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

by Berger, Glen

  —New York Post, Michael Riedel, August 12, 2009

  Riedel was always wrong about something in his articles. But this time I was having a hard time spotting it.

  My father-in-law, the pastor: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

  A letter from my bank: “Your home loan is forty days in default. Under New York State Law, we are required to send you this notice to inform you that you are at risk of losing your home. . . .”

  Son. Of. A. Bitch.

  7

  * * *

  Goodbye “Hello,” Hello “Goodbye”

  Times Square is a monument to impermanence. Near what would eventually be the site of the Hilton Theatre on Forty-third Street, a juvenile mastodon draped in reddish-brown hair was stalked and then attacked by a saber-toothed cat in the black spruce swamps that covered Midtown. Lifeblood gushing from its punctured neck, the six-ton shaggy beast collapsed just a stone’s throw from where, fourteen thousand years later, A Yankee Circus on Mars would be the Broadway box-office smash of 1905. That show opened in the Hippodrome to a sold-out audience of 5,300. Bessie McCoy played Aurora, and made her entrance on a gold chariot driven by two white horses. There was also a baboon named Coco, as well as four hundred actors-as-cavalry galloping on horses headlong into an eight-thousand-gallon water tank. In 1939 the Hippodrome was demolished, unable to sustain the costs of running a theatre with 5,300 seats.

  And seventy years after the Hippodrome was knocked down, and nineteen thousand years after a block of glacial ice one thousand feet high covered all of Times Square, renovation plans were getting drawn up for a Theater District Shake Shack while, simultaneously, renovations at the Hilton Theatre had ground to a spectacular halt.

  His optimism eroding by the hour, David Garfinkle could be found in the offices of Hello Entertainment desperately working the phones in an effort to ensure Turn Off the Dark opened before the end of May 2010: before the cut-off for Tony nominations; before the rights from Marvel expired; before this entire beautiful enterprise dissolved like wet toilet paper in his hands.

  Separate from the show’s budget, additional millions had been budgeted to convert the Hilton Theatre into a space that could actually hold this circus-rock-and-roll-drama. (And millions more had to sit in a bank to ensure there was a means to restore the theatre to its pre-renovation state once Spider-Man closed, even if Spider-Man wasn’t going to close for fifty years.)

  The renovations weren’t merely intended to accommodate the aerial stunts. From installing a new proscenium to altering the angle and arrangement of every row of seats, a sincere attempt had been under way to address some of the long-standing complaints about the barn-like auditorium. The reconfiguration of the space enabled an additional hundred seats to get squeezed into the theatre, and the grosses generated by those seats were earmarked for paying back the renovation loans.

  But the renovation schedule was tight. Even with that latest five-week delay, the first day of rehearsal was just around the corner, and David Garfinkle felt he had no choice but to begin renovations without having all of the necessary money secured. He had, in fact, raised less than half of the $37.5 million that the show was capitalized at. Oh, there were handshake deals, there were “understandings,” but nothing to keep, for instance, an investor from unexpectedly walking away the night before crucial paperwork was to be signed. In an instant, Hello Entertainment found itself in a critical six-million-dollar hole with bills for the Hilton renovation pouring through the mail slot.

  The Wall Street Crash of ’08 had left Hello vulnerable. There was no film-studio money to fall back on. The Lion King (officially budgeted at eighteen million, but more likely costing closer to thirty million) was funded by Disney. Shrek (costing an under-reported thirty-four million) was financed with DreamWorks money. But unlike these other large-scale, well-branded Broadway shows, private investors exclusively funded Spider-Man. (Though Marvel owned the brand, the company put no money into the show.) The Dow had dropped five thousand points in a period of seven months. Dozens of Broadway projects in development were shelved due to the changed fortunes of potential backers. These other projects, however, hadn’t just signed a lease for the largest theatre on Broadway.

  David told Julie he was confident this thing was going to get resolved within a week. But the next day it was reported in the papers that our general managers had released the actors from their contracts—they were free to look for other work. Our entire casting process? A big fat waste of time.

