things that got said got said. I wasn’t really listening to any of it. I was staring at the curtain, trying not to worry about the two thousand people on the other side of it. And failing.
And then the huddle broke with whoops and cheers, and as we headed to seats and stations:
“Break a leg.”
“Break a leg.”
“Break a leg.”
“Break a leg.”
The origin of this ninety-year-old expression is obscure, but it’s most likely something to do with the idea that wishing someone good luck is bad luck, so you wish them bad luck instead. Which feels Jewish. Or Russian. Or human. Theatre is a superstitious profession because success seems to depend on inspiration, planning, competence, and blind stupid chance. It’s why ancient agriculture had all those gods. Other superstitious activities: golf, horse racing . . .
Anyway, it was time to take our seats.
• • •
“I’m hellishly excited,” Michael Cohl said to the audience. He was in his usual T-shirt and shaggy beard. He was standing in front of the curtain, his unceremonious vibe instantly disarming. He got the audience laughing as he described the devices installed in the theatre designed to snatch any cameras or video-recording cell phones out of the hands of the offenders. He read an actual statement from the Department of Labor cautioning audience members: “Please don’t hitch a ride on any of the actors.”
And then the lights dimmed. Down in the backstage depths, Kimberly Grigsby punched her hands on the downbeat, a blast of horns splatted out of the speakers, searchlights swept over the audience, and there was no going back. The show had just gone public.
The opening number went off without a hitch, and segued smoothly into the Geeks scene, which went right into the myth of Arachne scene, which then went straight into the Queens High School scene. And yeah, the Geeks let adrenaline get the better of them, and the loom’s horizontals didn’t function perfectly, but we had already gotten through more of the show in one go than ever before.
At the beginning of “Bouncing Off the Walls,” there was a glitchy moment. In order for Reeve to fall onto his bed from the ceiling, cables stretching from the back of the auditorium must first “come to tension.” One of these cables, however, escaped the grip of a crewperson, and it draped on top of a few dozen audience members. But it happened fast, and it was in the dark, which meant that many of the audience members feeling something suddenly draped on them had no idea what was going on. I comforted myself with the thought that there was only a twenty percent chance—twenty percent tops—that someone would sue.
The Queens Rowhouses—which had never given us trouble before—got stuck, but the delay wasn’t a head-buried-in-one’s-hands moment. No, the first of those moments came at the end of “Rise Above.” The number itself had just taken the show to a higher emotional plane—you could feel the audience ready to give themselves over to the spell of the show, and we were ready to seal the deal—the Big Jump and the rest of “Spider-Man’s Debut” was just seconds away, when—
“Hold please.”
Natalie was supposed to ascend into the flies after her last verse in “Rise Above.” Instead, she stayed suspended in midair. After a minute, all of the show’s momentum had gone pffft. After two minutes, the quiet in the auditorium felt like the quiet in a library. After three minutes, I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, as if I were in the last minutes of a yoga class. After four minutes, the auditorium didn’t sound like a library anymore. It sounded exactly like an auditorium full of people enduring an indefinite delay while looking at a spider-lady suspended in the air. Murmurs. Some titters and other bubbly noises. After five minutes, Randall went on the God Mike. “Give it up for Natalie Mendoza, for hanging in there!” Surprisingly boisterous applause. Natalie acknowledged the applause with a subtle nod and smile. The applause subsided until silence reigned again, punctuated with murmurs and some coughing. After six minutes, I was digging fingernails into my skin. After seven minutes, I seriously began to worry that this weirdness was going to trigger an acid flashback in me. And after eight minutes, I felt on the verge of a spiritual epiphany, but it was disrupted by the sudden resumption of music, and Natalie ascending into the flies.
The show continued, with the first act lurching from impressive moments to more showstopping delays. Finally, we reached the last scene of the act. Patrick Page appeared at the piano, singing “I’ll Take Manhattan.” He made up some more lyrics while members of the crew untangled cables onstage.
Finally the scene resumed. The aerial fight between Goblin and Spider-Man ensued, and it went off without a hitch. The crowd thrilled to every second of it. We were going to have a head of steam going into intermission because there was only one last sequence, and it had never failed us. So we all watched a masked Spider-Man fly in with Jenn in his arms and deposit her onstage. A couple lines of script stolen shamelessly from the movie were delivered:
“But who are you?” a breathless and infatuated Mary Jane asked the masked man.
