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

by Berger, Glen

  So Riedel thought the show would be gone by the end of 2011. Instead, in that last week of 2011, it shattered the record for the highest single-week gross of any show in Broadway history, taking in over $2,900,000. In November 2013, three years after its first preview, it was still running. The curtain had gone up on over a thousand performances of the show Riedel once predicted in print would be closed by its sixtieth preview. Turn Off the Dark reached the one-millionth-audience-member mark faster than any show in Broadway history. The weekly running costs being so high, the show wasn’t necessarily turning much of a profit. However, with every additional month that the show survives on Broadway, the show’s pedigree gets burnished a little bit more which, hypothetically, will help lure investors and generate publicity for touring productions. Though, as of late 2013, that future remained exceedingly hypothetical.

  The predictions by stage management back in December 2010 that there would be at least two stops every week haven’t borne out, as the crew and stage managers have gained an ever-deeper understanding of how to keep this beast running smoothly. More often than not, at the bottom of the daily stage report, one word has been written, and it is the one you’re hoping will be there: UNEVENTFUL. Every night that you see that word, it’s a night without tangled cables, or power board failures, or actors falling into pits. It was all everyone in the company had yearned for: for all the drama to be replaced by routine: a job that every day is uneventful, uneventful, uneventful.

  Jenn Damiano’s last performance was a little less than a year after the first preview. T. V. Carpio left the show the week after that. Patrick Page—who earned glowing words for his performance (even in otherwise merciless reviews)—happily continued his green, prosthetic lifestyle until the Tony nominations were announced in May 2012. Many insiders considered him a shoo-in for a best supporting actor nod. There was a time—before rehearsals began—that Julie predicted Turn Off the Dark would net at least eight Tony nominations. Mortifyingly, the show only netted two nominations—one for sets, and one for costumes. Patrick Page turned in his notice soon after. And Spider-Man got blanked at the Tonys. Even George Tsypin—with all of those eye-popping, wonder-inducing, budget-straining designs—would end up losing to, of all things, Once, with a set design consisting of a single humble interior of an Irish pub. Eiko Ishioka never even learned she was nominated for her costumes. She died of pancreatic cancer four months before the nominations were announced.

  Alternate Spider-Man Matthew James Thomas had thought he’d take over the role full-time once Reeve Carney turned his attention back to his band. But Reeve—who Julie predicted would bolt from the show before 2.0 even went into rehearsals—was still Peter Parker in summer 2013, and Matthew turned in his notice to go and play the lead in the Broadway revival of Pippin.

  After Spider-Man opened, Phil McKinley headed to Italy to direct a Coliseum-sized remount of his Ben Hur circus show. Julie finally returned to the stage in fall 2013 to direct Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—the inaugural production in Theatre for a New Audience’s new Brooklyn theatre. Julie had considered directing Macbeth, but decided against it. “I know a lot about treason,” she explained in a Newsweek interview, “but I’m not going to do it.”

  Even while Spider-Man was still in its final previews, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa was beginning to turn his attention to new projects—a bound-for-Broadway musical and a writer-producer gig on Glee. The headline for a Business Insider profile of Roberto that came out during previews: “Meet The One Guy Who’s Making Money On The Spider-Man Musical Disaster.”

  Spider-Man was never about the money for me. Or rather, it was never solely about the money. Or rather, I lost whole days daydreaming about Spider-Man money. But the truth is, due to contractual whatnots set in stone long ago, Neil Jordan—Neil Jordan!—has made almost as much as I have. I mean, yes, I did return from the whaling ship with a whale. But it was an orca. Or maybe an adolescent minke. And Roberto? Has he made more than me on this stupid show? I’ll never know because I can’t bear to ask him. Though Roberto did ask me what I was making, and I gave him a full accounting. What did I care? I figured being so open would prompt him to respond in kind. I was wrong. This indicated to me he was too embarrassed to admit that he was, in fact, making as much as me. Or maybe more than me. Or maybe less. Damn it, he should have just told me, because there are days I can feel myself turning into Gollum from Lord of the Rings. As if this entire epic-length experience was, in the end, just about money.

