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

by Berger, Glen

  To many of those hard at work at the Foxwoods, reviewers showing up in the beginning of February was like hearing a proctor shout “Pencils down!” when you had three more answers that you knew, and just needed to write down before you turned in your—“Taymor! Cohl! I said ‘Pencils down!’ ” Your first thought isn’t that you should have gotten through your test faster. Your first thought is: That proctor—what an asshole.

  And certainly several of the critics took an extra dose of asshole pills the day they typed up their reviews of the show. Peter Marks at the Washington Post confessed: “I haven’t seen every stinker ever produced, so I can’t categorically confirm that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark belongs in the dankest subbasement of the American musical theater. But its application certainly seems to be in order.”

  I spent the morning wading through sentences like:

  A “65-million-dollar sinking ship, which goes down with all hands.”

  “The creature that most often spreads its wings in the Foxwoods is a turkey.”

  “The tale doesn’t so much unfold as ooze out.”

  Sometimes you don’t need thick skin as a playwright, you need a hazmat suit. Ben Brantley had been sharpening his knives for so long in anticipation of the day he could review our show, our flesh must have felt like a yielding pat of butter. For a critic of his stature, it must have been a sensuous experience to write that the performers wearing Julie’s masks “. . . bring to mind hucksters handing out promotional material for fantasy-themed restaurants.” Or to say Danny’s choreography was straight out of the early 1980s, and “pure vintage MTV.”

  But it was one sentence that gave him away, one sentence that allowed everyone working at the Foxwoods to dismiss Brantley’s whole review with a “whatever.” The head reviewer for the paper of record wrote: “Spider-Man is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.”

  For everything wrong with the show, moments of undeniable inspiration peeked through the clouds. It was the reason no one in this theatre wanted to close up shop. So Brantley’s review only strengthened our resolve to do an end run around him and the rest of these pharisees. Scott Brown, for one, concluded in his review that the show should never open; that it “should be built and rebuilt and overbuilt forever, a living monument to itself.” Both Julie and Michael had begun some serious consideration of this option. After all, Cirque du Soleil employed “soft openings” for their shows, working out kinks for a year or more before “freezing” a show.

  That sounds like a great idea, guys. Excuse me while I take this razor blade into this warm bath I’m running.

  Anyway, the notion surely wasn’t viable. A lot of the revenue-generating hype for the show was a result of what Scott Brown dubbed “Spidenfreude”—the taking of delight in Turn Off the Dark’s misfortunes. So even though the February 12 episode of Saturday Night Live featured a law firm specializing in lawsuits related to Turn Off the Dark; and even though there was a microbudgeted stunt-musical called The Spidey Project that was getting a lot of publicity and opening in New York on March 14; and even though yet another cheeky stunt-musical called Spidermann was garnering buzz and opening in New York on March 13; all of this hullabaloo over our show was due to end any second.

  Michael Cohl was of two minds. On one hand, he believed the show would be a hit if there were just some more clarity in the story currently onstage. On the other hand, he worried that Plan X wasn’t enough of a fix to save the show. These two opinions contradicted each other. Which explained the holding pattern we were in.

  Meanwhile, I pulled another all-nighter rewriting the first Geek scene, but I didn’t get it done, and rather than facing Julie’s outrage, I turned off my phone and spent the next two days holed up in a rented conference room with three other writers to work on a new children’s show for WGBH. This was another hazard of postponing the opening. Members of the team were beginning to get distracted by other projects. Danny had been flying between Los Angeles and Italy for the last month. And now George Tsypin was in Europe; Rob Bissinger was designing the sets for a new Off-Broadway show; Scott Rogers, Jonathan Deans—they were all moving on.

