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

by Berger, Glen

  Michael Cohl showed up just as an elevator arrived. With the elevator door held open, he commiserated, he quipped, he pacified, and, finally, coaxed Julie back into the conference room. “Julie’s back from the bathroom,” he told Bono, still waiting on speakerphone. And some good marketing ideas actually came out of that meeting.

  (Venice, however, was not an unequivocal success, and Julie would return from the weekend unsure whether the mixed notices were a harbinger of things to come for her movie. The trip had done her confidence no favors as we headed into Tech.)

  • • •

  Back at the Foxwoods, it wasn’t just sandbags swinging anymore—Scott Rogers or one of his assistants was now making the trips into the air. But one of the challenges Scott hadn’t factored in when transitioning from movies to theatre was that in the Foxwoods he had to finish the move. In a film, an aerial designer only had to figure out one portion of a sequence at a time. You could then stitch together five, ten, or fifty shots into one seemingly continuous aerial sequence.

  “But in the theatre,” Scott explained, “the whole thing’s gotta hang together. And that makes everything just a hell of a lot more difficult.”

  I looked up as an aerialist swung over our heads. Waitaminute . . .

  “Scott, where’s the thingy?”

  “The what?”

  “The thing! The big ring thing that contains the big web net. Where’d it go?”

  “Yeah, they took it down.”

  “Why? When are they putting it back up?”

  “They’re not. It’s done. It didn’t work.”

  “But. Dude . . . if they’re not putting it b—What do you mean it didn’t work?”

  “It was pretty clear as soon as they put it up that the net wasn’t gonna come out like they wanted. And the whole ring was gonna get in the way of the cables anyway. The flying wouldn’t have worked with that thing hanging there.”

  So apparently a week before, while we were all in rehearsal, steel-cutting buzz saws went to work, slicing the ring truss into sections so it could then be hauled away to some big dump somewhere. A ring of money one million dollars in diameter, taken apart tranche by tranche.

  “But . . . [brain sputtering] . . . what are we gonna do for our ending?! For, you know, the web?

  “Well . . .” If Scott Rogers actually chewed tobacco and it’s not just my faulty memory of him, then in this pause, he spat brown juice into a little cup. He then proceeded to say, “They better come up with something.”

  It turned out the “something” was a stage-wide spool of black lightweight mesh stored in a niche downstage of the footlights, and concealed by an automated lid. But it hadn’t been tested yet, so no one knew if it was going to work.

  September 17, three weeks after our deliriously good stumble-through of Act One, we had another go at it. This time, our show was vapid, juvenile, and as emotionally engaging as damp wood. The next morning, on my way to rehearsal, I saw Julie waiting on the subway platform. On the train ride up to Times Square we rehashed the read-through from the day before, getting analytical. Julie, suddenly looking exhausted, stared out in front of her.

  “Or maybe . . . ,” she said with a sigh, “maybe the whole idea of doing a Spider-Man musical is just ridiculous.”

  And there we go. It was what I had said to her five years earlier, and now it was my turn to say, “I don’t think so. No.” I looked up. And right there in front of me was a woman painted the colors of a baboon. It was Rafiki. The entire subway car was plastered with images from The Lion King, emblazoned with the tagline from Disney’s new ad campaign—IMAGINATION UNTAMED!

  Imagination untamed.

  Really, what wasn’t ridiculous on a stage? A milkman sings about tradition, a young man gives a young woman a dead seagull, and a woman who looks and sounds almost nothing like a real baboon is speaking and behaving as if everyone knows she’s a baboon. And she’s pointing to miles and miles of grassland even though there’s actually nothing but a wooden floor in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. But we buy it. Art does its voodoo, and we buy it. Except for all the times that we don’t.

  “Julie.” I fixed my eyes on her eyes. “Julie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not ridiculous.”