  Julie hadn’t received any bookwriting royalties since March 2011. Consequently, that fall, she sued the producers. I decided I would volunteer any assistance Julie might require in order to resolve this dispute in her favor. I was eager to show her I was on her side. That is, until I read on some blog a couple of days later that in addition to Michael, Jere, and David Garfinkle, the fourth defendant named in Julie’s suit was me. The first thing my new lawyer said to me on the phone: “Mazel tov! Now you’re a man!”

  Of course, suing me wasn’t about the money. The amount she was seeking from me was the equivalent to what she made in royalties every four or five days from The Lion King. No—she sued me because the deepest yearning in an artist is the desire to communicate. And revenge is communication. Only instead of thoughts, or a spectrum of emotions, you’re conveying pain. You’re communicating your pain to the people you believe caused you this pain so that they can understand it in their bones. And rather than with words, or paint, or music, the medium of revenge is violence—the infliction of a physical or psychic wound.

  They don’t allow phones or laptops in court, so I had a lot of time to ruminate as I sat in a Manhattan courtroom in March 2013 and looked at the back of Julie’s head as she engaged in gay banter with her lawyers. Back in 2004, at the end of a years-long series of conversations Bono participated in with his friend Michka Assayas, Michka’s very last question for him was “What leaves you speechless?” After pausing for quite some time, Bono answered: “Forgiveness.”

  Forgiveness was how Prospera finally was able to leave her island. And forgiveness was how, in Turn Off the Dark 1.0, Peter Parker freed the long-suffering Arachne, and allowed her to ascend into the stars. And it’s what will release all the players from this drama once and for all. That, and a couple of court settlements.

  In February 2012, the producers announced they had reached a settlement with the SDC, agreeing to pay Julie Taymor “full royalties for her director services,” which translated to $9,750 a week for the remainder of the Broadway run. Her suit for bookwriting royalties was still very much in play. But finally, after countersuits and a raft of postponements, on—yes—April Fool’s Day, 2013, my lawyer informed me that the settlement had been finalized. It was over.

  There was a time—a year after the show opened—when you could go on to the Turn Off the Dark website and not find Julie’s name anywhere. Her history with the show had been erased in the best Stalinist style. There was only a picture of Phil, labeled DIRECTOR. But with the settlement in place, the program now and forever shall read: “Direction by Julie Taymor, Additional Direction by Phil McKinley.”

  Bono had a new credit too: Aptostichus bonoi. In late 2012, a newly discovered species of tarantula-style arachnid was found at the Joshua Tree National Park. U2’s The Joshua Tree inspired the entomologist to name the new species after U2’s lead singer. Julie’s story for Turn Off the Dark ended with a spider becoming a human. And now I shall end my story with Bono becoming a spider.

  Stories. This was a story about storytelling, and I’ve told it with a sincere effort to stay faithful to the facts. However, I am the Russian hairdresser, so all bets are off.

  There’s a three-panel comic strip, which in three panels says everything I’ve ever wanted to express as an artist, and this comic-strip artist did it with a narrative and stylistic economy I could never hope to match. The title of the strip is 40,000 Years Between Panels. The first panel depicts, in a simple pen drawing, a desolate landscape. I
n the second panel, two wide-eyed, middle-aged, crudely drawn men are standing in a living room. One asks the other, “But why did you bring an extra pair of pants?” In the third panel, we see . . . a desolate landscape.

