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

by Berger, Glen

  Julie sought me backstage before the show. Danny, the mensch, had taken her out to dinner and delivered a pitch. Not for Plan A, or Plan C, but for friendship. He reminded her of the affection and bond between us, and he must have found her heartstrings because, outside the assistant director’s room, she took my face in her hands. She looked into my eyes, she kissed my cheek, she apologized, she pledged that she’d ask Michael Cohl to lend me money, “but please, please, let’s never fight again, Glen. I love you too much for anything to come between us.”

  I felt her tears on my cheek.

  • • •

  “That a brother should be so perfidious! He whom I did charge to execute express commands . . . instead undid, subverted . . .”

  Julie had asked me the year previous to rewrite about thirty lines of Shakespeare to accommodate Prospero’s gender change in her Tempest. The lines all described the treachery of Prospera’s brother, Antonio. And now the same month that this movie was disappearing from theatres, Rob Bissinger and I—out of Julie’s earshot—were plotting in the Foxwoods’s men’s room. As in, Rob was pitching me new thoughts about the plot, because—like Edge—he couldn’t make heads or tails out of the ending.

  “It’s a Gordian knot,” I told him. “And heck if I know how to untie it.”

  Spider-Man doesn’t kill his adversaries if he can help it, and the webslinger certainly couldn’t kill Arachne—she spent half of Turn Off the Dark as an anguished and lonely woman just trying to help him. Also, he literally couldn’t kill her—she was immortal. So, really, the climactic battle could only resolve with Arachne allowing Peter to be with Mary Jane, the goddess Athena transforming Arachne into a young woman again, and Arachne ascending into the stars.

  But because Arachne’s spider legs were attached to a twisty belt that was impossible to take off without the help of stage managers offstage, no miraculous transformation could occur as Julie had always envisioned. Awkward staging makeshifts had to be employed instead, resulting in hundreds of audience members leaving the theatre every night scratching their heads. And that was on a good night—when the web net actually succeeded in making it into the web-net scene (which Randall White predicted wouldn’t happen two or three times every week).

  Up at three in the morning on January 6, pacing up and down my East Village sublet, looking for a way to untie this Gordian knot, I noticed the I Ching on the bookshelf. I was desperate, so I took it off the shelf. I came up with a random number and turned to the page: “Remorse disappears. Take not gain and loss to heart. Undertakings bring good fortune. Everything serves to further.”

  I needed a brilliant suggestion for a plot twist, so this didn’t really help. But then I read the page again, and I breathed. Because in my sleep-deprived state, I was pretty sure the I Ching was telling me, “It’s cool. It’s all good. You just watch. Keep your eyes open, because the answer is coming today if you’re open to it.”

  • • •

  On the way back from dinner that night, Jere told me about a member of the stage crew named Jack. I had already heard about Jack back in September. When he wasn’t hauling equipment or repairing sets, Jack was rewriting Broadway shows. Sometimes he made little fixes; sometimes he overhauled entire productions. He never presumed to show his efforts to the writer or director. It was just a hobby. Like doing crossword puzzles. If you were on the crew of a show, you watched every performance, you heard the audience’s reaction, and you were bound to have a few opinions.

  “So what do you think?” asked Jere. “Any interest?”

  “Sure, man, why not?”

  Serendipitously, moments later we were running into Matty, another member of the stage crew. He said he’d pass the message on to Jack. So on the morning of January 7, I awoke to find several e-mails. Amid all the offers for male enhancement and cash loans, I almost didn’t notice this one from Bono:

  Glen you are bearing up very well. I am going to speak to JT today about bad behavior. A) shooting ideas down before taking time to understand them; B) threatening to throw the toys out of the cot when confronted with problems. . . . We need to support the director’s vision up to but not beyond the point of stopping truthful introspection . . . We’ll get there. What is already amazing is way harder to accomplish than fixing what is not.

  And then there was a message that Jere forwarded to me. It was from Jack the stagehand, who wrote:

  Maybe you’ll decide this is presumptuous, but rather than just sit on the sidelines and criticize, I thought you’d have more respect for me if I grew some balls and got in the game!

