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

by Berger, Glen

  “Reeve,” Michael told him, “you’ll never get nominated for a Tony this year. It has nothing to do with your performance. It’s politics. But stick around, and the 2012 Tonys could be a different story.”

  On March 1, in an auditorium with seven hundred empty seats, Bono saw the show for the first time since January. He liked it. He liked it too much. He didn’t want to install a radical fix. Meanwhile Michael and Jere had just received lousy news from Marvel that made finding the money for Plan X seem unlikely. So in a windowless VIP room that had lately smelled more and more rank, as if this whole enterprise had started to rot, the producers and our composers’ dramaturgical advisers discussed one more time how to fix the ending. I stopped listening. “March—the month we’re currently in—will be the last month of the show,” I wrote my wife that night.

  March 2. Bono called early in the morning. “What would be helpful, Glen, is index cards. . . . Can you have them by one o’clock?” Michael and Jere were meeting with Bono and Edge for lunch to make a final-and-they-mean-it-this-time decision, and Bono wanted to see how the scenes of the current show got switched around or substituted in Plan X. I was just gathering my stack of cards when Julie called. She sounded the worst I had ever heard her. Desolate.

  In just a couple of hours she was going to be delivering her TED speech, but she still hadn’t worked out what she was going to say. She said she had been thinking a lot about the alchemist’s crucible—that place of infernal forces where the result is either a triumphant transubstantiation or burnt char. She was in a crucible now—her convictions as an artist and her methods for navigating the entertainment industry were being tested like never before.

  So she was evoking the metaphor of the crucible to the one thousand TED conference attendees while, simultaneously, on the other side of the country, index cards were being laid out on a coffee table in the wood-paneled private room at the Lambs Club—the same room where Patrick Healy once interviewed Julie and her three collaborators a week before the first preview, with all of us awash in martinis and optimism.

  She described to that packed auditorium in Long Beach one of the defining moments of her life. Just hours before she watched men dance in an otherwise barren Indonesian village square she had taken an ill-equipped climb and found herself stranded between a dead and a live volcano.

  I am on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano on my left. On the right it is sheer shale. I realize I can’t go back the way I have come. So I got down on all fours like a cat. And I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me. . . . The only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me.

  Back at the Lambs Club, two composers and two producers sat in leather chairs as Julie’s cowriter walked them through Plan X one more time. His private audience was nodding excitedly, they were asking penetrating questions, they were finding the answers persuasive, they were making compelling suggestions; eyes and brains were lighting up.

  “It’s right there in the palm of my hands,” Julie avowed to her audience as she held out her hand, and it was as if she really could see it—the gleaming, ineffable, infinite thing you’d crawl on all fours on the edge of a volcano to reach.

  Bono, Edge, Jere, Michael—they were convinced. Bono said “his people” (the colleagues who had been advising him on matters dramaturgical for the last few months) told him to “trust Glen—he’s the only writer you need.”

  And Julie? She was going to be sent into exile.

  “I have beautiful collaborators,” she told the audience in a careworn voice. “We as collaborators only get there all together. I know you understand that. You stay there going forward and you see this extraordinary thing right in front of your eyes.”

  • • •

  To think it was only nine months earlier that I was paging through the Dao De Jing that was sitting on Julie’s coffee table while I watched her serenely sculpt masks in her airy studio—Laozi’s gentle counsel the perfect complement to the classical guitar playing on the stereo: “Welcome disgrace as a pleasant surprise . . .”

  Jesus, just nine months earlier: “Thus the rigid and inflexible will surely fail while the soft and flowing will prevail . . .”

