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

by Berger, Glen

  Michael and Phil would continue to ignore Bono’s alarms. Michael had also been ignoring Julie’s increasingly desperate demands to have 1.0 recorded before it was lost forever. He couldn’t tell if Julie’s impulse was sentimental, artistic, or litigative. In any event, he wouldn’t allow it to happen.

  Associate director Keith Batten drew a caricature of the Geeks, including Alice Lee in her cat-ears hat reading from a big book of Ovid, containing the story of an artist whose work was destroyed. The drawing was now hanging on the wall backstage, capturing that weird manic energy that was about to disappear from the show. After that day, the four Geeks were out of a job. They took extra bows at the curtain call while behind them three dancers in Spider-Man costumes confidently held up handmade signs in webbed lettering: BE. BACK. MAY 12. But this being art, and life, there were no guarantees. Among the Geeks’ going-away gifts were DVDs of Rivers and Tides, the 2001 documentary about the artist Andy Goldsworthy, who constructs sculptures out of natural materials—leaves, pebbles, sticks—that eventually collapse . . . or get swept away . . . or fall apart before they can even be completed. . . .

  19

  * * *

  The Russian Hairdresser’s View of History

  Since late November, it had been the third-highest-grossing show on Broadway. Turn Off the Dark had earned more than twenty-five million dollars. More than 245,000 people attended one of its 145 previews. And now we had shut it down. As Patrick Healy of the Times pointed out about our shutdown that week, “Spider-Man is without historical precedent.” To get entomological, the Foxwoods had turned into a giant cocoon. But what was going to emerge—if anything—was still a matter for debate.

  “Glen,” wrote Edge, “I just sent an e-mail to Phil formally requesting that you are given the chance to start rewriting the bad scenes, with or without Roberto, immediately.”

  Bono went a step further. Sensing Phil’s continuing reluctance, Bono called me the morning of April 18 with top-priority, top-secret instructions. I was to rewrite the script. Period. Don’t worry about Phil, or Roberto. We hired them, not the other way around. We absolutely must replace all the dialogue that, as Bono put it, “sounds like it’s out of The Waltons.”

  Bono was sounding like he did the first time I met him backstage at the Meadowlands six years before. This show had to be exceptional, or he was going to walk away. He said if it was necessary to conceal what I was doing from Phil, so be it. So. Was I in? Would I do it?

  Hell yes.

  An hour later I was in the upstairs rehearsal room at the Foxwoods, with just Phil and Roberto. And Phil was in high dudgeon. Michael Cohl had just told him about complaints from composers, staff, and who knew who else.

  “You need to tell us right now, Glen. I need to know if you’re on board with us or not.”

  I stammered to buy some time. I needed to work out some calculations. Roberto and I had begun to trust each other—“ ’Cause I’ll tell you right now, Glen. Roberto and I will walk.”

  I caught a flicker of confusion on Roberto’s face. He didn’t know what the hell Phil was talking about. But Phil was serious. Serious enough to actually leave the show? Nah—he knew what a great gig this was for him. So do I detonate my manure bomb? Obliterate any chance at a working relationship with Phil and Roberto for the next six weeks, and assume Bono will take care of the mess?

  “Yes,” I finally answered. “Of course I’m on board. But c’mon—I hope that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to be rigorous. We have to scrutinize every damn thing in the script, or we aren’t doing our jobs, right?”

  “Of course! No no. Obviously.”

  “More important than getting what you want is giving what you have.” That was the final lesson Peter Parker had to learn. Service and sacrifice. It was the eleven o’clock number for all of us. Bono wanted to know how my rewrite of the whole show was going, and I had to write him back to inform him that the situation on the ground was more complicated than he might have imagined. I told him most of the cast, as well as Marvel, Disney, and the producers, liked the direction the script was going in. I assured him that making the script “exceptional” wasn’t even that important: “The heart, the intensity, and the mythic glimmers are going to be delivered by the music and the spectacle, and the story’s job is to make sure that it gets delivered.”

