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

by Berger, Glen

  “Los Angeles!? So . . . probably won’t be back for tomorrow’s show, eh, Julie?”

  “Glen, we’re cursed.”

  “Ah look, another Michael Riedel column. That’s sure to cheer us up.”

  As any musical-theater fan knows, the script, by director Julie Taymor and someone called Glen Berger, is a shambles. Some investors fret that all the special effects in the world can’t mask an incoherent plot, lame jokes and dull characters. As a result, . . . backers are starting to press lead producer Michael Cohl to bring in a seasoned Broadway hand to help sort out the mess.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Their concern is that Taymor has her hands full directing and doesn’t have time to rewrite. Nobody thinks Berger’s up to the job. The guy’s biggest credit is a play that 14 people saw, Underneath the Lintel.

  I interrupted my reading in order to say the words “that motherfucker” about a dozen times, each time trying out a different inflection. They all felt good. “Fourteen people.” Underneath the Lintel has had, in fact, two hundred productions. Not performances. Productions. All over the world. It’s been translated into eight languages. Hundreds of thousands have seen that little play. I shouted at my computer screen, informing it of my twelve Emmy nominations, and of the two Emmy statuettes that were sitting on my shelf back home. With spittle flying, I rattled off my résumé to the inanimate object in front of me, making sure to mention how I was head writer for five years on a television show seen every week by three million people. Then I blew out my throat to reiterate the number “THREE MILLION.” I pointed out that it took The Lion King in New York six years to reach three million audience members, and then I consulted my computer’s dictionary to bone up on the difference between libel and slander before characterizing the New York Post columnist as a libelous motherfucker at about one hundred decibels. The characterization sounded even better at 130 decibels I decided. And then I resumed reading.

  “On Spider-Man, he’s basically another one of Taymor’s puppets.”

  I flipped the bird at my computer screen and added some grunting for effect. And yet . . . was I? Nah. That’s crazy. I put it out of my head. Or I thought I did. But soon enough I’d be put to the test. And that one word would be right there in my brain, waiting for me. “Puppet.” I was nobody’s puppet. And if I needed to prove it . . . I’d prove it.

  America’s third performance that Friday did not go well. She missed lines and she botched some of the music. Julie found America in her dressing room afterward.

  And Julie closed the door behind her . . .

  If anyone backstage was wondering what Julie was going to say to America, they didn’t have to wonder long. Thunder from a chthonic weather system rumbled through doors, through walls, through floors. Maybe Julie wanted to put the fear of God into America so it wouldn’t happen again. Or maybe Julie was just justly pissed. Or maybe America was a suddenly convenient outlet for an epic-week’s worth of pent-up stress. Or pent-up anger that America wasn’t Natalie Mendoza. And where was Natalie?! No one even knew what coast she was on.

  Though America’s confidence was now shot after getting worked over with her director’s iron combs, she was still Arachne until further notice. Teese, however, was given surreptitious orders by Julie to start working with T. V. Carpio and assess whether she’d be able to take over as Arachne. Julie left the next morning for the West Coast because The Tempest was premiering in Los Angeles. Other people leaving: Scott Rogers and Jaque Paquin, both of whom had been working on the final Spider-Man–Arachne fight.

  “This fucking show!” Scott was heard saying as he stormed out of the theatre that afternoon, after yet another scuffle with heel-draggers and naysayers. He wrote the next day, promising to “be back next week to finish the fight (pun intended).”

  “Zis fúckeeng show!” were Jaque’s last words, or words to that effect. Jaque was ready to quit for good, but Danny stopped him before he left. He lent his ear and let Jaque vent in the orchestra seats until he promised to return in one week’s time, after tending to his ailing mother in Canada.

  What had pushed these two men to the edge? The near-impossible task assigned to them: Create an aerial event out of our pathetic makeshift web net that could serve as a whiz-bang climax for the show. If Scott and Jaque were to have any hope of accomplishing this chore, they were going to need a maximum amount of stage time and the full cooperation of all available personnel. And they didn’t get it. It was why our sound designer stomped out for a spell after the first preview.