“You know who I am,” the superhero said with quiet intensity, sounding for all the world like he was going to reveal his true identity to the girl he secretly loved.
“I do?”
Pregnant pause, and then—“I’m your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man!”
Then Spider-Man “shot a web.” Act One would end with a coda of soaring music as Spider-Man flew over the audience toward the balcony. Only, inexplicably, Spider-Man stopped with a jolt in mid-flight. The music had ended, but Spider-Man was still hanging impotently over the heads of the audience. And, maddeningly, it wasn’t even a technical foul-up. Everything was in perfect working order. There is, however, a small yellow box with a big red button on it. It’s called an E-Stop, �
�E” for “Emergency.” A handful of these E-Stops were positioned backstage. Pressing the button shuts down the whole system. It was a last-resort safety measure. And someone backstage had accidentally leaned against the button. So instead of sending the audience out for intermission, we treated them to the emasculating spectacle of Spider-Man dangling helplessly over the front rows of the auditorium.
A minute went by. Three members of the crew appeared on the edge of the stage and tried to grab on to Spider-Man’s feet so that they could unhook him, but he was just out of reach. One of the crew members retrieved a stick from backstage, but the prodding only sent Spider-Man swinging farther out of range. Many in the audience were laughing. I stole a glance at Julie, who was shaking her head slowly from side to side. I meditated on that daddy longlegs, who was somewhere near that stage, going about his daddy longlegs errands, oblivious to the comedy and the misery.
Four stops in the first act. “Could’ve been worse,” several of us agreed over an intermission drink. But, oh man, that last stop stung. Without the image of the dangling Spider-Man fresh in the audience’s minds, the chatter now surrounding us in the lobby surely wouldn’t have had that slightly mocking edge in it.
Act Two was going to be a crapshoot. I grabbed another drink as the lights blinked. And miraculously, we got midway through the act before the audience heard Randall’s voice again.
“Aaand hold.”
The audience was giving off the vibe of folks who would take this fifth stop in stride. So when a woman suddenly shouted, “I don’t know about the rest of you—,” I stupidly expected the rest of the sentence to be a positive expression of support for our show, but she continued, “but I feel like a guinea pig tonight!”
The audience had been waiting in silence, so there wasn’t a single sound wave standing in the way of these new agitations in the air. The angry woman’s words traveled unimpeded across the orchestra, up to the mezzanine, and all the way to the cheap seats. The lousy acoustics of the theatre must have been momentarily transformed, because every single syllable rang clear as a bell. As Michael Riedel would report a few days later (because of course it got reported), the heckler was a woman named Denise Chastain, who explained, “I was like the frog in the boiling water. The slow simmer just got to me, and, by the second act, I just lost it.” Several audience members responded to this heckler with boos, eventually drowning her out. (Only later would we learn that alternate Spider-Man Matthew James Thomas—five shows away from his first performance and sitting in the audience—was the person who actually initiated the booing.)
Eventually the issue onstage was resolved, and the show slogged on. It took a painful number of minutes to get that damn web net out of the pit, but it eventually emerged, and anyway, it wasn’t me onstage describing how “this is where a big net comes up,” which was the actual backup plan had we failed to tech the web net in time.
And when the show finally ended, we did not feel despair. Michael Cohl, Julie, Jere—practically everyone involved with the show—confirmed that they were feeling how I too was feeling.
Pumped.
We got through the whole show. And we did it in under three and a half hours! (“Take that, Les Misérables!”) After a Tech that moved at worm-speed, the fact that we got through the whole show in one evening that night was nothing short of miraculous. We had six more weeks of previews to get this show to where we wanted it to go. No problem.
The producers hosted a party for the entire company afterward. Lots of food, an open bar, high spirits, relief, and amazement that we got through it. Earlier that night, 60 Minutes aired their Turn Off the Dark sneak preview, with Lesley Stahl and her team delivering a big puffy advertisement for our show, complete with exciting clips and effusive descriptions of a must-see theatrical event. At the party, Michael Cohl reported with a grin that between seven p.m. and midnight—partly on the strength of the 60 Minutes piece—Spider-Man sold $700,000’s worth of tickets.
The worst was over. It would only get better from here.
It would only get better . . .
11
* * *
Breakdowns
Spectacular, innovative and interesting things are happening at Broadway’s newly renamed Foxwoods Theatre . . . Taymor is very close to a finished product that could become the event of the season . . . You can see the money on the stage and it will take your breath away.