  Whether the tussle was with Joe Roth over the final cut of Across the Universe, or with Harvey Weinstein over Frida, or with dubious Disney executives over how little “lion” you actually needed for a lion costume, Julie almost always prevailed when she held her ground. It was only natural that she applied the same strategy here. But the circumstances were different in this case in one key way: In the other instances, the tug-of-war occurred before the film was released or before the play went into production. In other words, “in the eleventh hour,” if not before. And over a year later, in more than one interview, she would mischaracterize March 2011 as “the eleventh hour”:

  What’s tricky about my career is that people get really excited, they want all that groundbreaking or envelope-pushing stuff, whatever you want to call it, and then at the 11th hour, they get nervous. They smell more success if we don’t go too artistic.

  But over 150,000 people had seen Turn Off the Dark by the beginning of March. It had been reviewed by the New York Times. We weren’t in the eleventh hour—we were well past midnight. And it made all the difference. She figured she was merely facing off against a producer. But a tsunami generated by public opinion was gathering behind her. And it was about to crash down on her.

  She was coming home the next day.

  I left the Lambs Club and headed to the Foxwoods, where I found Rob Bissinger outside on his cell phone, bearing the haggard look that marked him as a Spider-Man man.

  I told him I needed a sounding board. Someone who knew how to put ideas through their paces; subject plot points to stress tests. Someone who could generate material quickly; someone who knew Spider-Man; who understood both theatrical possibilities and technical constraints. Someone opinionated, but not egotistic.

  “I know a Canadian. I’ll give him a call.”

  The Canadian was writer-director Jim Millan. Several people on the Spider-Man tech staff had worked with him before and thought he was just the fellow. He saw the show back in December and liked it for all the right reasons, and had issues with it for all the right reasons. He’d be in town in a day or two and meanwhile we could meet by phone.

  Timetable-wise, Michael Cohl wanted an outline in three days, and a slammed-out, roughed-in draft of a script six days after that. We would start rehearsing with that script, and we’d keep refining it until the new show went into Tech.

  Past midnight, back at my apartment, I turned on the television. The last minutes of David Letterman that night were reserved for a solemn, almost funereal “Rise Above,” sung by T. V. Carpio, Jenn Damiano, and Reeve in his Spider-Man jacket. They taped the performance at the Ed Sullivan Theater just as I was leaving the Lambs Club. All three of them looked heartsick. T. V.—as Arachne—sang:

  Your strength will be a vision

  Beyond visibility

  And the gift I’ve woven for you

  Will give you new eyes to see

  That you can rise above . . .

  yourself . . .

  And I let out a scream—loud, ragged, and long—until the walls echoed and my throat hurt. I felt like throwing up. I felt like slamming my hand against a wall until I had shattered some bones.

  But I didn’t.

  I made myself some coffee.

  • • •

  “You don’t have a soul.”

  Julie had arrived back in New York. And after two weeks sitting like unexploded ordnance in her inbox, Plan X finally got read. And that’s why Julie was calling me at three thirty in the morning and telling me I didn’t have a soul.

  “I was still holding out hope,” she told me. “I thought maybe it will make sense, who knows, maybe I can get behind it. But, Glen, it’s incoherent. It’s a cut-and-paste mess.”

  And then it started—the offen
sive. But I was prepared this time, my insecurities ushered into bomb shelters to wait it out until the shelling stopped. Her critiques now sounded facile. Maybe they were brilliant, but I didn’t hear it, because I was sick of it. I only had to push back a little before her dramaturgical bullet points were abandoned in favor of the personal. The thermonuclear. As soon as a relationship is built, we carry around the codes to atomize it. And this was the moment. The cover was off, and now nothing was between her and that big red blinking button.

  Press it.

  We would never talk again. Or no—one more time we’d talk. But it was months later, and it was like a brief meeting of ghosts. Our friendship was now a Superfund site and I was too tired and teed off to even care. The next day, Julie was fired. And within a week, Julie was being satirized as a narcissistic fruitcake by Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live.

  Rule #1: In every theatrical production, there is a victim.

  Rule #2: Don’t be the victim.

  Berger’s Corollary: Until everything is played out, don’t assume you know who the victim is.