  Tony Adams used to tell his staff that one of the most important roles of a producer was to carefully cultivate the most productive environment possible for the artists. But Tony was still dead, Julie was halfway to California, and Michael Cohl was only just beginning to realize that maybe this show’s shortcomings weren’t limited to its ledger book; that maybe Turn Off the Dark still had a few massive headaches lined up for him.

  With every preview performance, there were signs that certain persistent glitches had been eradicated. But every preview performance also delivered new and hitherto unimaginable snafus: puppets getting stuck in the flies when it was time for them to descend; or Reeve being unable to unhook the cables from his harness in time to perform the rest of the “Bouncing Off the Walls” number; or the doors of the transformer module losing power and trapping Patrick Page inside like a scene out of This Is Spinal Tap.

  Michael Cohl said it was a Murphy’s Law waiting game—we wouldn’t know everything that could go wrong until everything did go wrong. Like flushing grouse out of the tall grass, every performance was going to bring a few more problems out into the open, and only then would we be able to shoot them down. And just how many grouse were in the grass? And were there any giant, man-eating grouse lying in wait that we should be worrying about?

  I e-mailed new scenes to Natalie, but she reported that her memory was foggy. She was falling into “deep coma-like sleep states” throughout the day. Along with neck and head pain, she was suffering from light sensitivity and waves of nausea.

  “From a thumb-sized carabiner hitting the back of her neck!?” squeaked Danny Ezralow.

  Danny in particular just couldn’t get his head around the idea that Natalie was out of commission. Whenever there was a lull in our conversation, he replayed those moments in the pit again, as if he were trying to poke holes in the Warren Commission Report. And who could blame him? After an exhaustive two-year search for a performer who could actually handle this demanding role—the idea that our Arachne would wind up performing only twice before being out of the show “indefinitely” seemed so preposterous, so unfair.

  And that was the word from Natalie and her doctor now. “Indefinitely.” So America gamely went on each night in front of another sold-out audience. But although a fine performer, she wasn’t the Arachne that Julie had always envisioned. The situation made it that much more difficult for Julie, me, or anyone to get an accurate assessment of just what we had on that stage. So Julie continued to rehearse scene-clarifying rewrites, but her heart didn’t seem to be in it. Not today, at least, December 10. Reviews just came out nationwide for The Tempest. And they were almost universally horrible. You couldn’t call them “mixed.”

  “They really don’t like it,” she said, shell-shocked, as she read another review.

  The film, which cost twenty million dollars to make, would go on to gross . . . $300,000. Julie had no illusions that a Shakespeare film was going to clean up at the box office, but still . . .

  I watched Julie—we all did—for any effect the film’s reception might have on her. There’s a little gauge inside every artist, with its needle pointing somewhere between self-doubt and self-confidence. For an artist to produce their best work, that needle can’t be in the red zone on either end. If Julie’s needle inched too close to full-on self-doubt, what then? How would she start behaving? No one knew—few of us had ever been around her during a critical drubbing. There was certainly something more austere in
her demeanor. Nothing resembling that relaxed, expansive presence I encountered the first time I met her, when she was riding a long unbroken wave of acclaim. Now there was a grim focus—the bearing of someone walking determinedly home against a strong, cold wind.

  And December 2010 was supposed to be her month. The Met was remounting her highly popular Magic Flute, The Tempest was going to open to lovely reviews, and then, on December 21, Turn Off the Dark was going to have its triumphant opening. Instead, The Tempest was a bust, and Spider-Man wasn’t opening until January 11. And actually, now it was looking likely that we wouldn’t be opening on January 11. The feeling shared by Michael, Jere, and Julie was that it would be moronic to spend all this energy on the show and then fumble the ball on the one-yard line by opening the show prematurely.

  And we were on the one-yard line, weren’t we? Many at the Foxwoods thought so. But if you spent ten minutes googling Spider-Man + musical + review, you’d get a different picture. Two thousand people had been attending the show every night. The Internet was piling up with public opinion, and word about the show was spreading all over New York. It was as if the Foxwoods had the flu, and after every performance the building sneezed, sending two thousand new viral agents out into the city.

