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

by Berger, Glen

  Marvel did have a few notes. David Maisel wrote David Garfinkle and Martin McCallum a month later that if the script was left unchanged, “. . . the musical will adversely affect Marvel’s brand [due to the] level of sexuality and extreme adult themes that are inappropriate both for the character and the musical.”

  We couldn’t imagine what Maisel and company were imagining. Your typical Spider-Man comic book was chock-full of grisly deaths and women penciled and inked in just the way a sex-starved adolescent boy would want women penciled and inked. The show seemed perfectly chaste in comparison.

  “It’s because you used the word ‘erotic’ in the stage directions,” Julie surmised.

  “No, man, I had already changed every ‘erotic’ to ‘highly charged.’ ”

  Julie urged our producers to ask Marvel to reserve judgment until rehearsals and previews began. Marvel responded—“We have no objection to doing so, provided that such discussion occurs sufficiently in advance of the opening for Marvel’s concerns to be effectively addressed.”

  Fair enough.

  5

  * * *

  Stages

  We all climbed the stairs of the graffiti-graced Queens studio of our set designer George Tsypin. Over the last twenty years, Julie and George had worked on six operas together, including The Magic Flute, which had become a perennial favorite at the Met. Now Julie, our producers, and Edge, who happened to be in town for other business, were walking past the tumbledown toilets and toward the large loft office where George’s designs for the set of Turn Off the Dark were about to be unveiled.

  Associate designer Rob Bissinger (hired to help prevent the sort of technical glitches that plagued Julie and George’s most recent collaboration, Grendel) was there to assist. While George pointed out details in his Russian accent, Rob switched out cardboard scenery pieces inside a three-foot-tall model of a theatre, complete with little figurines of supervillains and Spider-Man.

  The sets took some getting used to. With misaligned architectural elements, Ben-Day dots, extreme angles, and forced perspective abounding, the inspirations appeared to be equal parts pop-up books, vintage comics, spiderwebs, and 1920s Russian Constructivism. In fact, the set by our mustachioed Kazakh set designer looked more like a 1921 Soviet avant-garde theatrical construction than anything since . . . 1921. The effect was dizzying, disorienting, cubist. We were looking at the city as a tumbling Spider-Man sees it when he’s swooping through the caverns of lower Manhattan.

  Immediately apparent was what a departure this show was going to be from The Lion King. For African grasslands, all it took for Julie to evoke the setting was a herd of dancers, or a rising sun made of fabric. Scene changes could be made nimbly, and the materials employed created an overall effect of lightness.

  Spider-Man, on the other hand, was going to be defined by heavy pieces, startling for their ability to tilt and fold. Scene changes wouldn’t be nimble, but they would, potentially, be showstoppers themselves. The last scene of Act One, for instance, promised a thirty-five-foot-tall Chrysler Building lowering from the flies upside down; and then, just before hitting the floor, it was going to unfold and thrust straight out toward the audience. With a city-street backdrop incorporating miniature taxicabs (little lightboxes) that moved back and forth, it would seem to the audience like they were suddenly looking down from a thousand feet up. Dazzling, bordering on the implausible, if this trick could actually be pulled off, our Act One climax was a slam dunk.

  Martin took me aside on the subway back to Manhattan. He clapped me on the shoulder, and spoke in those calm tones of counsel he had such a knack for.

  “Regarding the set, Glen—if Julie’s the id, then you’ve got to be the superego.”

  “Come again?”

  “We want the set to be great, but not . . . excessive. If it gets unwieldy no one will be happy. Ambition is grand, and grand ambition is great, but . . . well, you get the idea.”

  I did.

  And I didn’t. As Julie had begun repeating—“No audience wanted a ten-million-dollar Spider-Man musical.” I figured this was a time to remember Seth Gelblum’s advice: “Stick with Julie”—Julie, who was getting off the phone with Sony as we walked home after our Queens excursion. She was being notified that the final cut of Across the Universe was now officially locked. The version opening in theatres in September . . . would be hers. See? She won. And she pretty much always does. Or so it seemed.