  All of it was ridiculous. Just three days earlier, I had to stop in my tracks on my way through the Times Square throng. A sizable billboard for Turn Off the Dark was now up on the corner of Forty-fifth and Broadway. A graphic of Spider-Man, swinging in front of the moon, with only four names framing him: Julie Taymor, Bono, Edge, and Glen Berger. I gawped. Tourists jostled by me. Down the block, the cowboy was strumming his guitar in his underpants. The Black Hebrew Israelites were preaching their brimstone and inanities. A group of teens were eating sandwiches in the TKTS line. I knew this moment was coming, but I was expecting a fun little ego boost, not existential bewilderment. Was there any of me in that name? What was a name? A sound or some squiggles keeping at bay the fact that we’re bare, forked animals burdened with some extra brain parts. It’s a fact you can glimpse when you wake up at four in the morning and can’t remember your name. Or when you get your name on a billboard in Times Square. Or in those moments before death. I’m going to die. Maybe not now, but I will. I. Will. Die.

  Later that day, I was walking with Julie on Forty-second Street. She saw the billboard in the distance. She was excited, because in the middle of the “Sinistereo” animation sequence, one of our supervillains, Kraven the Hunter, was going to crash through a facsimile of that very billboard while riding an elephant.

  “Can you imagine Kraven busting through that?!” Julie shouted. Then her face suddenly darkened. “Where’s my name?!”

  An unfortunately positioned shadow from a nearby building was blacking out her name on the “Book by” line. Mine was spared.

  “Yep. Every day at this time,” I needled her, “tourists are gonna think it’s just ‘Book by Glen Berger.’ ”

  She harrumphed with a grin, and we walked on toward the subway.

  Julie had no idea—it would have been beyond her comprehension if someone from the future showed up and told her—just what indignities were still in store for her name and its placement in the credits of Turn Off the Dark.

  And Arachne scuttles by in the celestial shadows . . . Arachne—so confident, so exalted, then laid so low. Our patron goddess. She watches over us mortal artists, and she compassionately turns the crank—winding up the merciless-to-be-merciful machine built to teach humility . . .

  Its motors and winches begin to whirr . . .

  9

  * * *

  The God Mike

  I was backstage, crouched and facing a corner, shining my cell phone onto the floor. Nothing. I usually had better luck than this. Now I was on hands and knees squinting in the dark, because that’s what I do on the first day of Tech. It’s a tradition.

  While a play—any play—is playing out in front of its audience, other unscripted dramas are transpiring on that stage, containing actual births, peril, live sex acts, and corpses. Everyone’s oblivious to it because, of course, the participants are bugs. On the first day of Tech, I like finding one of these little creatures. I like knowing there are actual lives sharing space and time with the fake ones. Perspective, you know. For obvious reasons, a spider would’ve been nice that day, but I’d have taken a dead pill bug by this point. I decided to give it three more minutes.

  Writer on hands and knees. Pull back to reveal:

  An enormous auditorium, dark but for the illumination of little desk lamps and lots of computer screens. At a table, house left, the actors were gathered. On the table were dozens of little kits consisting of a microphone, a radio transmitter, and a battery pack. The name of a specific actor was written on each kit. Not only did each microphone fit on each actor’s head a certain way, but each radio also had its own frequency, so that the sound operator could tweak the volume and EQ during the show. The actors were just instructed to attach the microph
ones to their heads for the first time. We were about to tech the opening scene.

  Wooden boards had been laid over entire rows of seats. At one of these makeshift tables, there was a glowing bank of computers and a black phone with a handset. This was where eight-time Tony Award–nominated lighting designer Don Holder and several assistants were ensconced. Most everyone else these days used headsets, but Don was old school. He’d have that anachronistic phone on his ear for most of the next ten weeks, looking dyspeptic, like one of those 1975 police detectives methodically calling his list of leads. Of all the people Julie considered geniuses, she asserted it the most to me about Don Holder. Don’s loyalty to Julie was genuine and deep: She believed in him enough to hire him for The Lion King, which he credited for transforming his career.

  On the other end of Don’s phone was a lighting operator who was manning a computer somewhere high up in the theatre. Don’s phone also connected to the house-right balcony, where stage manager C. Randall White, sitting with a computer and headset, would be running the moment-to-moment execution of all the flying cues. Unlike other Broadway shows, this one was so complex that another head stage manager was required (Kat Purvis), to coordinate all the movement of the various set pieces.