  I was already amused—I couldn’t help thinking about Bullets Over Broadway, the Woody Allen film with John Cusack as the up-and-coming Broadway writer who was in over his head until he got career-saving dramaturgical advice from—

  Holy shit—

  The I Ching was right. One glance at the document was all it took. Jumper cables to the brain. I didn’t read the content because I already saw what Jack had done. I had made notes about it back in October.

  He moved the Spider-Man–Goblin fight to the end of the show.

  I closed my eyes as the implications crashed down in my head. Putting the fight at the end would eliminate all future web-net snafus. The frightening images of Goblin and the Sinister Six in the second act wouldn’t be Arachne’s illusions—they’d be real. In fact, the whole subplot of illusions—which was confusing audiences every night—would be eliminated. The undisputed highlight of the show would end just two minutes before the curtain call. How did Alexander the Great untie the Gordian knot? He didn’t. He used his sword.

  Plan X.

  That’s what it would come to be called. And I wasn’t certain yet. But I was beginning to think it was the only way the show could be saved. And if I breathed a word of it to my writing partner . . . I’d be fired.

  13

  * * *

  Plan X

  On January 7, I tried to watch Danny’s dance rehearsal for “Deeply Furious” but couldn’t sit still, so now I was standing by the elevators just outside the room, staring at my laptop propped on top of some stacked chairs. And now I was pacing back and forth as if I had just had ten lines of coke; my heart was pumping weirdly; my skin was clammy; I grabbed my laptop and crouched in the corner; I pounded the wall; I was acting like people acted in a padded cell, and when Danny found me during a rehearsal break, he asked if I was okay. I took him through the big points of Plan X and he didn’t understand why I was expending any neural energy on this one. At this stage of the game—even assuming that Julie would go for it (which, surely, she wouldn’t)—such an overhaul would be logistically impossible. Danny was right, of course.

  But just before the show that evening, I ran into Jere in the lobby as it began filling with ticketholders.

  “Hey,” he said jovially, “did you get a chance to check out Jack’s little outline?”

  “Yeah. He put the Goblin fight at the end.”

  “Yeah. He did.”

  Pause. And then I added:

  “If I thought there was a chance we could do that . . . it’s what we should do.”

  Jere wasn’t jovial anymore.

  “Then let’s have some dinner.”

  He grabbed Michael Cohl and the three of us headed to Frankie & Johnnie’s, a steak joint that used to be frequented by Bugsy Siegel and his goons back when it was a speakeasy in the 1920s. My boss’s voice was full of concern.

  “Act Two is a mishegoss,” said Jere. “Do you know what that word means?” he asked the Yid. I nodded between bites of steak. It literally meant “madness,” but The Joys of Yiddish says it can also be defined as “a state of affairs so silly or unreal that it defies explanation.” Sounded like Act Two to me.

  “Julie can’t treat this show like her . . . artistic sandbox. There’s a place for that. It’s downtown. Off-Broadway. But this is Broadway.”

  Jere continued, and he wasn’t flip. “This show employs a lot of people. . . . Some of the guys on the cr
ew are relatives of mine. A lot of them—the actors, the people behind the scenes—they’re supporting families.” He spoke of their dedication to the show. He named a married couple we both knew who had their first baby that past summer. “And yet they’ve been putting in sixteen hours every day on this show ever since then.” Jere didn’t talk about art. He talked about livelihoods. He said, “If I thought there was a way to increase the chances that all these people were not going to be out of a job anytime soon, I would do anything I could to make it happen.”

  I told him I hadn’t spent any real time with the idea yet. I wanted to vet all the narrative implications. Jere and Michael emphasized that even if it was determined that Plan X was doable, even if it was determined that it was the only way for the show to survive, the chances that they’d actually be able to carry out the plan were infinitesimal. It would involve a shutdown for who knew how long. “There would be mammoth considerations,” said Michael. To say nothing of the need to convince certain difficult-to-convince personalities that it was the only way forward. In fact, given all those factors, it was hardly worth having this discussion at all. But it was due diligence. They wouldn’t be doing their job as producers if they kept any options off the table.