  Suddenly everyone and their grandmother was a dramaturge. Every day in my inbox I got letters like: “A friend of mine who is an investor on Broadway saw your show this past Tuesday. He asked for your information so he could give you his thoughts.” Everyone thought they understood how to structure a story, how to develop character, how to adapt source material. And the maddening thing was: Practically all of them made valid points. Several blog reports began with: “If anyone from Spider-Man is reading this . . .” And the co-bookwriter was in fact reading these things. George Tsypin was obsessed with them too. And he was developing grave concerns based on what he was reading. Julie, on the other hand, refused to read any of the blogs.

  “It would just muddy my thinking. So I’m not going to read the bad ones or the good ones,” she said to me.

  Um . . . what good ones?

  December 15: Julie’s birthday. And like a gift-wrapped birthday present, Natalie Mendoza showed up at the Foxwoods. She was ready to be a spider-woman again. And she had new questions for me about Arachne’s story line. I biked over to the Forbidden Planet comic-book store off Union Square a couple of days later to flip through compendiums and confirm what I told Natalie—that one comic-book issue had Spider-Man pursued by a spider-wasp villainess from the astral plane, so our own story wasn’t as far-fetched as the bloggers would have it. I emerged from the shop fifteen minutes later, feeling inspired. The feeling lasted five seconds: My bike was gone.

  I reported back to George Tsypin about some new ideas.

  “Glen, all of this sounds exciting. When you are at the end of the line, desperate, broke, and your bike is stolen, great creative things happen.”

  Spoken like a true Russian. I was reminded of my favorite Russian proverb: “Life is better than a bowl of raspberries, half full of worms.” And this week that seemed about right. Because a bowl of raspberries only a quarter full of worms was looking pretty good. Especially after the e-mail I received from the wife later that day, in which I got a good flaying for being so thoroughly AWOL from the lives of our children. Other than coming home for Thanksgiving Day, and one other time to watch the dog die, I had been ensconced in the city since August. In my response:

  You’re right. I’ve been a lousy dad. And I know I’m not John Adams at the Continental Congress. I’m not even on a whaling ship. But if the second act isn’t fixed, my name will be attached to the biggest theatrical flop in the history of America.

  I neglected to mention in my letter home that the producers just settled on February 7. We were now opening February 7.

  • • •

  It was December 20. We were in the middle of Act Two. I couldn’t bear to watch the show in the auditorium so I was watching it on the monitor in the stage manager’s office downstairs. And maybe it was the monitor, or maybe it was my mood. But Act Two was sure seeming . . . oppressive. I wandered to the men’s room, and as I got there I saw a mother escort her boy from the bathroom back toward the theatre. The look on that boy’s face changed my life.

  The boy didn’t look eager to go back into the auditorium. In fact, he had the look of a boy who had come to the theatre that evening full of excitement, and minute by minute we were letting him down. He wasn’t feeling the buoyant feelings he usually associated with the nimble-minded, upbeat superhero he adored. Where was that Spider-Man? Why did the world seem so dark? Maybe his face wasn’t actually saying any of those things. Maybe he just had a stomachache (why did he need the bathroom in the middle of the second act?). But it didn’t matter. I saw what I saw. I drifted back to the stage manager’s office convinced we were failing all the children coming to see our show. Our problems couldn’t be fixed with a few clarifying lines. Our problems were deeper. They were systemic.

  Julie was in the stage manager’s office when I got back. She wanted me to send a few e-mails regarding the next day’s rehearsal schedule. My head was still with that boy—we have more work ahead of us than anyone realizes. I heard applause and glanced at the monitor—we were deep into Act Two now, and Reeve had just finished “Boy Falls From the Sky.” Because we were in the stage manager’s office, we could hear Randall call cue after cue from the calling booth high up in the house-right balcony. He sounded just like an air traffic controller. The floor was rising to repeat the Brooklyn Bridge tableau that opened the show. Chris Tierney began his miming slow-motion run. I looked down at my computer again in order to—

  “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.”

  Someone in the room was shouting. Meanwhile, words were spilling out of Randall as if a plane were going down, and from Julie’s mouth a wail, “NOOOOO!”

  And I looked down to see Julie collapsed on the floor, and I looked up at the monitor and the bridge was empty, and the show seemed to have ground to a halt, and Kat Purvis was ashen as she rushed out of the office with the rest of the assistant stage managers.

