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

by Berger, Glen

  14

  * * *

  The Serenity Coin

  I’m going to give you some advice. Whatever you do, whatever happens, stick with Julie.

  Like a kiddie alarm clock set for two thousand days in the future, Seth Gelblum’s words were now shrill bells in my head. Danny Ezralow had found a large coin on the street the week before and made a point of showing it to me. I wanted to keep the coin because to me it seemed to possess a real talismanic aura. But Danny thought so too, so he kept it. We were both clearly strung-out, because the coin was probably just something that fell out of the pocket of an AA member. It had a bunch of enigmatic symbols on one side, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer” on the other.

  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

  the courage to change the things I can,

  and the wisdom to know the difference.

  Danny didn’t say it, but he was showing me this coin because of Plan X. I was onto him.

  “Glen, you’re depressed. Everyone can see it. Julie’s been talking to me about it. You need to figure out how to find serenity in all this.”

  He was right. I was depressed. But why was “serenity” the answer? After all, they only called it the Serenity Prayer because the “serenity” bit came first. If the clauses had been switched, they’d be calling it the Courage Prayer. The unspoken subtext for our entire conversation was:

  “See?! The coin is a clarion call to me to push and keep pushing for Plan X.”

  “No, you idiot, the coin is telling you to back off.”

  Plan X was designed to create a narrative framework that would justify keeping as many of the eye-catching Arachne set pieces as possible while minimizing the technical hurdles. But the simple idea of sticking the Spidey-Goblin fight at the end of the show was already in the air. It had been suggested by fans on blogs. Patrick Page even took a discreet moment at the Spotted Pig party to float the notion to Michael Cohl and Edge. And on the afternoon of January 11, Julie herself mentioned the idea in passing in the lobby of the Foxwoods.

  “Well . . . uh . . . funny enough . . .” I said, scratching my head, “it would solve a lot of the problems that we—”

  “Oh, Glen,” she interrupted, sounding sympathetic and weary, “don’t think about that now.”

  She then warned me never to mention the idea to Michael or Jere.

  “Once you open that door, they’ll want to do it. And then? Forget it. It’ll be a theme-park show. This is how shows die. When people start abandoning the vision that got us here.”

  I was listening to her, trying to figure out: Did she know about Plan X? As for Julie, she was probing, trying to figure out: Was he still with me?

  “All I know is,” she added, “if that’s what they want to do, then I’m walking.”

  “Really? You’d . . . walk?”

  “Actually, no—I wouldn’t walk. They would have to fire me.”

  “Well, it’s not like they’re gonna get another director.”

  “Exactly.”

  Julie had already gamed it out. And now she was confidently heading into the auditorium to supervise the rehearsal. Moments later Michael Cohl called me. He said the investors had just unanimously voted to allow the producers to shut down the show. If it came to that. But, Michael added, he wasn’t at all convinced it needed to come to that.

  I’ll never convince these guys. Danny was right—maybe it was time to switch from courage to serenity. Glenn Beck’s radio show the next morning (January 12) wasn’t helping my case. The Tea Party movement torchbearer saw our musical the day before. “By far the best show I’ve ever seen. . . . Give a kidney to go see Spider-Man. I’m telling you . . . this is the Phantom of the twenty-first century,” he said.

  Mr. Beck devoted thirty minutes of his program to praising our show. To six million loyal listeners, he proclaimed Turn Off the Dark “the eighth wonder of the world.” Michael Cohl called the conspicuous jump in ticket sales that week “the Beck Bump.” Parched for an unabashed and vocal proponent of her show, Julie drank in the words of Mr. Beck, who gushed: “ ‘Rise Above’ is the song for today: You have a choice to make. You can be the hero.”

  “I have to admit, Glen,” Julie said to me. “He gets it.”

  Later that day, Julie assembled all the female dancers in the VIP room so she could bring them up-to-date on her new vision for “Deeply Furious.” I had wanted her to cut the number. Instead? She was expanding it.