—Broadway Critic Blog, reporting on the first preview
An epic flop, as the $65 million show’s high-tech gadgetry went completely awry amid a dull score and baffling script.
—Michael Riedel, reporting on the same first preview
The entire cast got a day off after the first preview. The next day, they all assembled on the carpeted floor of the mezzanine foyer for a relaxed little powwow with Julie. She told the cast with a laugh that she was clear about the show’s plot, but “whether you all follow the story or not—we don’t have a clue!”
Julie acknowledged that for too many people at our first preview, the question of Arachne and her illusions was a head-scratcher. Though Arachne explained more than once in the show that the “return of the Sinister Six” was “all an illusion,” Julie admitted that, “when Arachne is flying, it’s harder to hear the words somehow. Half the people are looking at how spectacular she looks and not necessarily listening to what she’s saying.”
After several actors—with deference—offered their two cents, Patrick Page said he had an “intuitive sense that this character who has inspired awe is now somehow in Act Two becoming . . . trivialized.”
This got Julie’s back up. “Why? Why is it trivial?”
Taking pains to not appear like he was overstepping his bounds as an actor, Patrick tried to explain. Julie clearly wanted feedback, but she was also beginning to bristle. If she allowed too much debate, if the actors started piling on, confidence in the whole show would erode, and that would be dangerous. It was time to shut this down.
“I believe in it as a concept,” she said. The tone in her voice brooked no dissent, and anyway it was time to let the actors go—there was a preview in a few hours. I found Natalie Mendoza in her dressing room a few minutes later and was excited to tell her about some of the ways we were going to upgrade her character. We were going to add a spoken section in the “Think Again” number.
“And it’ll be underscored by a sort of Tuvan throat singing—”
“I’m sorry,” Natalie interrupted. She said it all sounded thrilling, but she was still a little woozy from two days before.
“Oh?”
“I got a concussion that night.”
“What?!”
“In the pit, while I was getting in my legs for the final scene, something hard, like metal, hit me in the back of the head.”
I was dumbstruck.
“It was dark, so I couldn’t see what it was. And I was trapped in my legs—I couldn’t move . . .”
Replaying the events, it was eventually determined that a carabiner on one of the cables hastily thrown into the pit had conked her. If Tech that afternoon hadn’t been so rushed might this accident had been prevented? Perhaps. But without rushing it, there wouldn’t have been an ending to the show that night. Natalie had gone to the cast party that evening. No one yet—not even Natalie—realized this was an incident to take seriously.
So she performed her second show that evening, but the next morning Natalie reported back from her doctor: She could sustain permanent damage if she continued to perform before she fully recuperated. So, until further notice . . . no shows.
The third preview was that night, with another two thousand people in the audience.
“Who’s Natalie’s understudy?” Julie asked, unnerved.
“America,” came the answer from stage management.
“No she isn’t,” said Julie firmly. “Not the first understudy.”
“Well it says right here on the cast list . . .”
America Olivo was one of six “swin
gs” in the cast—actors or dancers who prepared for several roles, but only appeared onstage if a role needed to be filled that evening. America had been receiving aerial training the last four months, but certainly not as intensively as, say, Natalie Mendoza. Her vocal training with Kimberly was spotty. Had anyone even run lines with her recently? Had she ever gotten more than ten minutes of one-on-one with Julie? No and no. Heck, Julie barely even remembered America’s audition and wasn’t all too sure she ever signed off on making America our alternate Arachne. It didn’t matter—we had a show in eight hours, and stage manager Kat Purvis informed us that if America didn’t get familiarized with a half-dozen scenes and aerial moves by six p.m., we wouldn’t have a show that night.
Any plans to knock some of the things off the lengthy Tech list were nixed. It was all hands on deck to get America up to speed. And where was this happening? Forty-second Street. Seventy-seven years after the film 42nd Street was released, and nine years after a hit Broadway adaptation was performed on this very stage at the Foxwoods.
Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. . . . Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!
—Julian Marsh, 42nd Street
No one needed America to come back a star. Coming back in one piece without having made a total hash of the evening was good enough for us. And America—with a Natural History Museum Butterfly Pavilion in her stomach—got through it better than anyone dared hope. She was our heroine that night. But how long would Natalie be out? The rumor was that she was on her way to Los Angeles to convalesce.