  In fact, because it suddenly seemed so true, I explained that creating a musical was like rolling a joint: “The story is ‘the rolling papers,’ and the other elements are ‘the high-quality sinsemilla,’ and I believe the problem with Spider-Man 1.0 is that the rolling papers kept falling apart—they were torn and badly rolled.”

  The e-mail was getting embarrassing. I finally pointed out that Phil clearly never got the marching orders in early March to absolutely rely on me more than Roberto, and now we’d just have to make the best of it.

  Bono wrote back: “an amazingly lucid e-mail, even if it is not all or even most of what I wanted to hear. Let’s make our limitations strengths now.”

  I had dutifully bcc’d Michael Cohl on the e-mail, to demonstrate to him that I was playing ball, but Michael didn’t take it that way: “Wow . . . not a letter I expected. Nor do I believe it. To me it feels like ‘the Russian hairdresser version of history.’ . . . Frankly I can’t finish reading your email, too long and not in my opinion in the better interests of the show . . .”

  I was in the Cohl doghouse again. He was sick of me. I’d have fretted about it, except I was sick of people being sick of me, so there. I was pretty sure what I wrote to Bono wasn’t the Russian hairdresser version of the last month, but after spending two sessions with Google, I still had no idea what Michael Cohl meant by “the Russian hairdresser version.” Michael had his own version of the last month. So did Phil. Julie. Reeve. As I said, this book is a story about storytelling. All of us engage in the act every minute of the day, and then again when we’re dreaming. So maybe we’re all Russian hairdressers, I wrote back to Michael: “It’s sounding like a much better job at the moment than co-bookwriter.”

  • • •

  “Has Edge seen the run-through? What are his thoughts? Are you able to make a dent? Ready for Tech? J”

  The last e-mail I ever received from Julie. She had now written me three haiku-length e-mails three Sundays in a row, all of them at almost exactly the same time. Clearly, after one’s morning coffee with the Sunday crossword, but before lunch, was the proper time to write ex-co-bookwriters.

  Were we “ready for Tech?” she asked. Well, Chris Tierney was back in rehearsals, and eyes teared up just talking about it with each other. Meanwhile, a huge hole had been cut in the proscenium to make room for a new “center-speaker cluster.” Along with the two large stacks of speakers and subwoofers taking up much of the floor space on the two ends of the stage, the set now contained eyesores that made George Tsypin’s eyes sore. But the sound was noticeably improved.

  And the automated bed for “Rise Above”? Did it get fixed? Well, as a matter of fact, a couple of months ago it got outfitted with larger wheels. Too large to fit inside the bed, unfortunately, so the wheels were mounted on the outside of the bed, concealed with painted plates. However, the bed continued to get stuck in the cracks in the floor. So the bed went back to the shop, and more money was spent on still-bigger wheels with some serious treads. We now had a bed that could handle any topography. If you needed to go on a cross-country road trip in a remote-controlled bed, this would be the one. And then? It had just been decided that week that there would be no automated bed. It would be brought on manually by stagehands.

  So yes, we were ready for Tech.

  • • •

  On the morning of April 26, Phil, Roberto, and I were in the green room of The Today Show waiting to spend five minutes live with Matt Lauer. I watched the segment preceding ours on the green room monitor, sipping disappointing coffee. Matt Lauer was interviewing the mothers of two fourteen-year-old girls who were best friends. The girls were bullied at school fo
r the same old stupid stuff. So one night they had a sleepover. They wrote suicide notes describing things they wanted at their funerals. And then the girls hanged themselves. One of the mothers discovered them in the morning. Ungraspable, the grief that mother must be carrying. And now that mother was back in the green room. I had no words. I couldn’t look at her. Because we were next. We were the puff piece.

  The last six years on this show—everything I thought I had endured so stoutly—and it still amounted to nothing but fluff. I watched a prerecorded clip of Phil telling an interviewer that we were making “the impossible possible,” and I sat on that couch on the Today Show set, in front of a few million people, and brooded silently about how I was wasting my life. Matt showed a clip of dancers rehearsing the new “Bullying by Numbers” choreography, and I could only think what a mockery we were making of those mothers’ pain. At least with Danny Ezralow’s choreography, there was a brutality in the song. But now “Bullying by Numbers” was a big empty nutsack because heaven forfend we make bullying seem like the abominable thing that—waitaminute—did Matt Lauer think I was one of the new people brought on board? He just introduced us as “three members of the new Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark creative team,” and now he was asking us: “When you three first sat down and watched the show with your own eyes, what was your first reaction?”