  David found enough money to put Alan Cumming on a monthly “retainer” so he didn’t fly the coop. But Evan Rachel Wood was gone. Her agents were reportedly busy trying to get her back into the movies she turned down in order to be in Spider-Man.

  • • •

  Boris Aronson, Tony Award–winning set designer, came up with two rules that revealed a penetrating understanding of theatre:

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

  Rule #2: Don’t be the victim.

  For years, being lead producer of Broadway’s most anticipated show seemed a dream come true for David Garfinkle. But, like Big Anthony in charge of Strega Nona’s magic cooking pot, the damn noodles were now threatening to bury him. Riedel was reporting on August 7 that Sony and Marvel (with the approval of Bono and Edge) were going to give David the boot. According to one source, “He’ll be out by the weekend.” Edge and Bono were finding their names associated with a project reeking of “incompetence.” And they didn’t like it. In fact, they were furious. The whole team was.

  And Live Nation Entertainment was quickly running out of patience. They owned the Hilton and were intending to sell it. But with the renovations stalled, the inside of the theatre was trashed—it was in no state to impress potential buyers. So now the specter of an unpleasant lawsuit was looming over David Garfinkle’s head. “Once Live Nation starts restoring the theatre,” Rob Bissinger explained to me, “we can pronounce the show dead. Which means the gig is up on Tuesday.”

  “Wait—Tuesday the twenty-fifth or Tuesday, September first?”

  “Does it even matter? Is David really going to find the money if you give him an extra week?”

  Julie and I retreated to her upstate home, where we alternated between bouts of brainstorming and fretting. Julie said there was no way Live Nation would start restoring the theatre on Tuesday, because it would take six months to get anyone else into the space, “and we’ll be up and running by then.” But she didn’t sound all that confident.

  David’s strengths were not Tony Adams’s strengths. Putting aside whether this financial shortfall would have even occurred under Tony’s watch, Tony’s ability to charm and persuade were intensely missed at this moment, and it didn’t take long for Julie and Bono to realize David was going to need their help putting the pieces back together. No slouches in the charisma department themselves, and with some glittering names saved in their smartphones, Bono and Julie started making calls, searching for some rich someone who kept twenty million dollars in their petty cash envelope.

  But—and this was actually presenting a serious problem—it was August. And August is the worst month of the year to contact billionaires, because that’s when they go someplace remote where they can’t be disturbed, leaving serious financial decisions for September.

  Bono left a message with Steve Bing, avid Democrat and inheritor of 500 million dollars. Music producer and philanthropist David Geffen also got a call.

  “And that guy—the cofounder of Napster,” Julie reported as she got off the phone with Bono.

  I looked on Wikipedia.

  “Which one—Shawn Fanning or Sean Parker?”

  “He said ‘Sean.’ Or ‘Shawn.’ He said the one that’s friends with Sting.”

  But neither of us knew which cofounder of Napster was friends with Sting. And let Bono deal with that—we had to deal with Evan Rachel Wood. Evan told Julie she was still committed to Spider-Man, despite the hundreds of news r
eports to the contrary. But of course, it wasn’t a hundred reporters reporting, it was essentially one “reporter”—Michael Riedel—with a hundred “journalists” simply regurgitating what he wrote. But Riedel’s antics were now causing some serious mischief. Thanks to his gleefully gloomy articles, potential producing partners were getting the impression that the show was a goner.

  “Evan needs to have her people put out a press release,” said Julie. “You should write her and ask her to do that.”

  “Don’t you think you should write her?”

  “It would mean more coming from you.”

  “I hardly know her!”

  Julie flashed me her most fetching smile, and that night I was typing out “Dear Evan, . . .” Two days later, Evan’s camp sent out a release. Privately, she cautioned us that she might have to bow out somewhere down the line, but at least to the world-at-large, she was still on board.

  Julie was demoralized after attending an August 17 meeting between David Garfinkle and Marvel reps David Maisel and Ike Perlmutter (Marvel’s CEO). Ike seemed to have no interest in the show. He had a long successful history taking advantage of companies tottering on the edge of bankruptcy. Julie worried Ike was looking at David Garfinkle and seeing what a cartoon wolf would see: a tie-wearing lamb chop.