  A few rows down from Don Holder’s base camp, near the very center of the auditorium, there was a table for Teese Gohl to work on various music mixes and to confer with David Campbell over his musical arrangements. And costume designer Eiko Ishioka was taking notes next to him. Next to her were the assistant director, the associate director, and Danny Ezralow—all poised with laptops and iPads. And at the center of this table, in the center of the auditorium, like the termite queen, was Julie. Resting on the table in front of her was “the God Mike”—a wireless microphone that enabled a voice to be amplified throughout the auditorium. Sometimes Danny got to use the God Mike. Otherwise, it was the exclusive property of Julie.

  There wasn’t shouting in the auditorium, there wasn’t bustle—there were a lot of low-voiced consultations. The banks of computers; the headsets; the scattered paper filled with graphs and technical jargon; the palpable vibe of competent folk focused on the narrow bandwidth of stuff that only they knew how to do—it made the whole scene feel like Mission Control, Houston. It was the vibe of a team that knew—as with any NASA endeavor—that anything less than success was a fireball.

  Julie and Danny positioned the cast in what would be a tableau of black-trench-coated citizens. The cast began chanting, sounding quite deliberately like something out of Carl Orff ’s Carmina Burana. The floor lifted, revealing Jenn Damiano as Mary Jane “dangling” from a rope underneath the floor. As eyes adjusted, one noticed that the backdrop depicted one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, painted at a dramatic angle. And running toward her (and us), in slow motion, was Spider-Man, who appeared just as the heroic-sounding theme to “Boy Falls From the Sky” kicked in on the rehearsal piano.

  “Hold, please.”

  In addition to Julie with her God Mike, the other person with the authority to send his voice resounding through the auditorium was stage manager Randall White.

  Something was wrong.

  Julie had Don adjust the intensity of the lighting while Danny honed the choreography of the actors onstage, but something very wrong was not being addressed. And it was simply this: Spider-Man. Running toward Mary Jane.

  I suppose I had imagined close-ups, and quick cuts between Mary Jane and Spider-Man. Dramatic angles. In other words, movie editing. Danny Ezralow had Chris Tierney try a sliding motion of a sort to enhance the slow-motion running effect. Chris did it well. But he looked like a mime. A mime miming “A day at the Olympic speed-skating trials.” Could we not use a strobe? Or something? Was I the only one who thought he looked like a mime? Anyone else seeing a mime?

  This was our opening. It was a minute long. The somewhat terrifying Orff-esque chanting—which sounded like an angry mob demanding blood—was either daring or pretentious. The rising floor was cool. The reveal of Mary Jane was visually and narratively satisfying. But then the spectacle of Spider-Man—not swinging, not leaping, but running (and not running, but performing a theatrical interpretation of “running”)—managed to pound the message deep and irrevocably into my consciousness for the first time: This show was never going to be The Lion King.

  Our original treatment—the one Avi Arad at Marvel rejected back in 2005—opened with the myth of Arachne. With the loom and the weavers and the transformation of a girl into a spider, it would’ve delivered all the opening wow we needed. But Avi felt this choice put an undue spotlight on Arachne. “Why aren’t you presenting Spider-Man at the top?” Fine. We pitched a new treatment to Marvel in 2005 with an opening that contained a half-dozen spider-men battling a half-dozen villains all over the auditorium. That treatment was approved in 2006.

  The thing is, Julie had nothing specific in mind for that “Spider-Man opening extravaganza.” And over the years, the vision for the opening scene was pared down and down to what we were now teching. Dramaturgical logic dictated the choice. As the audience would eventually learn when they saw this scene repeated halfway through Act Two, Peter Parker didn’t have his powers anymore. So, logically, the actor couldn’t do any Spider-Man stuff at the top of the show. Run he must. Mime he must.

  Narratively speaking, there was no arguing with that. But “pulling out the stops” was Julie’s strategy for the opening of The Lion King, and it’s one of the great coups de théâtre in the history of Broadway. People cry during the opening of The Lion King.

  But that just wasn’t gonna happen here. Not this time. Next musical.