  Phil looked at Roberto who looked at me, and I looked at no one. I pretended I was a mannequin. I discovered I liked the idea of being seen as part of the new crew hired to clean up the mess of the original team. I mean, what were those original writers thinking? I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the interview.

  • • •

  After a run-through of the whole show—just a few days before our first preview—I had never seen Michael Cohl looking so distressed. Even when he was upset, he usually managed to project amusement. Not now. Questionable dance moves had infiltrated the entire show. 2.0’s running time had somehow gotten longer than the show’s previous incarnation, and the entirety of Uncle Ben’s death was now, bizarrely, just Aunt May and MJ standing on a nearly bare stage informing Peter that his uncle Ben was shot a few hours ago.

  And for all the work to make the show less “dark,” the first act in particular was a downer. The Geeks may not have been “laugh riot” funny, and many found them grating as hell, but they did add a certain goofy levity to the mix. Michael’s solution was to hire a young joke-writer who showed up in the lobby one morning, intending to submit a list of one-liners by the end of the week. This was guaranteed to fail to produce the desired effect. Between ourselves, Roberto and I gnashed. And eventually, the joke-writer was paid off and sent away.

  Meanwhile, there were troubling issues that weren’t being addressed with the air-raid-siren-urgency they required. 1.0’s garish and messy “Ugly Pageant” had gotten replaced by a garish and messy “Freak Like Me” number. Finding a viable concept that would justify having an ensemble of dancers join the Goblin in song was proving difficult. Phil and Chase had decided the dancers were random mutant figments of the Goblin’s imagination. But the overworked costume department had little time to throw something together, and Chase Brock wasn’t finding the concept inspiring. According to a consensus of company members and staff, the resulting number resembled a tribute to Michael Jackson’s Thriller video as performed by eight-year-olds during Gay Pride Week. Clearly someone was going to have to come up with something better. But it wasn’t going to happen before the first preview—a preview destined to get reviewed by a whole bunch of bloggers and Michael Riedel, so—not good.

  But with “Freak Like Me” not changing for the moment, was there another way to give the Green Goblin a little heft? Patrick Page came up with what Roberto and I thought was a brilliant idea. Patrick suggested that when the Green Goblin was revealed at the Daily Bugle, he should kill a reporter. Specifically, Buttons, the old-timer. Just strangle the life out of him in front of all the other reporters. It would make his evil indelible in the minds of the audience. Phil was reluctant—it felt awfully violent. And, on a more practical level, once Buttons’s corpse was on the ground, there was no way of getting him offstage. Patrick had an answer for that: the Goblin could drape Buttons’s lifeless body over Jameson’s desk, so the corpse could be ferried off when the desk was sent offstage.

  At last 2.0 was going to get a little grit into it. It was really too bad that Patrick’s frustrated attempts to hoist Buttons’s limp body onto the desk resembled Japanese hentai monster porn. Nothing could be contrived in the mere twenty minutes of Tech allotted to make it look like Buttons wasn’t being violated from behind by a green mutant, and Phil shut it down. He also—just two days before our first preview—decided to cut “Think Again” again. Arachne forevermore shall be nothing but a Gentle Lady Spirit Guide.

  • • •

  May 12. We were hours away from our first preview of Spider-Man 2.0, and we didn’t have an ending for our show. I’d be feeling déjà vu, but déjà vu was a trick of the mind. I really had already stood by the stage hours before the first preview of Spider-Man watching an ending getting slammed in as the minutes ticked down. But now Julie was a tall bearded man in a baseball cap directing technicians to tweak the position of the confetti cannons.