  For this brief moment, we’re here, humans, flawed and earnest. Flawed, yes. But what if this ultimately wasn’t a tale of hubris? What if this wasn’t a story of egos run amok, or money-managing ineptitude, or blind ambition or blinkered artistry? What if this story, in the end, was about the earnest effort to heave a vision into reality. The story of starry-eyed, hard-nosed, thin-skinned, charming, flawed but undeniably earnest people enduring any amount of rigmarole—forging and destroying friendships—and all for the sake of—what?—Art? For money too, sure, but what were we all trying to make money off of? Art. What other animal does this? What kind of species is this?

  A month after landing this job in 2005, I saw a U2 concert. A month after Spider-Man ran out of money in 2009, I saw another U2 concert. And a month after the show opened in 2011, I saw a third U2 concert. And over all that time, watching those four lads together onstage—as they’ve been together on stages for more than thirty years—it was clear the foursome’s spiritual ambitions hadn’t dimmed a lumen. Their earnestness could make you cry. Bono reaches out a hand and reminds you that the same hand that can flip the bird can also reach out in yearning toward the Infinite. Toward Love.

  And that is the ideograph, the essence, the single image for Julie’s Turn Off the Dark. The gesture Chris Tierney made at the edge of the bridge. The web-shooter that didn’t work, and then the frozen leap. The gesture of a powerless superhero leaping for love and toward death with nothing to catch his fall. A boy falling from the sky.

  Edge and Bono took the title of that song from a line in a poem by Auden (“Musée des Beaux Arts”). Which, in turn, was inspired by a seventeenth-century painting by Bruegel: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The painting is one of those typical merchant-ships-in-a-Dutch-bay-on-a-sunny-day paintings. In the foreground, a man plows his field. A little farther off, a shepherd tends his flock. And, barely noticeable at first glance, there in the bay—a splash, and a pair of upturned legs. Auden mused how the Old Masters were never wrong about suffering. How, after a disaster, life for the living always resumes, as it will. How the ship that witnessed “a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

  All that mad hubbub Spider-Man generated has already subsided and will soon be forgotten. Like a magician’s flash paper, those delirious, baffling, inexcusably operatic days were a blinding but momentary blaze, and as my eyes readjust, I see Danny Ezralow and me in a Ninth Avenue Thai joint back in 2010 after a full day of auditions. Danny picked up the tab, but before he did, he broke out his video camera.

  “Okay, Glen—let’s get it down on film.”

  “Get what?”

  “What do we want this show to be? What are we aspiring to?”

  “Really?”

  “We’ll watch it later on—when we’re in rehearsal—so we can stay on track.”

  “Well, okay look . . . what’s the most important thing?”

  There are shows that turn a theatre into a dark and suffocating coffin. And there are others that turn you on and resuscitate your soul. Life. That’s the most important thing.

  We wanted to remind people that they’re alive. Now. Here.

  “Danny, this project—it’s a huge chance we’ve been given.”

  “I know.”

  Danny’s eyes met mine. We were both as naïve and naked as any inhabitant of Eden. As any artist. As any human.

  “So—”

  “So . . .” Danny laughed. “Let’s not screw it up.”

  We never did re-watch that video.

  ’Nuff said.

