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

by Berger, Glen

  A curt announcement had already been made through the speakers in the auditorium—“That’s our show this evening, thank you for coming.” Two thousand people milled out of the theatre, confused and rattled. A hundred lingered outside the stage doors on Forty-third Street. Within an hour, one audience member had uploaded video to YouTube, having captured the entirety of Chris’s fall on their phone. Were they recording the whole show? Did they just happen to turn on the camera a minute before the accident? Mystifying. At any rate, word was out, and the clip was being played over and over on the local news. By eleven a.m., camera crews from local and national news stations were beginning to stake out spots outside the theatre doors.

  Inside, Chris was being wheeled to a waiting ambulance to rush him to Bellevue. Incredibly, he never lost consciousness. He had a fractured skull, a punctured lung, internal bleeding, four broken ribs, and three cracked vertebrae. But he was talking. And he could wiggle his toes. And thus, mixed with the sobs backstage, the anger, the heaving hearts, and the bewilderment, there was also that evening intense relief. (“In all my years of dancing,” Chris would say good-naturedly later, “I didn’t get injured once. I knew all that good karma couldn’t last forever.”)

  While Chris went into surgery to get a handful of screws put in his vertebrae, an inner circle of producers and creative-team members remained at the theatre, commiserating solemnly and getting updates from the hospital until we got the “all clear” at midnight that we could go home. We were ushered down a corridor in the dark toward an unlit side entrance. It was the only egress unguarded by the news crews, who were stationed outside the other entrances of the Foxwoods like the Greeks at the gates of Troy. Our security detail opened the doors, and we made a dash for the waiting SUV as a herd of reporters rushed toward us and cameras snapped like we were Mafiosi who had just been arraigned.

  The next morning, December 21—the day that Turn Off the Dark was going to have its triumphant opening once upon a time—Julie, Danny, and I visited Chris in his hospital room, having first made it through three security checkpoints. One tabloid reporter tried to join us, pretending to be Chris’s relative. Julie told her to take a hike, and the reporter threatened to “bury her.” More reporters were idling a few yards away, like fish that knew where the best chum got tossed. Chris, meanwhile, had just gotten off the phone with Bono and Edge, and was looking astonishingly upbeat.

  “I don’t feel angry at all. It’s just one of those things. I can’t wait to come back.”

  “Really?”

  “Are you kidding?! Of course. Julie, you know I don’t blame you, right?”

  Forgiveness. You could see the guilt that had been draped on Julie like a lead cloak suddenly drop away as Chris assured her how much he loved her, how much the show had already “saved his life.”

  “He is Spider-Man,” Julie said ardently as she left the hospital. She meant it. She repeated it an hour later to the entire cast, which had assembled in the auditorium for a meeting. Outside the theatre were camera crews. They had been there since eight a.m., and would be camping out until midnight. The next two shows had been canceled. Riedel reported that Assemblyman Rory Lancman, who chaired the workplace safety subcommittee, had “sent producers a stern letter today, saying he’s considering holding hearings into the problems with Spider-Man.” Investigators from the state Department of Labor, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the FDNY had already been in the theatre that morning, interviewing members of the Tech staff and the producers.

  Now everyone in the whole company had assembled. Everyone, that is, except Natalie Mendoza. Seared into her brain was the image of Chris Tierney crashing to the floor in front of her. She’d had enough of this show. T. V. was going to be the new Arachne.

  Michael Cohl addressed the company, stressing how seriously he took the issue of safety. “You, I don’t trust,” growled Michael Mulheren (our Jameson and the Equity deputy for the cast). Scott Rogers stood in front of the cast and broke into tears. Not calling attention to himself, assistant director Dodd Loomis was seated off to the side, doubled over with shuddering grief. Reeve looked like he wasn’t even in the room. For the next month he’d be there in body but not in spirit.

