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

by Berger, Glen

  At any rate, Julie had stopped listening to Michael Cohl. She believed any “softening” of Spider-Man ticket sales could be attributed to Michael’s Broadway inexperience. He was botching the marketing, just like Sony botched it with Across the Universe. She was making passionate appeals to me: “If we don’t stick together, Michael is going to sink the show.”

  But that night, as I was being driven back to my apartment from the theatre, Michael and Jere revealed that we were to meet at Edge’s apartment tomorrow to interview Phil McKinley. Jere said, “Glen, there are people who say your loyalty is with Julie. That we shouldn’t trust you, because you’re a double agent in all this.”

  I tried and failed to think of a good response. Protesting to these guys in the car that I wasn’t a double agent would make it sound like my loyalties lay with them. I didn’t like that, either. It made me sound like a turncoat. I recognized this role, but I was miscast. It was the same role played by Judas (which Julie would be calling me regularly to her friends come April). Except if I was Judas, that made Julie Taymor Jesus Christ, the Lord Our Savior, when we were just a couple of folks working on a play. But then, why did I feel like I needed a shower? Because, justify it all you want—but your dear friend is in peril and you’ve given up trying to save her. We reached my apartment.

  “So we’ll see you tomorrow,” Jere said as I got out of the car. He then added, with a crowbar in his voice, “And keep your mouth shut.” And with that, he slammed the car door. The SUV drove away.

  And I was alone.

  “Perverting my upstanding studies, converting counselors into renegades . . . he confederates with the king of Naples . . .”

  To think she once had such faith in me, she commissioned me to rewrite William Effing Shakespeare. . . .

  • • •

  Philip William McKinley was in Edge’s TriBeCa apartment describing himself to Michael, Edge, Jere, and me as “a team player” and “a people person”—traits that he stressed would be ever so important during this “transition” in order to keep the company intact. He saw the show, and he read Plan X, and agreed that it was the sensible way to proceed. Phil touted his extensive experience with flying systems and large-scale theatre machinery. Although Phil had only one Broadway credit, he directed seven different productions of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He had thrown up plenty of elaborate shows in just three weeks. And he had worked with tigers, elephants, fire, and alcoholic little people, so he was confident he could handle whatever Spider-Man threw at him.

  In Edge’s former apartment, fifty-two months ago, Tony Adams slipped into a coma. I was looking at Phil describing his ideas to change Julie Taymor’s staging, and I couldn’t imagine what Tony would have said about all this. Just who was this guy who thought he could step into Julie’s shoes? Did he understand he wasn’t to tamper with the Taymor aesthetic? “It would always be about serving Julie’s vision,” Phil insisted.

  Edge wanted time to consider. There would come the day when the new director would be introduced to the Turn Off the Dark company. The first impression needed to inspire confidence and hope because otherwise it would inspire rebellion. Michael reminded us that we didn’t have the luxury of time to deliberate. The new opening date needed to be announced within the week. But in the meantime, Michael said he had apprised Julie’s lawyer, Seth, of the situation. Michael confirmed that George Tsypin, Rob Bissinger, and—significantly—Danny Ezralow were all “on our team.”

  “Okay,” wrote Edge. “Wait for the fireworks.”

  And so there we were. On the brink of actually going through with an unprecedented restructuring of a Broadway show. And then?

  I got wobbly. It started because the show that night—with my much-improved Geek scene, and new curtain call music devised by Paul Bogaev—worked maddeningly better than I had ever seen it work. And then, backstage after the show, I took the temperature of the cast, and they were all anticipating the opening on March 15 with such eagerness it hurt. The producers waited too long to make a move. There would be morale collapse and defections if Michael postponed again.

  Seth Gelblum was arranging a meeting, a very serious meeting, at his offices on Saturday morning. Bono wouldn’t be able to attend—he didn’t come back to New York until the following Tuesday. But I entreated Edge, Michael, and Jere in an e-mail to see the show before the meeting. Because maybe we had no choice but to go with the show we had. I swore to them that Julie now seemed amenable to cuts and a certain amount of rewriting. In other words, she was listening.