  So while Julie was working with the four Geeks at the Foxwoods, I was thirty blocks away, excusing myself from a meeting in order to get to a bathroom, lock the door, slump to the tiled floor, and let a bizarre amount of tears spill out of me. And what set me off was—well, thirty-one hours without sleep, for a start. And then it was the whiteboard in the conference room, filled with open questions phrased with precision and intelligence. And it was the disagreements—which were lustily engaged in and dispensed with, but all within the lexicon of my people, the language of writers. I had written 150 scripts for PBS—these guys knew my work, and I knew theirs. And so when I talked, these collaborators listened. And we ran with each other’s ideas, and we knew we had found the answer when there was nothing but the grinning, twinkling nodding that comes with consensus.

  Bono once told me one of the secrets to U2’s crazy-long career. How had these four men—each with a strong personality and unique understanding of his craft—been able to work together for over thirty years? The four of them realized long ago that if they were arguing over a song, then that was an instant indication to the defenders that the song wasn’t good enough yet. “Because,” Bono said, “when something is good, truly good, there is no arguing.”

  I had no idea just how depleted of common sense and mutual respect my days had become until an amicable and lucid discussion of a plot point in a conference room sent me to the floor of a men’s room to bawl my eyes out.

  • • •

  Mubarak, president of Egypt, was in the news on February 11 because he had just resigned in the face of massive public protests. Rob Bissinger was on the phone with me, and he was angry. He said the entire Tech staff was ready to revolt—they would boycott the implementation of any more changes, or maybe they would just quit, but either way they wouldn’t take any more of this piddling and twiddling.

  The Goodwill Points were all used up. Julie’s simplest scheduling requests seemed to take twice as much effort to make happen. The most basic stage prep for a rehearsal was taking twice as long as it used to. The stage managers, the crew—they had all reached their limit.

  If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

  Everyone was sick of the stupid sea.

  Michael wrote me that he was meeting with the higher-ups at Marvel in four days to discuss the results of the focus group, Joe Quesada’s report, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s report, and Plan X. He said nothing could happen without the approval of Ike Perlmutter and Bob Iger (Disney’s CEO), so any definitive plan was still a few days away. He then added: “Please tell the agitated it’s all coming together. . . . Remember, there may be politics, and probably lawyers and painful settlements. Be strong.”

  I reread the sentences. Something wasn’t getting through my thick head. What precisely was he getting approval for? Shutting down the show for three weeks? Then what did lawyers have to do with it? Why settlements? Why painful? And for that matter, why was he meeting with all these executives before he did what surely he was going to do at any moment—what I had been waiting over fifty days for him to do: get Julie in a room with the whole production team, lock the door, and not let anyone out until everything had been presented in the bluntest terms. Julie would see the light, and then we could move forward. What was I missing?

  One day around this time, George Tsypin held up the piece of reality that had been in my blind spot.

  “Glen, you realize, don’t you”—his Russian accent sounding more Russian than ever, carrying the double burden of clear eyes and a heavy heart—“that if this Plan X actually does happen, Julie cannot be the director. She will never be convinced. You know this.”

  It was the most glaring and most dreadful of the unknown known
s. And it was unknown no longer. But wait—if there were no Julie . . . then what in God’s name was the plan?

  There must have been something new in my eyes as Julie and I sat next to each other in the orchestra seats during that afternoon’s rehearsal with the Geeks, because she turned to say something to me, and stopped in mid-sentence.

  “What. Glen, what is it.”

  “What.”

  She was cocking her head as she looked at me.

  “There’s . . . I don’t know—is there something you’re not telling me?”

  Damn her and her intuition. I shrugged. Tried to smile. “No.”

  “It feels like . . .” She was searching my eyes. “Like there’s something you’re not letting me see.”

  She let it go. But not really. She could feel that something was up. In her upstate home on Valentine’s Day, in the same cozy room we sat in five and a half years before for our first giddy writing session, I found a stack of pages on her little desk that I hadn’t seen for years: Neil Jordan’s outline. She admitted she’d been rereading it. “There’s some very good ideas in it,” she said. You could hear surprise in her voice. And also, faintly, the fear that all those years ago she had made a catastrophic mistake. I’ve lost her. Then again, if she was rereading an outline from a writer she fired six years ago, then she, herself, was lost.