  After more actors unloaded on Michael Cohl, Julie, and Danny, or expressed words of grief or love, Patrick Page stood up and reminded everyone that the previous day was the winter solstice. The darkest day of the year. And in a rare conjunction, last night, during the show? The moon was erased by a total lunar eclipse.

  “The ‘dark’ in Turn Off the Dark has never seemed more appropriate. But from this day forward, daylight slowly returns to the Earth . . .”

  The cast embraced, then went their separate ways, passing by our poster of Spider-Man swinging in front of a luminous full moon. They also passed by several dozen reporters.

  And the media bombardment was just beginning. First, the theatre community unleashed its outrage. Alice Ripley, who won a Tony playing Jenn Damiano’s mother in Next to Normal, tweeted, “Does someone have to die?” And original Rent cast member Adam Pascal posted on Facebook that “they should put Julie Taymor in jail for assault!”

  In print, online, on television—everyone seemed ready to tie Julie to the stake. Of course, no one was more outraged by the recent events than pure-souled Michael Riedel, who by this point would have happily given up covering any other Broadway show.

  An old video clip was unearthed by the local news (it eventually went viral) in which Julie said, “I don’t think that anything that’s really creative can be done without danger and risk.”

  The quote seemed damning, but of course it was out of context. She was speaking in the way all artists speak about “danger” and “risk”—hyperbolically. Sure, artists like to act like they’re astronauts or marines. But danger and risk for an artist means putting your work in front of an audience with the possibility of falling flat on your face. And—just to be clear—not even actually falling on your face. But Julie’s comment was being spun in the news as if she had just admitted she was Josef Mengele.

  Patrick Page played Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. He had two butane tanks strapped to his back, hoses running down his arm, a stun gun to ignite the gas, and two-foot flames flaring out from him. “And things happen,” Patrick shrugged to the press. “There were so many times I hit myself with that stun gun and shocked myself. But hey, you know, it didn’t make the newspapers.”

  Spider-Man was making the newspapers. We on the inside could only imagine the toll it was taking on Julie, who was already exhausted by the last three months of storm and stress. And it was all so meta. Here we had based our second act partly on the 1967 issue “Spider-Man No More!” in which Peter Parker is so beseiged by the press (led by a demagoguing Jameson) that he has a breakdown and gives up being Spider-Man.

  “The terrible thing is,” said Peter about Jameson in this issue, “he actually believes what he says! He sincerely thinks I am a threat to society!”

  Something set Julie off the next afternoon during Tech. And suddenly our director was out the theatre doors. She was gone. I dialed her number. She didn’t answer.

  In “Spider-Man No More!” as Peter walked down the street—beads of sweat on his anguished face—Stan Lee had words blare around him:

  “MENACE!”

  “EGOMANIAC!”

  “PUBLIC ENEMY!”

  “FRAUD!”

  “MENTALLY DISTURBED!”

  I called Julie again. I could hear traffic noises on the other end of the line.

  “Julie?”

  Breathing, with trembling in it.

  “Julie? Where are you?”

  “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know.”

  Flurries were swirling thickly as dusk descended. I grabbed Danny. “C’mon. We’ve gotta find her.”

  Only a few blocks away from the theatre, we spotted her. And our hearts wept—she looked miserable, huddled against the cold, leaning aga
inst a building. Danny and I threw each other a glance. Julie clearly didn’t realize just what building she was huddled against. It was the New York Times Building, reporters filing in and out the doors just feet away from her. Before Patrick Healy was the next reporter to walk past her, we ushered her into a nearby robata grill to get some tea into her and shake our heads in wonderment. We’re just trying to put on a play. . . .

  Julie returned to the theatre, where George Tsypin had an idea for her. The web net failed to be deployed at several previews that month, resulting in a thoroughly perplexing finale for our audience. And two days before, Jaque’s mother died. So our grieving aerial rigger—already unutterably distraught at word of Chris Tierney’s accident—wouldn’t be coming back to the Foxwoods to work on the web-net fight until after the holidays. George—armed with this news—proposed to Julie that we just forget the web net. Give Arachne and Peter a spectacular fight in the house instead, like the Spidey-Goblin fight at the end of Act One.