  Upon reading my note, Michael Cohl got livid. “If you write another e-mail like that, you’ll be in some deep shit. In fact, we’ll all be in deep shit.” He said the ovation the night before was still “our same old ‘popcorn standing ovation’—poof! and it’s over.”

  Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein (a former partner of Michael’s and producer of Julie’s Frida) had recently given Michael some advice: “Julie’s a genius, and you don’t have to listen to her.” It took a simultaneously magnanimous, arrogant, and pragmatic son of a bitch to come up with that calculation. But judging by Michael’s attitude over the past two weeks, he had embraced it. Our show was blowing past the old Broadway record for most previews because of Michael’s commitment to get Julie’s vision to the stage. But that commitment was coming to an end.

  Nevertheless, Michael agreed to attend the show that night. Edge too. It was another full house. I sat next to Julie, who seemed to understand how much was riding on this performance. The direction of the next morning’s decisive meeting depended on the audience’s reaction tonight.

  And it was the most technically disastrous show since December. Midway through “Spider-Man’s Debut,” one of those Murphy’s Law grouses showed up. The “rotate line” got hung up on the “rotate arm.” First time that ever happened. A frustrated audience experienced TurnOfftheDarkus Interruptus, watching an empty stage for twenty minutes before Randall made the decision to disable the fly rig and cancel most of the flights in the show.

  Not that I stuck around to endure it. Five minutes into the twenty-minute stop, I fled downstairs. Julie followed. So now we were alone in the little assistant director’s room as an audience of two thousand sat upstairs watching absolutely nothing.

  She looked at me with an inscrutable expression. “So let’s have it.”

  The voice she selected for this occasion was her special reserve blend of contempt and sarcasm, with notes of suppressed fury. Not my favorite.

  “Plan X. Tell me the whole thing.”

  It was the first time I ever heard her say “Plan X.” She made the phrase sound as stupid as the phrase actually was. She asked me again, but I didn’t understand the question. She had already read the entire thing, so why was she insisting I recite it, other than to be dickish?

  “You do know at this meeting tomorrow you’re going to have to defend your ‘plan.’ Michael and Jere are ready to shut down the show to do your ‘plan.’ So let’s have it.”

  “I really don’t want to do this now.”

  “If you believe in your ‘plan’ so much—”

  “I’m not—prepared—at this exact moment—”

  “Well, we’re all talking about it tomorrow, so you better get prepared. Really. I would like to know where ‘everyone’ thinks this show should be going. Don’t you think I’m owed that much?”

  Why was she pretending to be so thick? She read it! She told me so! Over a week ago!

  She said if the opening was postponed again, T. V. and Reeve would both bolt, “so good luck finding another Arachne and Peter.”

  I didn’t doubt they’d quit. Reeve had never really shaken out of his funk that began the night Chris Tierney fell. And both he and T. V. were devoted to Julie, for good reasons. The chances were high they’d do what she asked them to do.

  I started with the beginning of the show, how it was basically the same, but she interrupted almost immediately and methodically dismantled my logic. With a lo
t of stuttering, I responded that maybe I should skip to the second act, and describe that first. She shook her head slowly, out of pity. God, how this woman can intimidate me. By the time I was five plot points in, she had shot fifty holes in the plan. Every word out of her mouth was actually saying, “You’re out of your depth, boy. You got a taste of power but you’re just a callow mediocrity.” You could insert the myth of Icarus here. Or Phaethon—the boy who took the reins of his father’s solar chariot but couldn’t control the flame-breathing horses, and who had to be killed by Zeus before he burned up the Earth.

  I hadn’t actually thought about Plan X for almost two months. I mean sure I had thought about the fact of it, but the details? I could barely remember them. The plan had been in a state of suspended animation since January 8. For the last fifty days I had done nothing but do Julie’s bidding, clarify the big points of the plan to Edge, and urge people to have meetings that never transpired.