  • • •

  The Button Man had arrived. You could hear his hearty laugh thundering from the VIP room, where he was working out chords at the piano. Michael Cohl told me “getting him aboard was one of the worst fights I’ve ever had in my career.” This statement beggared the imagination. For forty years Michael had been a rock promoter—what epic clashes he must have lived through. But no, “one of the worst” was the fight with Julie Taymor over the man hired to fix the buttons.

  In musical theatre, the “button” is that final, definitive musical note that tells an audience “you can applaud now.” And getting applause isn’t just an end in itself. Applause helps create an atmosphere—it supplies a show with momentum and lift. Turn Off the Dark, however, contained songs that faded out, or at least ended with the subtlest of doomps instead of a WHOMP! Or a BOOMP! Or a double button—a Bomp!-BOMP! Or a zipper—a rapid ascent to a final note, as if you were zipping up a fly—zaaaaAAAAA BOWMP!

  Enter Paul Bogaev.

  In his lengthy career, Paul has worked with Elton John on Aida and Phil Collins on Tarzan, and was the music director on a number of Andrew Lloyd Webber New York premieres, so unlike Teese Gohl or David Campbell, Paul had some unimpeachable Broadway bona fides. Beefy, with a goatee and let’s say Robert Redfordish hair, Paul Bogaev is also a jocular fellow. He has a predilection for off-color jokes. The members of the Turn Off the Dark company meanwhile—after the bruising reviews, the accidents, the seventy previews—were an increasingly haggard and somber lot, and weren’t sure what to make of this Button Man.

  Also new to the Foxwoods that week was Peter Hylenski, who had been tasked to remedy the sound issues that had already sent the great Jonathan Deans over the brink. But the presence of neither Hylenski nor Bogaev would be publicly announced for another week. It was another name that broke in the Times’ Arts Beat blog on February 16. Patrick Healy reported that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa had been invited to rewrite the book.

  Well for the love of—“Michael—hey, man, did I just get thrown under the bus? You can see, can’t you, how it’s like a big practical joke—urged to follow Julie’s writing orders for a month and a half, and then this?”

  Michael called me back and told me to chill out.

  Chill out because it was just a spurious rumor? Or chill out because the degradations were only beginning?

  That night, with T. V. out of the show with laryngitis, and with the new “Deeply Furious” wedding-nightmare scene eliciting (as an out-of-patience Rob Bissinger reported) actual laughter from the audience, Michael Cohl took Julie out to dinner. Michael told me later that words weren’t minced. He didn’t go into specifics. So I was left to work out a crucial calculation. If Michael Cohl decided to commit to Plan X, then the only chance of getting Julie behind it was if I sent the plan to her right now. Yes, seeing such a highly detailed scheme worked out in secret by her collaborator would piss her off. At first. But if she could get past that, there was a chance she’d agree to direct it. Otherwise, if Michael sprang it on her as an ultimatum, she’d reject it out of hand.

  However, if Plan X wasn’t going to happen, then sending her this scheme would accomplish nothing except explode to smithereens what was left of our relationship. And the only chance of improving the show the little it could be improved without Plan X depended on us working together. In which case, I shouldn’t send the—fuck it. I sent it to her. I sent her Plan X. The whole thing. On February 18. Forty-one days after I first wrote it down. And now at least everything was out in the open.

  But here’s the thing. She missed it. Before that time she had never missed an e-mail of mine—not once, from 2005 to that moment. But this e-mail—surely the most urgent, the most vitally important e-mail I ever sent her—was overlooked. And then, what happened next was a plot twist usually found in farces, but sometimes tragedies: the “Misconstrued Conversation Leading to an Erroneous but Critical Assumption.”

  Because the next morning, the subject of restructuring the show along the lines of Plan X came up between Julie and me. And something Julie said made me think she had read my e-mail—that she had read it, given it careful consideration, and rejected it. And based on this erroneous assumption, I decided that whatever happened next was out of my hands. I had come clean, and now I would “find serenity to accept the things I could not change.”