  In Spider-Man 1.0, there was a two-minute gap near the end of the first act while the stage crew prepped the aerial rigging for the final sequences. This gap was covered with some excited blather from the Geeks wondering how the story was going to turn out. Now this gap was happening near the end of the whole show, and there were no Geeks to cover the two minutes. A two-minute drop in momentum after the exciting aerial battle would ruin the sequence. It would ruin the ending. It would obliterate the entire reason for shutting down the production and implementing Plan X in the first place.

  Roberto came up with an idea: Instead of the Geeks, we’d have New York citizens—including Jameson—supply the dialogue. And we would have Spider-Man–costumed dancers planted in the auditorium ready to leap and toss “web confetti.” (The confetti was Phil’s idea.) More and more web confetti would be thrown until it climaxed with an explosion from a “confetti cannon,” sending streams of spermatic webbing onto the heads of the audience. (The thought of such a “theme-park” approach would have sent Julie exploding into little confetti-like pieces.) Phil had been itching to get a confetti cannon into the show since mid-March, but up until that moment, he had been overruled by stage management, who worried that the streams of paper would get caught in aerial equipment, and that the ushers would start demanding extra pay to clean it all up every night. Those were the excuses they gave Phil. Really, they just thought it was tacky. But now the cannon was in.

  The sequence was teched without a moment left on the clock. In the VIP room just minutes before the show, the anxiety was thick. The show wasn’t quite sold-out, but the auditorium felt packed. A lighthearted dramaturgical discussion between Roberto, Phil, Chase, Eileen, and me suddenly turned into shouting. I was shouting at Phil, he was shouting at me, and we didn’t care what we were shouting about so long as we were shouting at each other. He stomped out of the Very Important Person room, and we took our seats.

  Michael Cohl appeared onstage in front of the show curtain to address the audience. “Welcome to all of you: ladies, gentlemen, and uninvited critics.” The show didn’t open with Spider-Man speed skating down a bridge with Mary Jane in peril anymore. Reeve, as Peter Parker, simply stood in front of the Iris Wall, delivering a book report about Arachne. (Edge and Bono in particular found this shockingly underwhelming, but all of their ideas to improve it got vetoed.)

  The loom didn’t work that night, but at the end of the show, the climactic Spidey-Goblin fight thrilled the crowd. Web-throwing spider-men appeared in the aisles; the confetti cannon fired. Reeve and Jenn delivered their final dialogue, and then Reeve swung away over the audience. The final triumphant bars of music played. Blackout. The lights came up. The dancers came out to take their bows . . .

  A
nd the audience leaped to their feet. The standing ovation was sustained through the entire curtain call. No “popcorn ovation” this. The reaction by the audience was more boisterous than anything 1.0 ever generated. There on the stage—those weren’t just the gracious smiles of professional performers. They were unfiltered expressions of pure joy, a profound exhale as the company sensed that maybe, just maybe, this thing was going to work out after all. I glanced over at Michael Cohl and Jere Harris. They were giving fist bumps to everyone they saw. They were looking so relieved it was as if they had just received their invitations to the Rapture.

  As the audience filtered out, I picked up a program lying on the floor. The cover was different from the 1.0 cover. “Spider-Man” used to be in small letters and “Turn Off the Dark” in big letters. That had now been reversed. The message from the producers was clear: Nothing overshadows Spider-Man. I opened to the first page. “Original Direction: Julie Taymor. Creative Consultant: Phil McKinley. Book by Julie Taymor, Glen Berger, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.”

  A machine built by the gods to teach humility . . .

  Roberto assured me in March his name wouldn’t appear in the program. At a certain point during this last month, this seemed both unfair and preposterous to both of us. But getting equal billing also seemed ludicrous. When he found out how the new credits would appear, he didn’t have the heart to tell me. So I discovered it on my own that night. However, it only took me a minute to get over it. Or more like a week, actually.

  I’m still not over it.

  Roberto had been on the job two months. I had now been working on the show for six years, and . . . criminy—it was to the day. Yes, exactly six years before the first preview of this Phil McKinley–helmed production—on May 12, 2005—Julie Taymor had called me after reading my Goblin-piano scene and asked me to be the co-bookwriter of Spider-Man, and my heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.