  Chris Tierney had just fallen off the bridge. A thirty-foot drop onto the concrete floor of the pit.

  • • •

  One of the guys on the crew—we’ll call him Sam. He had a three-step routine worked out for this point in the show. At a precise moment in the middle of “Boy Falls From the Sky,” Sam heads to the back of the stage, where Chris Tierney’s safety line sits coiled on the floor. It’s dark back there, so Step One for Sam is to fish around in his pocket and pull out a little flashlight that he can wear on his forehead like a headband. Once that’s done, Step Two is to take one of the ends of this safety cable and clip it to a ring embedded in the floor. By the time Sam accomplishes Step Two, Chris Tierney (who was dancing as one of the spider-men in the “Boy Falls” number) has shown up at the back of the stage. Sam clips the other end of the safety cable to the back of Chris’s harness. That’s Step Three. The floor rises, and Chris Tierney—in Spider-Man costume—runs in slow motion toward the front edge of the floor, which is now a good fifteen feet higher than it was a few seconds before. As at the top of the show, the Goblin Cut Out (the set piece blocking one of our sound designer’s speakers) “slices” the rope, sending Jenn Damiano “falling” into the pit. Chris lunges forward, making to leap after her. The precisely measured safety cable—hooked to the floor on one end and to Chris’s harness on the other end—goes taut. Thus Chris is able to freeze in pre-leap, as if he’s an image in a comic-book panel.

  So this was how things were supposed to go, and it was how they went in the twenty or so performances before now. What was different about tonight? When Sam went to the back of the stage, he fished around in his pocket for the little flashlight. And have you ever fished around in a pocket, unable to find the thing that you absolutely know is in your pocket? That happened to Sam this evening. So it took him just that much longer to pull the flashlight out and affi
x it to his head. That was Step One. By the time he bent down to pick up one end of the cable, Chris Tierney was there for him. And as was the routine, when Chris Tierney shows up, the end of the cable is clipped to the harness. That’s Step Three. All three steps completed, Sam’s job was done. The floor rose. And Chris began his slow run toward the front edge of the stage.

  As soon as Chris went into his leap, he could feel the slack behind him and he knew what had happened. Or rather, what hadn’t happened—Step Two. He tried to grab the edge of the stage, but he had too much forward momentum. (“If you don’t go for it, it just doesn’t play,” he had said more than once.) He began plummeting, headfirst, with Jenn Damiano’s recorded scream (treated with reverb and a dash of distortion), accompanying his fall as if a live person were reacting in horror in real time to what was happening. And of course, the audience (including that unhappy boy who had just returned from the bathroom) was unsure if this was all just part of the show.

  Chris had maybe a half-second in the air to react and, in that time, this professional dancer twisted his body as much as he could because he knew if he landed on his head, he was a dead man. Natalie Mendoza was in the pit, having just gotten into the spider-legged twisty belt for the final scene. A body plunged right in front of her, with the untethered cable trailing behind him. A boy falling from the sky.

  He landed on his back.

  There were stage managers and those with emergency training racing to the scene; cast members in the backstage hallway standing stricken against the wall, fear on their faces, tears held back and tears not held back; Julie bolting past them, half-certain Chris wouldn’t survive this, if he wasn’t already dead. Had there been a vote earlier in the day for “favorite company member,” Chris could have taken first place. Julie had cast Chris once before—he played a rambunctious Princetonian in the “With a Little Help from My Friends” number in Across the Universe. Danny had introduced Julie to Chris after working with him several times in the past. Good, raucous times. Maybe it was in Italy that Danny had once seen Chris fall a dozen feet from a lamppost he had been climbing, only to see him immediately spring back up on his feet. Chris was a very cool cat, and he tended to treat his nine lives with a boyish indifference. Now Danny was watching EMTs slice through the fake muscles in the Spider-Man suit. And now, with grave caution, they were slipping a brace around Chris’s neck. And wouldn’t you know it. All this sickening business was going on within the exact square feet of space that was identified to Danny by that laughable Ritual Maven as containing the darkest energy in the entire building.