  Julie couldn’t believe her ears. In her mind, this whole web-net fiasco was George’s fault, and now he had the temerity to suggest we just cut it? She stopped listening to George. In that minute, and for the next three months. She was done with him.

  Turn Off the Dark was always meant to be a spectacle, but the spectacle was supposed to be confined to the stage. Now it was becoming one of those cultural events that blazed across the mediasphere like a grease fire. The cover of The New Yorker in a couple of weeks would depict an entire hospital ward filled with convalescing spider-men. An invitation to a Lincoln Center gala during the holidays had engraved at the bottom NO DISCUSSION OF SPIDER-MAN ALLOWED. Julie, perversely, had gotten her wish. She never wanted Turn Off the Dark to be thought of as a Broadway musical, and now it wasn’t. It was being talked about instead as if it were some giant art installation ensconced in Times Square for who knew how long—like one of those Christo projects where half a city gets wrapped in fabric. A Broadway show hadn’t sucked up this much oxygen in a generation or more.

  And Julie needed to get the hell away from it all for a week or her nerves were going to snap. On Christmas Eve, she jetted out of the country, intending to recharge at her Mexican hideaway.

  I stayed behind and struck up conversations in the Foxwoods lobby with assorted folk on the creative team. Julie never liked that bourgeois lobby, with its faux-marbled Greek columns. She wanted it defaced with graffiti art—anything to make it feel less “Middle America.” What she got instead, in late December, were tidy holiday wreaths decorating the railings.

  And it was there in that evergreen-bedecked lobby—while Julie was away—that dry tinder ignited. As a Boxing Day snowstorm dumped twenty inches on the New York streets, the air in the Foxwoods lobby was becoming infused with the unmistakable fumes . . . of conspiracy.

  12

  * * *

  Plotting

  In a suburban Chinese restaurant outside Philly, a cookie blew my mind. On the twenty-sixth of December, as I enjoyed one of the forty-eight hours I was allotted to spend with the family, I grabbed one of the seven fortune cookies brought to the table. I cracked it open, only to read: CLEAR WRITING ARISES FROM CLEAR THINKING.

  Was I being punked by the universe? It didn’t matter. I was holding a wise cookie, and I needed to listen to it. I needed to pull myself out of my ass. The face of that boy coming out of the Foxwoods bathroom came back to me. An offhand comment Teese Gohl made about the second act a couple of days ago started doing laps in my brain. The words of my cookie continued to admonish me all the way home from the restaurant. By the end of the night, I knew what had to be done. And it wouldn’t be difficult. It was mostly a cut. And if we executed this cut, the show would be saved. Or maybe not “saved.” But we would have bought ourselves some time. This hot air balloon was dipping into shark-infested waters. We needed to start throwing stuff overboard. We needed to buy some time.

  The next afternoon, my phone rang. It was Bono, calling from Ireland. He and Edge had been literally ten thousand miles away from New York the last month, but they had been keeping tabs. I knew he and Edge were making weekly calls to Julie. What neither Julie nor I knew was that they had also been sending a trusted cadre of artistic consultants to the Foxwoods to be their eyes and ears.

  “And the consensus—”

  “Before you say any more, Bono—let me tell you what I think.”

  I told him the audience always chattered excitedly during intermission, eager to return to their seats. I told him that despite opening the second act with the “Ugly Pageant”—which the audience was receiving with the same pleasure one received from a wedgie—the audience was still with us with only a half hour of the show remaining. But then we would lose them—and you could see it happening. It was like watching the slowly drifting odor from the tail of Pepé Le Pew reach their noses.