  I clomped up the stairs back to the lobby, where Michael and Jere were chatting. As promised by Bono back at the Spotted Pig, tonight, post-performance, was when the producers and composers intended to have the mother of all meetings, when Plan X was finally going to get aired and all this sordid conspiring would end. But Michael wondered if maybe now might be a good time to grab a moment with Julie, so that the producers and writers could begin the heart-to-heart. Bono could join in later.

  “Julie was just downstairs,” I told him eagerly.

  “Great. I’ll go check if she has a minute. Stay here,” he instructed.

  Michael headed downstairs toward the dressing rooms. Minutes went by. Michael still hadn’t returned. I went down the stairs and tiptoed toward the closed door of the VIP room, where I rested an ear.

  I could hear Michael’s voice. It was RAISED. It was interrupted by Julie’s voice, which was AGGRIEVED. Now Michael’s voice was SCOFFING. Julie’s was SCATHING. Michael’s was CONTEMPTUOUS. Julie’s was—no, I wasn’t gonna stick around any longer. I crept away. No way was I getting in the middle of that. Kat Purvis, standing outside the stage manager’s office, shot me a little grin. “Any idea what they’re talking about in there?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  “I saw Michael come down here. He found Julie, and it went from zero to a hundred like that. They’ve been in that room ever since.”

  I found Michael an hour later. He was still under the influence of adrenaline and other aftereffects of the blowup.

  “Was it over Plan X?” I asked, hopefully.

  “I didn’t even get to that! She quit the show twice before I even brought it up! I had to chase her back from the elevator each time. And I’ll tell you this—the next time she quits, I’m not chasing after her.”

  After the show, I headed to the VIP room, expecting the room to be empty except for a few serious people ready to deal with some serious issues. Instead, it was a party, with actual VIPs getting drinks at the bar and showing no signs of leaving. Julie was there, but she said she was heading home in a moment. Not only was she giving no indication of the rumpus between her and Michael earlier that day, she didn’t seem to know that there was supposed to be a meeting—a really important meeting—tonight. As in, right now. Michael murmured to me that the meeting wasn’t happening tonight. No one was really in the right frame of mind to have a serious talk. I wandered demoralized out of the room, only to see a man coming at me with a beautiful smile and an outstretched hand.

  “You, sir, have written one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. It’s going to be a huge hit, and I’ll do everything I can to make that happen.”

  It was Glenn Beck. And he was saying everything—everything—a playwright dreams of hearing from an audience member. So I shook his hand, deeply gladdened. And then I bolted out of there, deeply confused.

  • • •

  Michael Cohl had an announcement the next evening at the nightly production meeting. Get out your calendars—opening night was moving from February 7 to March 15.

  “March fifteenth,” one of the production managers mused aloud. “So we’ll be opening on the Ides of March.”

  “I like that,” said Julie. “It’s got a good ring to it. Wait—what’s the Ides of March again?”

  Someone piped up, “It’s when they murdered Caesar.”

  “Uh, maybe I’m not so crazy about the Ides of March after all,” Julie joked, prompting laughter. Conspicuously uncomfortable laughter.

  I had to g
o home for a couple of days. I must have looked miserable, because as I was leaving the building, Julie called out to me, “Glen! Cheer up! We have a hit.”

  She looked so . . . fragile standing there. I could hardly look at her, for all the care and confusion I felt toward her. I shrugged, mumbled a promise about cheering up, and took a call from Michael Cohl, who said we were going to spend the next three weeks putting everything Julie wanted into the show. He said he would then check the results of a survey he commissioned for later that month based on those additions, and he was going to check his own instincts. And if it seemed like we still didn’t have a hit, we were “going to gut the show and start again.” I didn’t believe him. (My dubiousness was seconded by my agent, Joyce Ketay: “Glen, it’ll never happen.”)