  Carl Jung once noted: “The work in process becomes the poet’s fate . . . It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe.”

  On screens less than three months before, Julie had Prospera lament to her daughter how she was deposed and they were sent into exile by conspirators, “to cry to the sea that roar’d to us.” And every night at the Foxwoods, audiences watched an artist brought low after her artistic creation was destroyed. Arachne was punished for remaining true to her Art, whispering wretchedly to Peter in the title song: “I am the queen of dreams / Banished to a shadow prison . . .”

  Almost six years before, I asked Julie, “Why did Arachne try to kill herself after her tapestry was destroyed?” Instead of the explanation found in most versions of the myth—that Arachne hanged herself from shame over her conduct toward Athena—Julie said Arachne made the noose because her artistic impulse had been thwarted.

  In fact, Julie said Arachne wasn’t punished for thinking she was more talented than the goddess of weaving, she was punished for actually being more talented. In other words, Julie had unwittingly reinterpreted one of the most iconic myths about hubris as not being about hubris at all. Was that a symptom of hubris? Or was it simply one artist sympathizing with another? In their respective stories, Prospera and Arachne were banished. But when the time was right, both of them struck back. Their patron goddess became the very deity whose image Athena wove on her tapestry during that ancient weaving contest: Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance.

  • • •

  Edge and Bono were in a music studio in Midtown. They had begun working with legendary producer Steve Lillywhite to cut the Turn Off the Dark cast album (Lillywhite had been producing U2 albums ever since their debut album, Boy, thirty years before). But that night—hours after Julie was officially dismissed—Edge and Bono were working on a new version of “Rise Above” with twenty-seven-year-old British up-and-comer Alex da Kid. They were intent on turning the song into a number one hit in two months’ time.

  Bono and Edge had already thoroughly revamped “Bouncing Off the Walls.” The verses were sung to a new melody. It wasn’t as raw, but it was more tuneful. And the new lyrics were more intelligible. The lads had taken the criticism of their songs to heart and produced a song that was simultaneously not as good and also probably better.

  The boys also demoed an entirely new song to replace “Spider-Man Rising,” and it was . . . new. It—well, it sounded at first-listen like something out of a spaghetti western remixed for a European late-1970s discotheque. It sounded like that at second-listen too, so I guess that’s what it was.

  “It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek,” said Edge. It sounded like nothing else in the show, and it was another indication to me that we were entering a new and weird epoch of the project’s life. The composers and I left the studio together, and I hitched a ride downtown with them, Edge eagerly discussing dramaturgy all the way down.

  I turned to Edge and Bono. “This is all so bizarre.”

  Edge shrugged apologetically. “Yeah, we don’t do normal well.”

  Bono informed me that Michael and Jere were checking with the investors. They might need a “high-wattage” name to collaborate on the new script. Someone who might do no more than contribute some suggestions and credibility. They reached out to Aaron Sorkin (writer-producer of The West Wing), but he politely declined. In the meantime, I should proceed to work with this Canadian fellow, Jim.

  By March 8, after a couple of marathon sessions in my sublet (the baffled owner of the apartment had been told I’d be out of there by Christmas), Jim and I were within striking distance of having a full outline from which we could start generating pages. It was going to work. I reported to Michael that “the Canadian” was just the fellow I needed—we were speaking the same language. It was a functional, focused collaboration.

  And it was about to go away forever.

  That night, at the March 8 performance, director Chris Ashley was going to see Turn Off the Dark for the first time. The artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse (and last seen on Broadway as the Tony-nominated director of Memphis), Chris indicated that he would make a decision right after the show about taking the “creative consultant” job. Bono mused aloud that, with Phil McKinley out of the running, “we better hope Ashley says yes because otherwise, we’re in trouble.”