  Acknowledgments

  This book was once twelve thousand pages. Practically. If you had read the first draft at an average clip, you’d have experienced the eight-year gestation of Turn Off the Dark in real time. Nicholas Greene—discerning, compassionate, incisive editor Nicholas Greene—showed me how to cut this mother down, and always with humor, graciousness, and patience. I owe him an enormous debt. Jonathan Karp, on the strength of a scanty and scattered pitch, mustered up enough faith to offer me a chance to turn my pitch into a Simon & Schuster book. And then he kept that faith, even after I made a cruel mockery of his original deadline. For his wise and unwavering mentorship, this first-time book writer is deeply grateful. My book agent, Joe Veltre, and longtime agent, Joyce Ketay, are owed many thanks for their guidance and gentle prodding, as well as Jonathan Evans, the book’s production editor. For slogging through early drafts and still managing to find the energy to be encouraging and insightful, I want to thank Alex Aron, Jeanne and Myron Berger, Roy and Shannon Almquist, Ingrid Almquist, and Jules Cazedessus, who was also an inspiration for this book in uncountable ways. There are also those who assisted me simply by giving me the space to write this story without interference. No small sacrifice, it required serious acts of kindness and trust. Edge, Bono, Michael Cohl, and Jere Harris top this list, and they have my gratitude. Special thanks also go to Erin Oestreich and Rob Bissinger for being such reflective and obliging resources. Solomon, Sylvie, and Theodore Bergquist were my muses, though they endured more deprivations than any other thanks to all the hours I spent writing this ridiculous tale. The Mountain Laurel Waldorf School and its community of parents and students were a deeper source of strength than they could possibly know. And then there’s a list—pages long—of everyone who has donated a portion of their limited mortal life to making Turn Off the Dark a reality. The stage crew, all the performers, and the stage managers, the Tech staff, the people whose official job titles I never learned even though they are ten times more vital to the smooth running of the show than I ever was, the people who assist with the costume changes, and those who apply the make up, and mend the costumes, and design the web ads, and—well the list is truly pages long, and I reverently thank them all.

  And then there’s Karin Almquist, who isn’t crazy about hyperbole or public confessions of love, but I’m here on bended knee in front of her, with a bouquet of a thousand flowers, in a stadium full of a million people, with skywriters writing “I Love You” and “Thank You” over and over again. Because I’d be singing early bongelese versions of the Spider-Man songs while drooling and wearing a straightjacket if it weren’t for her. I’ll never be able to pay her back, unless she leaves me alone for nine months with our three children and a dying dog (I hope she doesn’t), but it’s always an option.

  Lastly: Just as this book was going to print, I received a call from Julie Taymor. I didn’t answer it. I figured she had simply sat on her phone. After all, she hadn’t called me for more than two and a half years, though I never erased her phone number because . . . well, just in case. And then my phone chimed. Because Julie had left a message. Hearing that voice again, inflected with warmth and familiarity . . . boy, that staggered me. What followed over the next two days was a handful of e-mails and three hours of conversation. The conversations weren’t just civil, they were genial—strange and psychedelic for being so almost-normal. Which is all to say, I wrote in my book that she and I never talked again. That’s now incorrect. Though her call came too late in the production process for me to incorporate additional changes, I hope she’ll see that I endeavored to make this at least an honest account, though my memory and my word count were limited, and she of course had her own perspective on the experience. With all my heart I wish her peace; I wish her a life of love and creation. Like no one else, she leaves me with nothing to do but to humbly repeat Dag Hammarskjöld’s morning prayer: “For everything that has been—thank you. For all that will be—Yes.”

  About the Author

  © DON HAMERMAN

  Glen Berger cut his teeth at Seattle’s Annex Theatre back in the ’90s. His plays since then include Underneath the Lintel, which has been staged more than two hundred times worldwide, been translated into eight
languages, and won several Best Play awards; and O Lovely Glowworm, a 2005 Portland Drammy Award winner for Best Script. He is a New Dramatists alumnus.

  In television, Glen has won two Emmys (out of twelve nominations) and has written more than 150 episodes for children’s television series including Arthur (PBS), Peep (Discovery/The Learning Channel), Big and Small (BBC), and Fetch (PBS), for which he was the head writer for all five years of its run.

  Glen spent six years cowriting the script of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  DISCOVER MORE GREAT BOOKS AT

  authors.simonandschuster.com/Glen-Berger

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Index

  Abbott, George, 116

  Across the Universe, 25, 44–45

  alumni of, 54–55, 71, 203

  Beatles songs in, 44, 45, 63, 116

  casting of, 95

  choreography of, 71

  critical reviews of, 44, 63, 64

  final cut of, 277

  marketing of, 63, 262

  message of, 65

  Actors’ Equity Association, 45–46, 54, 301

  Adams, Tony, 9–12, 23, 29, 42, 113, 120, 195