  I went straight back to my apartment and pulled an all-nighter. Julie called once, but I guess I was in the shower. She’d wind up never hearing about the meeting at Frankie & Johnnie’s. Never. I stopped working when I realized the bursts of noise from people and traffic outside my window were becoming more frequent. It wasn’t night anymore. I could smell coffee. I had written a new twelve-page outline. Act One ended fifteen minutes earlier, the “Ugly Pageant” was gone, and Arachne was amply represented in Act Two. In fact, only one of her numbers (“Deeply Furious”) would get cut. She retained her wrathful temper while continuing to be a zoomorphic guardian spirit. Socrates would have called her a daimon. She was basically Peter’s self-appointed superego, and this put the focus of the story back on Peter Parker where it belonged. Plan X could work.

  I wrote Michael and Jere that the amount of rewriting wouldn’t be so daunting. “Two or three days of coffee-fueled, Benzedrine-fueled, whatever-fueled writing would yield the pages we need.”

  I then asked Michael permission to bring Rob Bissinger into the loop—if we weren’t on rock-solid ground from a technical perspective, we’d never be able to convince Julie that the plan was at least worth listening to. Michael responded: “No.”

  Bother.

  He wrote back thirty minutes later: “Yes.”

  I sent Rob the new outline. He was coming in on the twelve thirty Metro-North train from his house upriver. I met him at Grand Central. It was the only time in my life I ever had the urge to ask, “Are you sure you weren’t followed?” We found a discreet bar by the train station. Rob said he would do a full assessment of the plan that night, but from a cursory read-through on the train, he believed it could be done. And he believed it should be done. But he cautioned the planning stage would have to be rigorous.

  Edge wrote to me with another idea he wanted to pitch for the ending. It was his third one that week. Dramaturgy fired him up. But his idea was going to be another nonstarter with Julie, who had spent the last month whacking Edge’s notions back over the net without breaking a sweat.

  And though Julie hadn’t dressed me down in the last few days, her impatience with me was growing. I was taking too long getting pages xeroxed in the stage manager’s office. I was spending too much time talking with the Geeks. And my rewritten monologue for Arachne that launched “Deeply Furious” still wasn’t working (“Because it’ll never work,” I told her . . . silently to myself ). It was low-level haranguing, but it was ratcheting up my psychic exhaustion with her. I wasn’t alone. Those Goodwill Points everyone in the theatre spotted her? They were dwindling perilously.

  So Edge and Bono were going to catch the Sunday matinee that day, and then Julie wanted a quick meeting with them and me to go over some suggested lyric rewrites.

  “Be there at five, Glen. Don’t be late.”

  I wasn’t late. I was early. Julie wasn’t in the VIP room yet, but Edge and Bono were. Bono was lying on his back because the last summer’s injury still gave him trouble. (He had torn a ligament and herniated a disc, necessitating a postponement of the North American leg of the 360° Tour for a year.) But that wasn’t why he was wincing. “All I know is,” he was saying in an outraged voice to Edge as I entered the room, “there is no way I am allowing us to open with that.” He was pointing with disgust out toward the general direction of the stage. The web net didn’t deploy again. Act Two was again a mishegoss.

  This is the moment, I thought. Two thousand days ago Bono looked me right in the eyes and said, “This show has to be brilliant.” He was right then. And I was right now. The time for pussyfooting was over.

  “Bono, there’s a new idea, and it’ll fix everything. Did Michael not tell you?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything.”

  I glanced toward the door. It was shut. The VIP room was empty but for the three of us.

  “Well . . .”

  Bono sat up. Edge was looking at me intently.

  “Just consider this—”

  WHAM! The door swung open and Julie breezed into the room.