  In September 2007, however, Sony released Across the Universe in just twenty-three theatres. After three weeks, the forty-five-million-dollar film had grossed only $8.5 million. In mid-October, the film’s release was expanded to 953 screens, but it was accompanied by anemic marketing, and Julie began to wonder whether her refusal to make changes to the film back in March poisoned the well over at Sony.

  The movie’s prospects weren’t aided by the wildly mixed reviews. “Mixed reviews” often means some critics kinda liked it and some critics kinda didn’t. But reviewers for Julie’s film found it either “a car crash in slow-motion,” or “a magical mystery tour with the power to restore one’s faith in both movies and music.”

  Critics.

  Julie couldn’t understand why her film was so “polarizing.”

  “It’s not like it’s The Passion of the Christ!” she said, throwing up her hands. “It’s a love story! With Beatles music!”

  And there was the rub. John Lennon once pointed out that the Beatles were bigger than Christ, and just like Jesus’s fans, Beatles fans generally don’t appreciate folks messing with the iconography. Making a musical about Spider-Man, who was also about as big as Jesus in 2007, meant Julie was just lowering herself back into the piranha tank.

  But teenaged girls (according to the Los Angeles Times) were seeing Across the Universe “in packs, bonding with one another (and the film) through repeated viewings.” And a truly unusual number of people were writing testimonials on the web calling Across the Universe their favorite movie of all time. And on such evidence, Julie was left convinced that neither the reviews nor the movie’s debatably narrow appeal led to its ultimately underwhelming forty-five-million-dollar gross. No, rather, the culprit was the lack of aggressive marketing. And in a cabinet in her brain, Julie filed away this lesson—a lesson that would make a pivotal reappearance three years later.

  • • •

  Julie was still hoping Sony would make a last-ditch marketing push when Bono and Edge rang David Garfinkle. It was late October 2007. The lads had found themselves with a free half-day in Los Angeles—could Julie and Glen swing by the Chateau Marmont for a Spider-Man confab? Airline tickets were hastily arranged.

  “Jim Morrison of the Doors stayed in this apartment,” said Bono as he stood on the balcony in his bathrobe. The lads were eager to assess the songs from the workshop—“Let’s listen to them, and then beat them up,” said Bono, who apparently was going to stay in his bathrobe for the meeting.

  As we listened to recordings of the songs performed in the reading, we were all once more buoyed by what we heard.

  “All hits, lovely hits, one after another,” Bono pronounced, only half-joking.

  There was really only one major writing assignment left for the boys—Norman Osborn’s paean to self-empowerment and genetic engineering. What could Osborn say that would whip the high schoolers into an inspired chorus?

  Bono had an idea: “How about ‘Who’s afraid of the future?! Don’t be! Don’t be a pussy!’ ” Bono was getting increasingly excited by this notion. “It would be a fantastic thing on Broadway, to have Osborn shouting, ‘Pussies! Pussies! You’re all a bunch of pussies!’ ”

  Julie rolled her eyes. “Well us girls might get a little pissed.”

  “Why?” asked Bono in his most innocent voice. “ ‘Pussies’ is a term of endearment. It’s pussycat. Do you not have that expression here?”

  “No,” Julie said with her stern librarian face. “ ‘Pussies’ is ‘pussy.’  ”

  “Oh.”<
br />
  Julie flashed Edge a grin and then got serious. It was crucial to her—to all of us—that Turn Off the Dark wasn’t just going to be a cotton candy entertainment, dissolving in the audience’s memories as soon as the show ended. She wanted to deliver a positive idea to all the kids in the audience: “You don’t like the world? Change it.” This, Julie said, was the entire message in Across the Universe. It was the baby boomers delivering a message to the Millennials; a message that could be boiled down, as Julie put it, to “Get off your asses.”

  Edge said they would put the song back on the blocks and deliver something soon. Julie then hurried off to her next appointment, but not before saying with gratitude and sincerity, “It’s just a beautiful musical. . . . I love it.”