  Michael also told me—prompted by a conversation with Julie—that he was going to loan me some money, since I had yet to be paid any royalties and I was at the end of my soon-to-be-repossessed rope. I wanted to be nothing but grateful, but nothing was pure anymore.

  Should I be emotionally indebted to Julie now, for lobbying Michael to loan me money? What if she wanted me to be free of financial worries not because we were friends, but because only then would I give up on radically changing our script? But maybe Michael was expecting my allegiance to shift toward him—after all, it wasn’t Julie’s money getting loaned, it was his. Or was everyone just being nice and four weeks of scheming had warped my brain?

  • • •

  “We’re fucked.”

  Michael was sitting up in bed reading the findings from a focus group composed of Turn Off the Dark audience members. A more comprehensive survey had been commissioned for the beginning of February, but Michael had just boiled down this many-paged preliminary report to two words, which he repeated to me on the phone the next day.

  “We’re fucked. The numbers for ‘emotional involvement’—they’re not just low in the second act. They’re low in the first act. Plan X isn’t going to solve that. It’s not going to solve our problems.”

  And we definitely had problems. Riedel reported on January 21 that “ticket sales are slowing down,” and predicted that “. . . come February and March, the Foxwoods will be one big old empty barn.”

  Up past one in the morning in Julie’s apartment, the discussion once again turned to the speech Arachne delivered before “Deeply Furious.” Since the sixth of December, I had been submitting rewrites, and none of them had satisfied her. Sensing my frustration, Julie reiterated that we couldn’t cut “Deeply Furious” because it would demoralize the female dancers. Artlessly, I told her what I knew: The dancers didn’t enjoy doing the song—it felt demeaning. The puppet legs were cumbersome, and the choreography took advantage of the fact that, with the puppet limbs, each female dancer could spread her legs for the audience in three different directions at the same time.

  It was as if I had just slapped her face.

  “I can’t believe you just said that—”

  Oh God—I tripped the wire again? She stood up from the table.

  “How dare you tell me that . . .”

  It was cortisol. It was her amygdala taking over. It was fear, it was stress, I got all that. Still, the cannonade that followed was a drag, and it ended with her suddenly heading up to her bedroom. I sat alone at the table, feeling like a jerk. She didn’t come back down. So, walking home at two in the morning, I tried to work out how I screwed up. Because she didn’t just sound angry, she sounded wounded. Since her days working as part of a troupe in Indonesia, and certainly after thirteen years of The Lion King, Julie had come to expect a backstage exuding cheery solidarity. It was another reason to work in the theatre instead of being a novelist. Camaraderie. Oh, she knew there would always be a healthy amount of bitching behind the scenes, but hearing that these women she shot the breeze with in the VIP room just a week before had lost faith in a part of the show—well, it was a shock for Julie. And it was a shock because she was inhabiting a bubble—a bubble we all created because no one wanted to tell her how they really felt. But damn it to hell, if we really cared about her, if we really cared about the show, then that bubble of hers had to get lanced for good. And soon.

  • • •

  Julie was absorbing the news that Michael had commissioned a survey. That a questionnaire was going to be draped over the back of every seat in the auditorium. A questionnaire that said, “Thank you for your participation,” but really said, “Our show is in trouble, and we’re not really sure why.”

  Julie was nauseated. Art by poll. “These people have no idea what they’re doing,” she muttered as I followed her down the stairs that led backstage. “What they don’t understand,” she continued, sounding bone-weary, “is that the only shows that really succeed are the ones that were the result of one vision. When you start diluting that . . . throwing in all these other voices . . .”

  As Julie spoke, she passed under a tangle of bare-thighed, shoe-clad, disembodied legs. Quick-changes happened on these stairs, and so assorted costume pieces were hanging on the walls, including the “Deeply Furious” puppet legs. One vision. As we turned the corner in that little stairway, it felt as if I were turning a corner in a fold of Julie’s cerebral cortex. Those puppet legs, the set, the script, the advertising campaign, the casting, the songs—it was all her, and I could almost see it on her shoulders literally weighing her down. New lyrics Bono and Edge had written for “Boy Falls From the Sky” came back to me: You can hold on so tightly / It all just breaks apart.

