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

by Berger, Glen

  “It’ll suck out all the dramatic tension! If we make it too easy for the audience—”

  “See, Glen?” clucked Phil. “That’s why your show didn’t work. You guys wanted to make it so hard for the audience.”

  Roberto gave me a look. “Why are you being so weird about this?”

  I relented. It was out of my hands. In Sardinia, the cure for tarantism required burying the victim of the spider bite up to his neck in a heap of dung. If he laughed while seven women danced around the dung, it was a sign of recovery. If he couldn’t laugh, then the prognosis was death.

  Start laughing, fellow.

  Roberto sent me a note at the end of the night.

  Hitting the hay, my friend, but wanted to tell you how incredibly jazzed I am about this. It was actually . . . kind of . . . really . . . sort of . . . fun today, wasn’t it? Thanks for welcoming me aboard.

  I guess we were all competent, collaborative, and (more or less) sane that day. Roberto and Phil seemed genuinely surprised that I was willing to alter the show. So much so, that the next day Roberto would ask me, “If you disagreed with Julie so much from the very beginning, why didn’t you just quit?”

  “Quit?”

  Hell, I was almost fired. And then I turned my radio dial to her frequency and never looked back. Quit? What, and give up the chance to learn from a master? Would Roberto have quit? Or would Julie have fired him before he had the chance, like she said she would have done after reading his notes?

  “Quit?” I said to my new cowriter. “But there was no proof she was wrong. In fact, it seemed like there was plenty of proof over the years that she was right.”

  No, the more pertinent question was this, Roberto: With so many things destined to be decided in these next two days that I so fiercely disagreed with, why wasn’t I quitting now?

  • • •

  The fourteen-hour-long meeting to remake Act Two the next day was more contentious. The changes to the script were far more extensive than what the Tech staff had signed off on with Plan X. These two didn’t come here to do a little remodeling. This was a gut renovation.

  Perhaps the unkindest cut was the excision of “Think Again”—Arachne’s hard-driving song of vengeance that began with the startling sight of Arachne hurtling down from the balcony. I argued until I was hoarse, but it was no use. And it unsettled me because I could feel this cut. It felt like, well, a mastectomy.

  “MUTATE OR DIE,” the Goblin says as he reveals his plans for a new world order to the terrified reporters at the Bugle. It was the Goblin’s catchphrase in the new script, and it would become the motto for our entire endeavor for the next three months. Everyone had to get with the program. Turn Off the Dark had to mutate or die. (Very quickly, people began to refer to the version onstage as Spider-Man 1.0, as if it were first-generation software in bad need of an upgrade.)

  But Phil and Roberto clearly didn’t understand yet that Turn Off the Dark wasn’t a show, it was a machine built to teach humility. They couldn’t begin to comprehend that I had already seen it all. As the history of the show unfolded, I was there. I was the Ancient Mariner. Or Forrest Gump. Either way, they needed to heed my words of caution. If they started diverging too far from Plan X, the Tech staff would balk.

  I honestly couldn’t figure out who these guys were—swaggering revolutionaries putting their feet up in the empty palace of the swept-out rulers? Or sincere servants of the production, unaware of their own baggage and biases? When Phil learned that Bono and Edge’s new song for the top of Act Two was called “A Freak Like Me Needs Company,” his eyes lit up. He just had an epiphany.

  “No, no, no—it isn’t company. It’s family. ‘A Freak Like Me Needs Family’!”

  He wanted me to e-mail Bono and Edge immediately to inform them of the title change. Because—Phil explained—the Goblin didn’t want to feel like an outcast. More than anything in the world, what he wanted was family. I listened to Phil, trying to understand why this song title was getting him so animated. This didn’t just seem like a plot point to Phil. There was a fervor in his voice as he spun this new scenario.

  “I think Phil’s a lonely man,” I said to Roberto as we left Phil’s apartment late that night. “I think he sees himself as a freak who needs family.”

  Roberto rolled his eyes. “Get some sleep, Glen Berger.” He was right—this was the last night for that. Roberto was assigned Act One, I was assigned Act Two, and a first draft was due in five days.