  • • •

  But how feasible was this beautiful musical? That was the one question to be answered before the producers could make any serious commitment to a theatre and a schedule.

  Dragging the intangible into the tangible world is a tricky business.

  We were about to take a huge leap into a world where physics was actually applicable, where the immutable laws of gravity existed. From this point forward, motors, winches, and cables were going to be in the mix.

  Three months after the Chateau Marmont meeting, nearly everyone involved in Turn Off the Dark had traveled to the site where evil monkeys once took flight. On Sony’s historic Soundstage 27, where remnants of the yellow brick road were still under the floorboards, aerial designer Scott Rogers and choreographer Danny Ezralow had spent the last month trying to figure out how to render the trickiest Spider-Man production numbers on a stage. A little over two years ago and just a few hundred yards away, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews had hosted an intimate memorial service for Tony Adams. Now, Hello Entertainment had put up enough funds to rent a vast soundstage there, along with a tractor-trailer load of aerial rigging.

  With no heat in the airplane hangar–sized building, and Los Angeles in a cold snap, everyone was bundled in hats and coats as Scott Rogers prepared to demonstrate for the first time a dogfight between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin.

  “Three, two, one, go!”

  The “Goblin Glider” is a levitating, bat-shaped boogie board that has been an iconic Goblin accessory ever since his first appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man #14 in 1964. But acknowledging the difficulty of flying a Goblin performer on top of a Glider inside a theatre, Marvel granted Julie and Hello Entertainment a dispensation. The Green Goblin in this musical would instead have retractable wings—part of his genetic experiment gone wrong involving beetles and bats.

  So as cables whirred, our Goblin aerialist was lifted into the air. Wearing makeshift wings, he began sweeping around the room as if looking for his nemesis. Suddenly, an aerialist playing Spider-Man sprang twenty feet from behind a platform. As the Goblin sped toward him, Spider-Man leaped another fifteen feet, and then flipped in the air backward over the Goblin, between the two lines suspending the Goblin aerialist. Landing on the floor, he pivoted into an iconic Spider-Man crouch, prepared for the next sally. That jump between the two lines—that was the pay dirt. It had never been achieved in a theatre before.

  Our aerial designer—lanky, strapping Scott Rogers—had a drawl, an undaunted demeanor, and a commitment to conservative family values that contrasted merrily with the East Coast leftist theatre folk he had been hired to work with. Scott also had a high tolerance for getting flung around the air, and a doctorate-level understanding of parabolas. He would have made a fine astronaut in 1962’s Project Mercury. Instead, born when he was, he became a Hollywood stunt coordinator, and designed the aerial feats in several movies including Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2.

  When he was tapped to design stunts for this Spidey musical, he appropriated an innovation from pro football coverage. TV networks had recently added a camera suspended by four cables above the playing field, which enabled an operator to send the suspended camera roving around the field via remote control.

  Scott Rogers figured what worked for a camera could work for a human being. The “four-point bushing system” he consequently devised was going to allow a Spider-Man or a Green Goblin or an Arachne to zip at fantastic speeds literally anywhere in the theatre. With an adversary hooked up to a separate flying system, complex aerial battles between two performers were now conceivable.

  Until now, Flying by Foy had maintained a virtual monopoly on theatrical flying systems. Back in 1953, Peter Foy developed a system to send Mary Martin and the Darling children whizzing through the air in Peter Pan. For the next half century, the company had been refining their systems in order to accommodate the needs of any large-scale theatrical production.

  But the heart of every Foy system was this: guys backstage hoisting ropes. Flying by Foy was always manually operated. For Scott to achieve the effects he was after with precision and reliability, computers were going to be necessary. Once programmed, the computers would deliver all the instructions to the winches and whatnot. But as a theatrical strategy, it was a leap into the unknown.

  “That flip over the Goblin—that’s called a ‘back-gainer,’ ” explained Scott with some pride in his voice.

  Would we be able to duplicate this sequence in the actual theatre? He wasn’t sure yet. But the sequence gave everyone in that soundstage plenty of confidence that something pretty thrilling would be devised. Julie asked for a slight adjustment in Goblin’s flight pattern, and Scott said they’d get right on it, but it could take a while, because they’d have to program the new code into the computer.