  There were five short scenes right in a row. One of the scenes included “Deeply Furious,” known on the Internet as “The Shoe Song” (and usually accompanied somewhere in its description with a “wtf!?”). The five scenes were a total of ten minutes of stage time that felt like thirty. There was a way to cut it without mangling the narrative. In fact, the story became clearer. With the cut, we’d come out the other side with only fifteen minutes to go before our actors were taking their bows. Fifteen minutes. Not enough time for the audience to bail on us, especially once Scott Rogers teched a more exciting ending. By all rights, we shouldn’t have been able to fix so much of what ailed the show so easily. But Bono agreed that this cut would satisfy almost all of the concerns of his secret agents.

  “But, Glen, doesn’t Julie have a list of changes?”

  “I don’t know if they’re gonna do the trick. We really are in trouble.”

  “Well nevertheless, for sake of clarity, we’ll call her fixes ‘Plan B,’ ” Bono said. “Which might be worth trying first. But this cut, ‘Plan A’—I think that’s probably where we’ll have to go.”

  Bono said he’d give Julie a call down in Mexico and at least prepare the ground for a frank discussion once he and Edge returned to New York. He reported later that night that his two-hour-long conversation with her was more arduous than he was expecting. “She’s very defensive about Arachne.” He decided not to broach Plan A, “as she needs some rest and I didn’t want to blow her vacation.”

  My phone rang. It was Julie.

  “He doesn’t get it.” Fresh off her chat with Bono, she was letting me know that our composer’s month in Australia had warped his perspective.

  “Well . . .” I managed before trailing off.

  “What.”

  Timid, stuttering—why do I get this way?—I put forward the details of Plan A. She treated it like a clay pigeon—BLAM!—it was a bad idea; I didn’t know what I was talking about; I shouldn’t let those blogs wig me out—she had been saying for weeks that I shouldn’t be reading them.

  Then she launched into a defense of Peter’s “arc.” I had heard it before, Lord knows. They were the same words we had been using with each other for years. But it sounded different to me now. Now it sounded like a lot of abstractions that hardly anyone in the audience would ever apprehend, and it wouldn’t matter a damn if they did. It suddenly seemed as if Julie and I were two railway cars that had crisscrossed the country linked together, but now the last three weeks had removed the pin that connected us. We still saw the show the same way—we hadn’t drifted apart . . . yet. But perhaps it was only momentum still keeping us together.

  I crafted a lengthy letter to Julie, going beat by beat through my proposals for the second act. “Let’s have a thoughtful conversation about it when we have some time,” I wrote. And I reminded her that this wasn’t some schmo writing her, it was her partner, her cowriter, her friend. I closed with a “Love you” and hit SEND.

  She’d certainly mull it over for a few hours, maybe even take a day, and I was sure she’d have concerns, and she’d probably challenge some of the—oh, she was calling me already.

/>   “No.”

  Damn it—forgot about that snap-decision-making mechanism of hers.

  “But—”

  “If all of you think the cut is such a great idea, you can do it without me, because that isn’t a cut, it’s a mastectomy.”

  A mastectomy. On some level, every artist thinks of their creations as extensions of themselves, but I wasn’t prepared for how invasive this surgical procedure I was suggesting would feel to her. But fine. Call it a mastectomy, Julie. A mastectomy is sometimes the difference between life and death.

  But I didn’t push the point with Julie. Instead I wrote Danny, hoping he’d help me persuade her. And I wrote George Tsypin. Julie had said George would never go for Plan A because it would cut out one of the more gorgeous stage-pictures in the show. But she misjudged him. George wrote back to me, “This change is a matter of life or death for the show.”

  I crept up the back stairs of the theatre to the top-floor office of the production managers, who were busy putting together the January rehearsal schedule and despairing, because it was becoming clear to them that implementing Julie’s list of changes before the critics started arriving was impossible. (On January 15, we would be switching to a full performance schedule, leaving precious little time for rehearsing.) I apprised them of Plan A. They were into it. Not only did they believe it would improve the show (everyone’s a dramaturge), it was doable. It freed up hours of crucial Tech time.