  But three days later, grasping just how damaging it would be to the Spider-Man brand if the project collapsed, Marvel strongly indicated to David Garfinkle that they were going to put up the money to save the show. David Maisel and Ike Perlmutter convened another meeting with Garfinkle, Martin McCallum, and Alan Wasser (Turn Off the Dark’s general manager) to discuss how to move forward. The Marvel reps came with a checkbook in their pocket, along with a pen to write out the number “thirty million.”

  “Call me as soon as the meeting’s over,” an again-upbeat Julie told David.

  Two hours later the meeting was over, but there was no crisp check in David Garfinkle’s hands. The Marvel reps weren’t crazy about the numbers in the Turn Off the Dark ledger, but what really spooked them was the vivid display of high-quality, uncut dysfunction. All of Martin’s and Alan’s supressed pessimism toward the project’s viability came spilling out at the meeting. David Garfinkle, blindsided, stammered his way through damage control. The contrapuntal strains of accusation and counter-accusation filled the air. The Marvel reps closed their checkbook and went home.

  What Ike Perlmutter didn’t divulge at either of the two Hello-Marvel meetings was that Disney was buying Marvel. Any day now. For four billion dollars. So while Ike was raking David over the coals, sermonizing about the enormity of thirty million, Ike (who owned thirty-eight percent of Marvel stock) was a week away from receiving a personal payday of $800 million in cash and $590 million in Disney stock.

  Julie sent a note to Alan Wasser, Martin McCallum, and David Garfinkle urging them to get their shit together.

  Enough looking backward and blaming each other for where we are. What’s done is done. How do we pull this Spider-Man back from the brink???? This family has to come together now.

  Danny Ezralow added his two cents in another e-mail: “I don’t care what it takes. We need to have it be known to Marvel and Sony that none of us are flakes. . . .”

  Bono found a little money (some of it from a colleague named Michael Cohl). David Garfinkle said it was enough to get workers back in the theatre on Monday (August 31). How much money did Bono find? David said more was coming, but he had just wired the first tranche. A “tranche” is a portion of something. From the French for “slice.” As in “this tranche of pie seems a little small.” Or “David, are you sure more tranches are coming?” Because Monday rolled in. Not a single worker was back in the theatre. Tuesday, ditto, and now the tick-tock of the clock was getting kinda loud.

  On Labor Day weekend, 2009, David Garfinkle could be found alone in the Hello Entertainment offices, working the phones, and lifting his legs so that the woman from the cleaning service could vacuum under his desk. And where was Martin McCallum? David informed us that after that mess of a Marvel meeting on the twentieth, Martin took a lifeboat back to Australia.

  “Glen,” said Julie, “you need to write him.”

  “Well, somebody needs to write him, but maybe it should be you.”

  “It would mean more coming from you.”

  “Seriously?”

  I wrote him a tearjerker of a plea, but Martin never did respond. And though Martin McCallum is listed as a producer in the playbill, he would never again be seen in connection with Spider-Man. But his sanity is still intact, which is no small thing.

  Julie was convinced David was on the brink of a nervous breakdown and would wind up in jail before this was all through. He had just secured a five-million-dollar building loan, and he was using it to send a modest number of workers back to the theatre. But he didn’t seem to have any means of raising the rest of the capital, which meant he was just digging a bigger hole for himself.

  I called Julie’s high-powered lawyer, Seth Gelblum, the one who told me to “stick with Julie” back in 2005. Surely he possessed some sort of promising news.

  “I don’t see it happening,” he said over the phone. “I’m really sorry. We get people who are interested, and then they look at the numbers, and they run away. And I feel worst for you, Glen. . . .”