  I was too unnerved to evaluate what Julie was saying. I couldn’t tell if she was using little more than specious reasoning and intimidation to dismantle my outline. But I should have been able to tell. I was unprepared for this, but why was I so unprepared? I realized, aghast, that I had pulled a “Sam” and, like that stagehand, I skipped a crucial step. Ever since the day I first devised Plan X, I imagined three steps needed to be followed. Step One: Get the producers interested in a preliminary version of the plan. Step Two: Gather trusted Tech people and possibly an additional writer in a room to work out all the details. Step Three: Get the producers to pull the trigger.

  And in this small, airless room, I was listening to my own stammering voice and realizing . . . we skipped Step Two. We hadn’t all met and worked out the details. And now Turn Off the Dark—this entire enterprise—was about to leap off the edge with its unclipped safety cable dragging behind it.

  Where was I?

  Julie was looking at me with her arms folded. She was wearing a smirk.

  What IS this place? I have arrhythmia. My arms are prickling. I thought I was so smart. I was going to save the show. But there IS no show! Spider-Man the Musical was never Spider-Man the Musical. I see that now. It’s always been nothing more than a diabolical machine built by the gods to teach humility. And I’m trapped in the dead center of its workings . . .

  I staggered out of the room, out of the building, and down the street. I wandered into a hotel lobby. It was late, but I called my agent, Joyce Ketay. When I called her excitedly back in 2005 to tell her how I had just landed this incredible Spider-Man gig, practically the first words out of her mouth were “Be careful what you wish for.” I was so mad at her. Could she be more of a downer? It was like having the Delphic oracle from Oedipus Rex for an agent. And now, almost six years later, it was like . . . having the Delphic oracle from Oedipus Rex for an agent.

  She extracted enough from my agitated babble to get the lowdown. She said I shouldn’t be expected to defend anything at the meeting the next day. “Plead the Fifth,” she said, because the meeting should really be between the producers and Julie as to how to proceed.

  Plead the Fifth. I can do that. I went back to the theatre, slightly calmer. The fubar-of-a-performance, which had just ended, had only strengthened Michael Cohl’s resolve to stop listening to Julie. I found him in the lobby.

  “I can’t defend Plan X tomorrow.”

  “Glen, no one’s asking you to defend anything.”

  “Really?”

  “You know what I think? I think you have battered-wife syndrome. Why else would you still be defending Julie? I think you’ve had your wings clipped for so long, you don’t even realize it. Go home. Get some sleep. Stop writing e-mails.”

  I promised him. I was heading toward the door when Michael said one more thing to me.

  “Glen. How do you want to fail? Because that’s what it comes down to. We’re not asking you to ‘defend’ anything. But you have to ask yourself how you want this thing to end. Do you want to be able to say we tried everything? Because if you want, we can just call it a day right now. So give whatever answer you want to give tomorrow. But it’s a simple question. How do you want to fail?”

  16

  * * *

  The Crucible

  This is an amazing situation. I am so sorry it has come to this when we have been creating a story of transcendence. What larks, pip. xxx

  It was three in the morning, and Julie had just called me Pip. In Great Expectations, Joe the blacksmith was like a father to Pip when Pip was poor and without prospects. Later, Pip cast his good-hearted friend aside. I stared at her e-mail. How in the hell did we get here? Don’t play dumb; you know how we got here. Okay, but was there a way we could still salvage this relationship as well as salvage the show? No, it’s one or the other. Damn it, there had to be a way . . .

  It was Saturday morning, and so the building housing Seth Gelblum’s law offices was deserted. Seth, our downcast arbitrator, had gathered us around a long table—Michael, Edge, and Julie—with Jere on one speakerphone, and Bono on another.

  And the unflinching conversation that could have happened on January 7—and January 8, and every day after that until this thing got solved—was finally happening on February 26. It had taken until today, when we needed a lawyer to play den mother. Today, after a dozen major papers had already practiced vivisection on us in the Broadway operating theatre.