  And maybe I was just projecting. Maybe I was the lonely man. Where was everyone? It felt like the last episodes of I, Claudius—where were all the characters who once filled these halls? Teese Gohl and Martin McCallum; David Garfinkle and Michael Curry; Dodd Loomis, Jonathan Deans, Danny Ezral—

  Yeah . . . where was Danny?

  Instead of sleeping, I stayed up until three in the morning updating Danny about the goings-on. He was currently in exile, waiting for the call that would bring him back from Los Angeles. It was a call that would never come if Phil had anything to do with it. And Phil had plenty to do with it. He had begun searching for a new choreographer. Phil would say it wasn’t his choice to cut Danny loose. But he seemed relieved to not have to deal with such an influential member of the old team.

  The official word was that Danny was being let go because the stage managers and crew told Michael Cohl that they were confident Plan X could be implemented in the time allotted, but only if Julie and Danny weren’t in the theatre. Apparently Danny had used up all of his Goodwill Points too. Michael also had it on good authority from his spy that the worn-out dancers didn’t want Danny back because they were worried Danny would take the opportunity to rework all the dances again.

  “Who’s the spy, Michael?” I asked.

  “Guess. He’s in plain sight. He’s there all the time, and everyone talks to him freely in a way they never would with the management.”

  I couldn’t think of who it could be, even though it turned out I had talked to him as much as anyone: Jacob Cohl. Not only our documentarian, but also Michael Cohl’s son. In two weeks’ time, nearly all the dancers would recant, desperate for Danny to return. But it would be far too late by then.

  Meanwhile, the actors were meeting with their union—Actors’ Equity—to explore their options. Did they really have to keep rehearsing just because they were still “technically” in previews? Weren’t they being exploited? Couldn’t they get some vacation time? Talks between Equity and the producers would be ongoing—this was all rather new territory.

  • • •

  When we didn’t open on February 7, it was “Fauxpening Night.” March 15 was unofficially dubbed “Nopening Night.” There was no party. The next day, Roberto and Phil introduced themselves to the cast before the show, and Phil whipped out for the first time (but hardly the last) his favorite rallying cry from his circus days: “Let’s make the impossible possible!”

  Meanwhile, Bono and Edge were busy working on “A Freak Like Me Needs Company” (they didn’t go for Phil’s proposed title change). They asked me to come down to the near-empty studio that evening and check out what they had so far. Bono was lying on a ratty couch in the middle of the recording room improvising Goblin lines into a handheld mike over an endless groove. He was in character: a dissipated lounge lizard shaking off last night’s bender and warming up for some new kicks. He was scatting, hacking up tar, yawning, cackling into the mike: “Bring out the DANCING GIRLS! The crossroads of the world needs a little resurrection. Heh, heh. It used to be REALLY ROTTEN ’ROUND HERE! Now, can’t even BUY ME AN ERECTION! Hoh, hoh, hoh. Sorry, darlin’.”

  We’ll clean it up for Phil, not a problem.

  Slurring like he was three sheets to the wind, with stained-silk-bathrobe bravado he sang, referring to our show’s troubles:

  If you’re looking for a night out on the town,

  You just found me. . . .

  I’m a sixty-five-million-dollar circus tragedy . . .

  He shifted into a Tom
Waits growl, slinging extemporized beat poetry and pausing every time a trio of Edge’s multitracked vocals were heard singing in falsetto, “A freak like me needs . . . com-pa-ny.”

  After those twenty-two hours of script meetings with Phil and Roberto, where it felt like the show was turning into a Sunny Delight juice product, this felt like something else entirely.

  And then Elvis Costello appeared in the studio, wearing a pair of little red glittery devil horns. Right—it’s March 17—St. Patrick’s Day. He passed out extra pairs of horns to his Irish compatriots. Costello. I threw out my back camping out for tickets to this man’s Blood & Chocolate tour. But I kept my mouth shut about all that. Bono invited Elvis to listen to a few cuts from the unfinished Spider-Man album. Steve Lillywhite played the first track, and all the Irish-inflected banter in the empty studio stopped. Elvis listened intently, hardly moving until the songs were over. And after he said some very complimentary things, and headed out into the night, Bono clucked and said, “Yeah—I heard the songs through his ears, and there are some things we need to fix.”