  I found my family and fled to Mexico.

  • • •

  What we feared would happen was happening. With Ben Brantley of the Times leading the way, at least a dozen reviewers from major newspapers and magazines had decided that Michael Cohl’s latest postponement was beyond the pale. They weren’t going to wait until March to review the show. They were going to pretend opening night was still February 7, and publish their reviews the next day. So the rogue critics bought tickets for Saturday, February 5.

  The February 5 show was, of course, a cavalcade of glitches—the worst since the first preview. “Because we’re cursed,” said Julie. Lengthy stops had been becoming mercifully infrequent. On February 5, however, there were two excruciating stops near the end of the first act. “That just takes the villainy right out of ya!” Patrick cracked as Randall White announced the first stop in the middle of the Chrysler Building scene.

  When I returned the next day from the Yucatán (a week spent rewriting Geek scenes under a tropical sun), Michael invited me over to his apartment. He just wanted a quick chat (the Steelers were playing Green Bay in the Super Bowl in a couple of hours, and he wanted me gone by then). He poured me a beer, and then said he wanted to give me a “heads-up” that Plan X probably wasn’t going to happen. Marvel and Disney were concerned about the cost of the plan ($3.5 million would have been tolerable, but the price tag was looking more like five million). They were also concerned that shutting down the show for three weeks would “disrupt the show’s momentum.”

  The show’s “momentum”?! How much “momentum” were we still going to have in a month? And as I was thinking this, he let drop:

  “Oh, and also? Julie wants another writer.”

  The next day—February 7—was dubbed “Fauxpening Night.” Complimentary tickets ensured that the auditorium was packed with friends and family. My wife and two of my children were in the audience, seeing the show for the first time. Also in the auditorium, taking pages of notes, were two people invited by Michael Cohl. One was Marvel Entertainment’s chief creative officer, Joe Quesada. The other was a writer named Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. As for myself, I spent the show with my two-year-old, who—even at that tender age—was obsessed with Spider-Man, and couldn’t understand why he was watching the show on the little video monitor in the VIP room instead of inside the theatre with his siblings.

  Because you’re not old enough to be in the auditorium. And, no, you’ll never see the show in the theatre, because it
will be gone long before you turn three.

  It was a smooth show—that is, until the final scene. One of Arachne’s wires jammed. So without a web net, on practically a bare stage, Arachne and Peter wandered around instead of having a fight. The open bar at the Fauxpening Night party was hit hard. I found an empty booth and ate a bunch of breadsticks in an alcoholic stupor.

  So it was with a serious hangover the following afternoon, waiting for takeout in a neighborhood Thai restaurant—with reviews of the show and reviews of the reviews circulating around the world—that I wrote this note to my wife:

  Here’s what I’ll bet. They’re gonna keep me working on the script as-is: dialogue lines, nothing structural. Until early March. Then we’re going to freeze the show. Open on March 15. And then we’re going to close before June. I’m really sorry I couldn’t bring home that whale.

  Incapacitated, I was unable to do anything but stare at the Buddha in that restaurant. He had oranges and cut flowers in front of him. And he was looking serene, as always.

  15

  * * *

  Spidenfreude; or, How Do You Want to Fail?

  What you’re watching is the stem cells of a protean imagination dividing and dividing and dividing, right out of control. . . . The result is savage and deeply confusing—a boiling cancer-scape of living pain. . . .

  —Scott Brown, New York magazine

  And that was our good review. Seriously. Scott Brown declared that the show was “never, ever boring,” although that pronouncement came at the end of a sentence that began by describing the show as “hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar.” So, yeah, there were some qualifiers in there.