  Michael admitted at the top of the meeting that he made a mistake. He said he should have convened the meeting weeks before. He said it was “out of a respect for Julie and her vision” that he hadn’t. There was a lot of irony in his voice when he said that. Julie snorted. They could hardly look at each other.

  The meeting was five hours long, and not one of its eighteen thousand seconds was fun. Michael said this meeting wasn’t about who was right artistically. This was about survival. “If Spider-Man were only a twenty-million-dollar show that needed eight hundred thousand a week to break even, we wouldn’t be having this meeting. But it’s not. So we need ‘the big fix.’ ” He put it baldly: We didn’t even have enough money to make it to March 15. If Marvel released more funds, it would be on the one condition that the show got thoroughly revamped.

  Seth suggested we go around the table and state how we thought we should move forward. Julie wanted to open with the show we had on March 15. Bono, privately, wasn’t confident Michael Cohl could find the money for Plan X. So Bono supported Plan X, but with a lot of caveats, and wondered if we couldn’t open on March 15, and just keep adding changes intermittently to our current show over the next four years, like Wicked did. Julie suggested she could get behind that plan. Michael and Jere were skeptical—did they not just say we could barely make it to March 15?

  Edge came out strongly for Plan X. He saw no alternative, and he hoped Julie would come to embrace the option. Now it was my turn to speak, and from the perspective of those in the room, I’m sure I looked like a glasses-wearing waffle. The forty-five-day delay in considering Plan X had muddied the waters—I worried for the cast; I worried for the lack of a viable director; I worried for my dying friendship with this woman looking so bewildered and betrayed at the end of the table. I tried to split the difference. I said, “I’m not here to defend this Plan X plan. I’m not prepared to do that at this moment. I—”

  Michael Cohl suddenly got up from his seat and walked around the room toward the little table where the iced tea was. He was so disgusted with my equivocating that he couldn’t sit still. As I talked, he dropped ice into his cup, rattling it loudly while breathing heavily. He didn’t look at me. Which was fine, because the less I saw of the scowl on his face, the better. I’ve lost him. Is Julie taking note of this? Is she going to be grateful? Or am I just going to end up ostracized by everyone? Well, to hell with it: I said we should all put off the decision until Bono could get back to New York on Tuesday to see the show. I said that even if we put off the vote for one week—until March 5—we’d still have time to vote on whether we should open on Marc
h 15 or not. And, incredibly, that was how we left it. After five brutal hours, it was agreed to table the final vote until the next Saturday, March 5.

  So Julie left for Long Beach, California, to spend six days at the TED Conference, where she was invited to give a speech on “Worlds Imagined.” George Tsypin and I sat on the steps in the empty vestibule off Forty-third Street. George worked for years designing the sets for The Little Mermaid, and I began to understand why he had been such an early and strong advocate for Plan X. The previews for The Little Mermaid were packed, and even after it opened, the mostly stinko reviews didn’t affect ticket sales. At first.

  “Glen, you wouldn’t believe it—the lines—one day they’re going around the block, and the next day, we’re closed. Just like that.”

  You can get suckered into feeling like you had a hit, George cautioned. “But you can sense when the crowds—when they aren’t real.” A chill wind slipped into the Forty-third Street vestibule. I told him Julie called me from the airport and said Don Holder would quit if a new director came in.

  “Well, there’s Don now,” George said. He beckoned our lighting designer into the vestibule. “Julie says you told her you would quit if she left the show.”

  Don grimaced, looked around as if checking to see there were no directors around, and then clarified, “Well, . . . no . . . that’s what she told me I should do.” Apparently Don wasn’t the only one Julie had called with a similar message. And why not? Now was the time to gather your troops.

  And what about T. V. and Reeve? Would they quit? Michael had a heart-to-heart with Reeve. Our lead repeated his love for Julie (“She’s like my fairy godmother,” Reeve said in an interview around that time). But his contract didn’t allow him to leave the show until late June, so we didn’t have to worry about our Peter Parker jumping ship. Apparently Reeve didn’t want the opening postponed again because it would make the show (and him) ineligible for that year’s Tonys.