  With the Tuesday show over, the composers and producers filed into the VIP room with Chris Ashley—all five of them looking anxious and grim. They shut the door behind them. They emerged twenty minutes later. They said nothing, but they were striding down the backstage hallway toward the exit with springs in their steps and broad smiles. Jere slapped me on the back. As Edge passed by me, he gave me a wink. Chris Ashley was going to be the new director of Turn Off the Dark.

  Twelve hours later, Phil McKinley was the new director of Turn Off the Dark.

  Apparently Chris Ashley had called Michael the next morning with cold feet. Probably because the man was sane and intelligent. Consequently, onstage that night, just before the Wednesday evening curtain, Michael Cohl addressed the cast, with Bono and Edge at his side. He told them that Julie would be taking “a leave of absence,” and he told them about the new “creative consultant.” And Michael then told them that we were opening June 14.

  “Have a great show!”

  The audience was filing into the auditorium, but whether there actually would be a show that night was suddenly uncertain. Many of the younger performers were preparing to change back into street clothes and simply go home. They were sick of being yanked around, and many of them were literally sick from being worked day and night without some proper time off.

  The more seasoned members of the company—Isabel Keating, Jeb Brown, Ken Marks—were no happier about the situation than anyone else. But they knew that although it was the hoariest cliché of them all, and although Turn Off the Dark seemed to be testing the truth of the adage in ever more perverse ways, the show must go on. And they—with quite a bit of urgency—commiserated and negotiated with their less experienced comrades until the show had a quorum again. And the curtain rose on the most mixed bag of a milestone: an unprecedented one hundredth preview of Turn Off the Dark. And it was performed in front of an audience completely unaware that the most dramatically compelling part of the evening had already happened.

  • • •

  “Just talk with him. He’s here to help. You’ll work it out.”

  The search for a superstar writer figurehead had petered out. But the producers still needed someone to assuage skittish investors and intrigue a dubious public. So Marvel had put forward the name of a writer who had written stories for Marvel Comics (the Fantastic Four and the Sensational Spider-Man titles, among others), in addition to being a playwright and a writer on HBO’s Big Love for its last two seasons. He was also no stranger to rewriting superhero musicals. The previous summer—when Spider-Man was just go
ing into rehearsals—his newly overhauled script for the 1966 Broadway musical It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman went up at the Dallas Theater Center.

  “Wait. Roberto? But I thought you didn’t like his notes,” I moaned to Michael.

  “Just talk with him.”

  Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and I had gone to London together back in 2004 as part of an exchange program sponsored by Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic. I hadn’t seen Roberto since, but I remembered him as an amiable, gangling comic-book fan with Clark Kent glasses and a keen appreciation for solid dramatic structure. My plan was to meet him at a Midtown coffeehouse and invite him to join the Canadian and me. ’Twould be a merry band—we’d drink, confabulate, and do the good work that needed doing. We didn’t have to make the process miserable—those days were behind me.

  I walked into the coffeehouse. I saw him all the way in the back, sitting on a couch, working on a script, engrossed. He looked relaxed and amused at what he was typing. I remember vividly the last time I looked like that while writing. It was 1991.

  “Roberto!”

  “Glen Berger!”

  We found a table and I spun my vision for the next month. The fact that he had worked in television would come in handy. I evoked the idea of the writer’s bullpen—that egalitarian room where instead of the personality, it was the strongest idea that prevailed (on its best days, at least). I mentioned the “showrunner”—the television writer who had final say on creative decisions. I was sure we’d come to consensus ninety-nine percent of the time, but—

  “Glen? Um . . . why do you think we’re meeting right now?”

  Roberto had a concerned look on his face.

  “What?”

  “I’m listening to you talk and . . . I’m a little confused.”

  Why is he looking like that? Something is very wrong.

  I was sent to this meeting with the understanding that Roberto would be coming onto the project as a script consultant for a script that I would be writing. I. Me. And now I was learning from Roberto that Roberto had been sent to the meeting with the understanding that Glen Berger had gotten canned, and he, Roberto, was rewriting the new Spider-Man script. Roberto. On his own.