  Did she hear us? No, because she immediately launched into a discussion of the lyrics. But that discussion was brief because she said it was time for the Spotted Pig. I had no idea what she was talking about. I finally gathered that it was a restaurant in the West Village. Bono was a part owner. The whole company had been invited to a party there in lieu of the opening night party we were going to have on January 11 before opening night got postponed. The two lads and Julie and I were heading toward the town car that would take us down to the Village. I desperately needed twenty minutes alone with Bono and Edge to lay out Plan X, but I had no idea how to arrange that. Suddenly Julie was being stopped by Kat Purvis, who needed to discuss a brief scheduling matter with Julie.

  “Shall we wait for you?” asked Bono.

  “I’ll meet you down there!” Julie said.

  Perfect.

  A couple of the composers’ assistants would be riding with us. So as we stepped into the car, Edge whispered that we needed to be a little circumspect. He then said aloud as the car turned down Ninth Avenue, “So, Glen . . . in future productions of the show, how might you see the plot possibly changing? Just as something to consider?”

  I dove into Plan X, taking the composers point by point through the whole show, needing to be thorough yet knowing time was tight, and grateful for some gridlock south of Fourteenth Street. The outline was fresh in my mind, and it was so sensible that it was easy to spin the tale with confidence and clarity, and other than asking a question or two, Edge and Bono listened in attentive silence.

  The town car arrived at the Spotted Pig, and now it was idling. Bono dramatically turned around from his front seat. His hand gripped mine.

  “I’m in.”

  As we got out of the car, Bono and Edge said they would kick the plan’s tires. And when we were absolutely confident that it was the way to go, we would present it to Julie. But it had better be soon, I thought. Bono and Edge were leaving the country in four days.

  The room upstairs at the Spotted Pig was already packed with company members taking advantage of the open bar and thrilled that the next day was a day off. Not only had they been putting on shows every night, they had been required to attend rehearsals every day. And for a typical show, that grueling double-duty would have been ending that night. Had we just opened, the exhausted actors and dancers would now be relaxing into the groove of an eight-show-a-week schedule, interspersed with light brush-up rehearsals. Instead, they had another whole month of intensive rehearsals. From this point forward, every Goodwill Point got spent at double the rate.

  It was a spirited party. Chris Tierney was there, which was putting a smile on everyone’s faces. But it was also a party laced with trepidation. Ju
lie and Michael had been back in New York a week and yet, to the Turn Off the Dark company, there seemed to be no indication that anything significant in the show was changing.

  In the middle of the party, Julie delivered a speech to the assembled. Her confidence was unsteady, and she was barely trying to hide it. She told the cast it didn’t matter what the public thought of the musical. What mattered was that we were staying true to our original vision. Her intent was to counsel the actors not to get caught up in the negative press. She wanted to rally us all around the tabernacle of Art. But it was a grave miscalculation. Her speech made it appear as if she didn’t care if the show closed. She seemed to be telegraphing to everyone in the room that she had no intention of “fixing” the show.

  Edge, astonished, turned to manager Paul McGuinness. “I can’t believe she just said that.”

  To Edge, Julie’s speech seemed to confirm that she knew the ship was sinking, but was resigned to that fate.

  I was ready to leave. It was crowded and loud in the room so, as I was saying goodbye to Edge, he brought his mouth close to my ear to say:

  “As her partners and as her friends, it is right to support Julie and her vision. But . . . it is also right . . . at the same time . . . to continue on a separate track and develop this other plan, should we need it.”

  For as long as I had known him, Edge had struck me as a thoughtful man, an ethical man. A serious man. You couldn’t listen to Edge and say the fellow wasn’t conscientious. If he was telling me that what we should do was take a “twin-track” approach, then there had to be rectitude to it.

  And as I was leaving, Bono told me that Wednesday would be the day. January 12. I passed the information on to George Tsypin and Rob Bissinger in an e-mail. The big meeting—the day of reckoning—would be Wednesday. And then at the bottom of the e-mail I hastened to add (because almost every letter and conversation had to end with it now): “. . . But keep it under the hat.”