  Though promising deals kept falling through, David had managed to secure . . . a block of tickets for the upcoming U2 concert. The band landed in the Meadowlands with their gargantuan 360° Tour, and on September 24 a van was hired to get some of us from Manhattan to the stadium. The van crawled through downtown traffic as David Garfinkle talked enthusiastically about the reviews and attendance records broken on this U2 tour. He got a tepid response. He talked enthusiastically about the cast of Turn Off the Dark. No response. He fondly recalled the last time we were in a van together heading to a U2 concert. “Tony Adams was in the van that time,” was the only response. It was all so awkward, so pitiful. Under all his perky chitchat about this and that, you could hear in David’s voice “It’s not my fault,” and “I didn’t mean to let you down,” and “Please don’t hate me.” You wanted to commiserate, but you don’t commiserate with “the victim.” The gridlock was so bad, and the social dynamics were so uncomfortable, Teese Gohl finally leaped out of the van and returned to the creeping vehicle minutes later with a couple of six-packs. We still weren’t moving, David was still trying to make small talk, but at least now there was beer.

  A week and a half earlier, David Garfinkle had sought to ease the fears of a half-dozen Spider-Man investors by escorting them and their families in a stretch limo to the U2 concert in Chicago. There, backstage at Soldier Field, Edge and Bono posed for pictures and assured the investors that, artistically, the show was on solid ground. The investors were assuaged; David Garfinkle could breathe again, for the moment.

  Now Julie was pushing through the crush of eighty thousand people at the Meadowlands and marveling at the drawing power of our two composers. There just had to be some producer, some savior, who understood what a golden opportunity Spider-Man actually was. That we were in this mess felt so unfair. It felt unfair, that is, until U2 featured on their vast cylindrical video screen a tribute to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political prisoner who was just sentenced to imprisonment for three years with hard labor. At best, she faced the prospect of being under house arrest for fourteen of the last eighteen years. And all for fighting for justice on behalf of her people. And U2 had carved out space in their rock concert to educate the crowd about her.

  And I couldn’t find a kind word to say to David Garfinkle in a van.

  I was ashamed. I made a point to navigate the after-party with colleague David Garfinkle, with friend David Garfinkle, with good-hearted, put-upon David Garfinkle, the man Julie said a year before was such an endearing advocate for the show she wanted to create (unlike Martin McCallum “who was always carping about the budget”). However, when David tried to press his way through a throng of cockta
il drinkers to schmooze with Bono, and the singer shot him a look of undisguised scorn, I made sure my body language was clear—“Oh, I just happen to be standing here, I’m not with him.”

  Never go to a U2 after-party with “the victim.”

  • • •

  Spider-Man was, to put it mildly, an undertaking. And in Italian, “undertaking” is impresa, from whence we get “impresario.” And that was the better word for what the show needed. Not just an organizer, but a promoter; not just an overseer, but a ringmaster, a rainmaker, a spin doctor—someone who could get control of the spooked horses and steer this teetering stagecoach safely into Dodge.

  When Julie met Michael Cohl for the first time, in an early-October meeting, she was a little thrown. Even though every successful producer had his or her own style, deep down you could tell they were all stouthearted, steel-spined, cold-eyed realists. But Michael?

  “He’s . . . well, he’s like an old hippie,” reported Julie. “He’s just in this T-shirt, with this bushy beard. Very laid back. He’s like the polar opposite of David.”

  In August, like most of those in the multimillionaire tax bracket, Michael Cohl was vacationing with his family. He was on a Spanish beach when his cell phone rang with a call from Bono asking him to come in as a producer on Spider-Man. The pitch was that the job was “just a part-time” thing. Michael Cohl chuckled heartily over that a year later: “Part-time! He actually said that!” The show just needed someone to tidy up the books, and check in now and then. There might be some money in it, and hey—it could be fun.

  The pitch appealed to the very things that lured Michael out of bed in the morning. This puckish iced-tea addict (he gave up alcohol years ago) was always receptive to a project that was going to give him “that buzz.” Once a Toronto teenager raised in the thick of the sixties, Michael had remained loyal to his first loves: folk music, leftist politics, and rock and roll. He dropped out of school and test-drove various jobs (including managing an Ottawa strip club) before trying his hand as a concert promoter, booking the seventeen-thousand-seat Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in 1970 for country band Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. The date was such a flop that the twenty-year-old Cohl had to ask the venue’s owner to loan him twelve thousand dollars so he could pay the band. The sign that Michael had found his true calling: This disaster left him undaunted. He continued to book bands, and within two years, he was the in-house promoter for that same Maple Leaf Gardens.