  This was the downside to bringing computers into the game. Programming took ages, and it was ratcheting up the anxiety levels of David Garfinkle and Martin McCallum. Nearly all the programming accomplished in this workshop would have to be redone once an actual theatre was found, since the new dimensions would require new algorithms. Would there be enough time to reenter all the computer code? What happened if an adjustment to a flying sequence was required at the last minute? Disastrous delays? Hope for the best, I guess. In the meantime, Scott would keep working, alongside Jaque Paquin—our long-haired, thick-bearded Québécois aerial rigger from Cirque du Soleil.

  Michael Curry, meanwhile, was occupying himself with the challenge of making a web-shooter for Spider-Man. Michael was the man who devised, with Julie, all the puppet-work on The Lion King. Resembling a Wings-era Paul McCartney, he was the sort of fellow who sketched out solutions on the backs of napkins. Actual solutions. He intuitively understood how different materials behaved. He grasped the physics behind the fluttering of fabric. He worked with the universal laws that made an insect leg extend just so, or eagle feathers unfurl, or any of the engineering and aesthetic marvels all around us that we generally take for granted until we see their essence presented on a stage.

  It was easy to see why he and Julie made for such felicitous partners on The Lion King. Michael’s engineering know-how was coupled with the sort of attitude that Julie prizes. The attitude that the unsolved was merely the not-yet-solved. The soon-to-be-solved. (Why Michael Curry left Turn Off the Dark—resulting in a number of never-to-be-solved issues—we’ll get to in a bit.)

  So while we waited for the next aerial demonstration, we noticed Michael Curry picking up a wad of something in a Baggie. He walked a few paces away from us. He turned, lifted his hand, and—THWWWIPPPP!—a fifty-foot ribbon of white shot out of his hand in a blur. We rubbed our eyes, because the ribbon was still somehow hanging in midair, the whole length of it quivering.

  Now the ribbon was fluttering away, and as our jaws returned from the floor, Michael explained how he attached one end of a bungee-like cord to the wall, and then affixed a fifty-foot length of silk to the other end of the bungee, and then wadded the silk up into this little pouch. Concealing the pouch in his hand, he walked away from the wall, thereby pulling the nearly invisible bungee taut. By holding on to the pouch but releasing one end of the silk, he achieved the web-shooting effect. Simple, with plenty of theatrical
bang for the buck, it was a quintessential “Taymor Effect.” We could cross another item off the to-do list.

  Now Chris Daniels—the stunt double for Tobey Maguire in the first two Spider-Man films—was being fitted in a “twisty belt” (actually, the “Climbing Sutra Spinning Harness”), a swiveling metal hoop, with three cables attached to it. He was standing in front of a mock-up of Peter’s bedroom—five large lightweight panels which formed the floor, ceiling, and three walls of a forced perspective room.

  A recording of Jim Sturgess singing “Bouncing Off the Walls” blared from speakers, and Chris was hoisted into the air and sent backward, careening into a wall. A flip and a half put him into a handstand, enabling him to spring off the floor and spin like a pinwheel toward the ceiling and then sing the next verse upside down as the walls (held in place by puppeteers) twirled and swayed to the melody, so that it wasn’t just the music and the aerialist but the set itself telegraphing exuberance.

  The scene was pretty fantastic, even though the cables were distracting, and the twisty belt was inelegant. A discussion with costume designer Eiko Ishioka and her assistant, Mary, quickly ruled out any possibility of hiding that big metal ring around his waist. Julie concluded that the audience would just have to embrace the necessity of the setup.

  “In fact,” she said, “Peter Parker should embrace it. Have him toss the cables to a crew guy. You know? ‘Hook me up, Joe!’ ” Expose the artifice. This was an approach Julie had taken in dozens of shows, and when the gambit worked, theatre asserted its theatricality, and it felt good—like how life felt when we were tots, regularly shifting back and forth from reality to make-believe in our minds.