  And that’s what you get with a community of artists. Beyond the compulsory slagging off, there’s also this exchange of ears. An artist is able to step into the shoes of anyone else and get a new perspective on their work, but not every artist is eager to take such a step. It requires a willingness to be self-critical. These guys in the devil horns had it.

  I knew I was going to pay for that visit to the studio. Although it allowed me to get a better bead on Goblin’s character, I lost a half-day of writing. My fears were realized when Roberto, Phil, and I convened on Sunday. Roberto had a completed draft of Act One, and my Act Two was patchy. In fact, Roberto had done a very thorough revision of the act. He prepped us with apologies and acknowledgments of the scenes’ shortcomings. But like a true dick, I ignored every one of Roberto’s caveats. Where was the intensity? Where were the attempts to generate moments of transcendence? I figured Phil would instantly see that he put too much faith in Roberto, and he—of this I was certain—would assign the next draft of the first act to me.

  And of course, I was wrong. Phil was excited by Roberto’s effort. So much so that he was assigning all of the MJ-Peter dialogue in the second act to Roberto. I smiled. I clomped home. And I started writing e-mails. I urged Bono and Edge to read the script immediately. Because maybe it was just ego, exhaustion, and churlishness making me think Phil and Roberto were taking the characters down the road to Vanillaville. I mean, really—jokes about Applebee’s?! I told the composers I was ready to resign. “Probably within the week.” I really was ready to quit, and—to my surprise—it felt good to say it. In fact, I was hoping Edge and Bono responded with a shrug, because then I’d be done. But, nope, Edge called. After having read the script, he said: “I needed to pour myself a drink.” He was going to send “a howitzer of an e-mail” to Michael and Jere. Bono said similar words in a call an hour later.

  Michael Cohl, of course, was sharing my fantasies about being free of the show. From the threats coming from Julie’s camp about litigation, to the complaints from his composers, it was the most tempting thing in the world to just close the show down and write the damn thing off come tax time. He told me “we either get something good done within a week or it’s over.”

  Roberto, being a dramatist and, in his words, “a student of human nature,” could tell I was annoyed. So in a small office at PRG the next day he promised that the final draft would not be cheesy. It would be taut, entertaining, and—by trading pages back and forth until opening night—it would be of one voice.

  “Be totally frank with me, Glen. I have no ego in this. I swear. Anything you want changed, change it! It’s done!”

  I was swayed. I think we even hugged. I didn’t want Roberto demoted. As Edge wrote me later that week: “I think our prospects for success rest squarely on the new book. If you and Sacasa can thread the needle, I think we’re in business.”

  Then adding: “No pressure!”

  • • •

  Friday, March 25. As the actors performed for yet another preview audience that evening, echoes of a Turn Off the Dark from a parallel universe sounded in their heads. Because that afternoon, they crowded into the conference room at PRG for their first read-through of Turn Off the Dark 2.0.

  There’s always a nervous excitement in the room on the first day a new script is read. But this cast had already had that day. Seven months ago. This felt a little too much like attending the wedding of a groom’s second marriage, with no one wanting to talk about the spectacular failure of his first marriage. In addition to the nervous excitement, there was awkwardness. Julie’s absence was conspicuous. As was the absence of our four Geeks. Our Jameson, Michael Mulheren, gave me a big hug and said, “Just so you know—we all think it’s awful what Julie has been saying about you.” He was sitting down at the conference table before I processed his words, and now it was too late to ask him to elaborate.

  Stephen Sondheim, in the lyrics compendium I had gotten for Christmas, nailed the source of my ambivalence about the new script:

  [The content] has to be clear . . . but it must also be mysterious. . . . Something should remain unsaid, something just beyond our understanding. Of course, if it’s only mysterious, it’s condescending and pretentious and soon monotonous. . . . But if it’s only clear, it’s kitsch.