  And Arachne peers down from the shadows, sighing sympathetically for these myopic mortals who still cannot see the machine they’re inside of . . .

  • • •

  It was a Saturday morning, the sun was bright, the air was crisp, Julie wanted to do a little clothes shopping, and she invited me to tag along. I stupidly took the offer as her gesture to assure me “we’re still cool, even after your little show-restructuring scheme.” So we ambled down the street toward SoHo and chatted away like chums. She said she had read Sacasa’s suggestions for fixing the show. She hated all of them. “If he was the one who had gotten the job five years ago instead of you? I would have fired him after a week.” She told me she didn’t even know why Michael reached out to Roberto in the first place. She just wanted somebody who could write some jokes—she didn’t want suggestions for a whole rewrite. “You’re much funnier, Glen. You’re just exhausted—you needed some assistance, but we can forget that.”

  Guess she’s decided she needs me on her side after all. She said Michael Cohl yells at her all the time now. She didn’t like it. She warned me, “You don’t understand—you haven’t seen this side of him. He comes off all friendly and casual, but underneath, he’s a thug.”

  More hip, high-end clothing stores. She wanted to buy me a shirt. She didn’t remember that she ripped my (already ripped) shirt. She was just in a giving mood. The shirts were all way too expensive. So I demurred. Still, two good hours with my old pal.

  And then I returned to the apartment to find this e-mail from Edge:

  Glen, I just got off a call. We are resolved to go after a new beginning for our play. The exact lineup of new players yet to be decided. I argued strongly that your knowledge of the material and production intricacies made you a key person in finding solutions to the problems we face. Everyone agrees . . . I feel very excited about the next few weeks. We just need to hold our nerve. . . .

  I’m thrilled by the note. I’m horrified by the note. How was this possibly going to work?

  Riedel reported in the New York Post the next day that along with Sacasa, the show’s producers were “looking to hire a co-director. Sources said they have reached out to Phil McKinley, who is best known for directing Hugh Jackman to a Tony in The Boy from Oz.”

  Julie’s press agent contacted th
e Spider-Man press people. She wanted that story shut down. Now. But was Riedel onto something? I wasn’t sure. I had heard Phil’s name mentioned once. He was already working with Michael Cohl on an arena show based on the Bible, and a person extremely close to Julie suggested him to Michael as a possible replacement for her.

  Two Maxims:

  1. People are not to be trusted.

  2. You must trust them anyway.

  The following day, Michael Cohl called. “Glen, you’re in, Sacasa’s out.” (Apparently, Julie wasn’t the only one who didn’t like Roberto’s notes.) Michael also informed me that he was just on the phone with Julie. It was a brutal conversation, but now “everything’s on the table.” He told Julie to take a vacation for three weeks, during which time a “creative consultant” would come in to implement changes.

  Julie called me minutes later. She was sweetness and light. She wanted me to talk to Rob, to make sure the design team was working on the “Arachne decals” that she wanted the Geeks to affix to the Geek Wall over the course of the show. And she wanted me to talk to Edge about revisions to the lyrics. “Because Edge doesn’t listen to me anymore,” she said resignedly.

  No. She didn’t mention any recent telephone calls she might have had. No mention of a cataclysmic call from her producer just minutes ago in which she was asked to leave the show.

  Nope. Instead she described the decal: a spider logo with an “A” above it, about a foot wide, red against a black background. . . .

  Did I dream Michael’s call? Was Julie in denial? Or as Riedel reported the day before, was she just truly exhausted? As soon as she entered a rehearsal room, all the vitality was there. But that’s the thing about exhaustion—it doesn’t stop you cold. Not at first. What exhaustion might do first is convert your passion into a mania, sending you trudging down an increasingly narrow tunnel, where perspective sloughs away and clear-eyed self-assessment goes out the window. By late February, not just Julie but all of us were like Tom Simpson trundling wobbily up Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France. “Go on, go on,” he said, not realizing he was going to die before reaching the top of the hill.