  The heavy “Iris Wall” descended, because it was time to tech the loom. The wall was actually two large half-walls with a wedge cut out of each, enabling a diamond-shaped hole to be formed when the walls were spaced a certain distance apart. Behind the walls, while the Geek scene played, the loom swing was being installed and the “weavers” were being hooked up for their big swinging entrance. Julie had always imagined the first four weavers would immediately begin swinging out toward the audience as soon as the Iris Wall opened up. But now stage manager Randall was informing Julie that he couldn’t allow it. Julie was ready to argue the point until Randall explained that each weaver was being held in place by a cord. Should one of the cords accidentally release while the wall was still in place, that dancer would begin to swing helplessly toward the wall, ultimately slamming into it at a speed approaching fifty miles per hour. In other words, that dancer? Could die.

  Okay. Can’t argue with that.

  Making these sorts of determinations was one of Randall White’s key jobs on the show. The previous year, he was one of the main stage managers overseeing This Is It, Michael Jackson’s mega-concert tour that got canceled when one morning, Michael Jackson never woke up. With close-cropped hair and little room in his day job for joking around, Randall seemed tightly wound. But fair enough—stage-managing was a big responsibility. Nobody wanted his job. We were told privately that on several occasions, Randall used the 10-minute breaks to head out to 43rd Street and scream out his frustrations, startled pigeons be damned. It was disconcerting to hear this. Randall had his shit together like no one I've ever met. He was experienced. If he was screaming to the heavens, maybe more of us should have been as well.

  So the Iris Wall parted, and we watched the seven weavers, standing in their long swings made of silk, slowly being pulled backward amid fog, eerie lighting, and mysterious, intensifying music. It didn’t look so bad, really. However—“Hold, please”—there was an issue with the automatic cord release. I was starting to get the feeling we were going to hear “Hold, please” a lot.

  Issues with the loom delayed us. Then finding the right lighting for the Queens High School scene took time. “Don, remember what I said about ‘pink’—that’s getting too close to pink!” Julie hated pink. It also seemed as if she could discern gradations of red on the electromagnetic spectrum that no one else could. Humans are
“trichromats,” meaning we have three types of cone cells in our eyes. However, it has been surmised that, because of the XX chromosome, some women may possess a fourth variant cone cell, situated between the standard red and green cones. This would make them—like birds—“tetrachromats.” These hypothetical tetrachromats would have the ability to distinguish between two colors a trichromat would call identical.

  To date, only a few female candidates for tetrachromacy have been identified. I didn’t tell Julie my suspicions. And I’m not saying she is a tetrachromat. But it sure would explain several of those extra hours in Tech, when Julie had hues finessed to a fare-thee-well. But then again, a writer will fuss over a single word, to the exasperation of a choreographer who will make endless refinements to a dance step, deliberating between differences an engineer can’t even perceive. In other words, an obsession over subtleties may just be an attribute of expertise, rather than evidence of being a mutant. Still, a scientist should check her out.

  After four days, we were getting through forty-two seconds of the show for every hour of Tech.

  • • •

  Brandon Rubendall was one of the dancers. He also played The Lizard. But he excelled as one of the flying spider-men. In fact, he was the one who executed “The Big Jump,” perhaps the show’s signature moment. With Brandon kneeling, the whole back of the floor swiftly rose, elevating him until he was at the top of a twenty-foot-high ramp, raked at a forty-five-degree angle. The lights in the floor then snapped on, revealing the ramp to actually be a skyscraper as seen at a dramatic angle. With the aid of two cables pick-pointed to his hips, Brandon leaped forward, did a back gainer, and landed in a crouch at the very lip of the stage, just inches from the audience sitting in the front row. (The first time this move was performed for Julie, Scott Rogers sat her in one of these prime seats. Fearing Brandon was going to land on top of her, she shrieked like a little girl. It was hard not to.) Upon landing, Brandon stood up and waited for the ramp behind him to lower to a twenty-degree angle. The cables then whipped him upstage as he executed a backward somersault. Landing on all fours, he then began crawling as if he were scuttling down the side of a building.