  That was it. Our new show was kitsch.

  And yet today in the reading there were laughs at lines that hadn’t seemed funny the day before (and they didn’t seem funny today either, but every new laugh just seemed to further prove that I was being a grouch). There was a delighted shock from the actors at discovering the sheer extent of the rewrite. And they had every reason to be shocked—it had been only a week and a half since Roberto, Phil, and I met for our first script meeting. And you could feel the morale of the company lifting as the scenes progressed; you could see hope flicker behind the actors’ eyes—maybe they wouldn’t be out of a job come June after all.

  Patrick Page (who had seen his part expand more than any other) summed up the consensus of the actors afterward: “It’s clearer, funnier, and shorter.” Ken Marks (Uncle Ben), after first taking time to sing the praises of Julie’s vision, admitted that the original script and directing style were something of a straitjacket, with the skills of the actors suffocating under layers of “style.” Reeve, psyched, said, “It feels more like a hit, doesn’t it?” And Matthew James Thomas took me aside for hardly any words other than a very italicized “Yes.”

  But amid all the positivity in that PRG conference room, T. V. Carpio was undisguisedly miserable. She was miserable for her dear friend Julie; she was miserable because her part had been cut down to a sliver of what it had been; and she was miserable because—as far as she could tell—the new script sucked. If Phil couldn’t find a way to change her attitude, it was going to be a problem.

  Meanwhile, Danny Ezralow was beginning to suspect a new choreographer was coming on board, and he was seriously contemplating having his union, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), pull all of his work from the show. All the dance and all the aerial work. The loom. Everything. If Michael Cohl and Phil couldn’t find a way to get through to him, it was going to be a problem.

  Phil wanted to begin rehearsals on Tuesday, and so he wanted the actors to have a relatively final version of the first act in two days’ time. Even if Roberto was totally chill with having any line in the script changed to my satisfaction, Phil was a different story. In the name of giving these actors something they could start memorizing, he wanted to start locking this thing down.

  And that was going to be a problem.

  18

  * * *

  A Goblin in a Box and an Eensy-Weensy Spider

  Near the end of March, I got an e-mail from Rob Bissinger on behalf of the design team: “Hey man: Why does the Goblin appear in a box? Is there an idea here? We’re trying to design a ‘Goblin Box.’ What is that?”

  What i
ndeed.

  Geneticist Norman Osborn thought he had things under control, even as god-like visions of rewriting Creation danced in his eyes. So, in the end, what turned Norman Osborn into the Goblin? Hubris. The Green Goblin was a cackling, bright-hued personification of the warping effect that comes from overestimating your own capabilities.

  But now consider what the composer Andrew Bird once said: “The only thing that separates a mess of seemingly disparate observations and a song is a moment of excessive confidence.”

  He was being wry, but let’s take him at his word. What if there have been so many “egotistical” artists throughout history because hubris is one of the tools in their toolkit? Like Popeye’s can of spinach, “excessive confidence”—in controlled doses, and timed correctly—is what gets the job done. However, if it’s the main tool in your kit, then you’ll probably end up flying too close to the sun, or flipping off the goddess of wisdom.

  In other words—if you have relatively unsung artists volunteering to fix the work of Julie Taymor on the most expensive Broadway show of all time, and do it all in just three months, then chances are you’ll wind up with a Foxwoods full of dysfunction, overreaching, and ideas like the Goblin Box.

  Which—I explained to Rob Bissinger—was just a big box delivered onstage to reveal the Green Goblin at the Daily Bugle.

  “Well . . . instead of a box,” suggested Rob, “can’t we just reveal Goblin by having him swivel around in Jameson’s high-backed chair?”

  That would work too.

  When this new Turn Off the Dark gentrification project was launched, the indispensable Rob Bissinger was going to be shoved out, but he got a reprieve. Danny Ezralow, on the other hand, was still in exile. He called me one night from Los Angeles.

  “So, Glen, have you met Chase yet? Chase Brock? Of ‘The Chase Brock Experience’?”