by Berger, Glen
I couldn’t take it anymore. I wrote an anonymous, snarky comment to append to the end of his New York Post column, and I got such a taste for anonymous commenting, I began trawling the Internet, scrawling comments on every blog I could find, pushing back against this incessant, ill-informed negativity. After I found a gang of commenters putting the boot in our show as if they were a bunch of hooligans out of A Clockwork Orange, I (incognito) let ’em have it.
And if it’s good? If it’s entertaining? Will your heads literally explode? Don’t you realize this could be the moment—right now, right here on this blog!—when the Internet started to change? When it suddenly occurred to people to See THEN Judge?
That silenced them. No, actually they mocked me, and without mercy. That didn’t stop my anonymous tirades. After all, each of us had to find his or her own method for releasing stress.
Danny Ezralow wished Reeve and Jenn Damiano would relieve their stress together. You know. Together. Julie agreed. Danny and Julie both believed that the scenes between our two leads were lacking chemistry, and it was bringing the show down. I didn’t notice anything particularly inert, and anyway I wasn’t so sure “chemistry” would improve anything. Maybe I should just be rewriting some lines?
“No, no, the lines are fine,” Julie said. “There just isn’t any attraction between them.”
“Well, it’s not like you can force attraction,” I said.
Julie and Danny weren’t so sure. Wasn’t there some way to get them dating? Even a one-night stand might do the trick.
“Guys—you’re not serious.”
Danny said he’d have a birds-and-bees talk with Reeve, while Julie agreed to consider a “between-us-women” chat with Jenn. This is a weird profession. There was still no discernible spark between them a week later, and keeping vigil for any sign of progress felt uncomfortably similar to those tense days when people hoped Ling-Ling would make a move on Hsing-Hsing in the giant panda enclosure at the National Zoo.
• • •
We were putting in eighteen-hour days. But it beat working. I mean, really. As Tom Stoppard’s character Henry Carr in Travesties puts it: “For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.”
When the actors weren’t onstage, they were killing time in the orchestra seats, messing with their smartphones or gossiping with their castmates. Geek Mat Devine was sending me pitches for merch to sell in the Foxwoods gift shop that he wanted me to run by Michael Cohl. Fellow Geek Jonathan Schwartz was studying how to beat the stock market. And meanwhile, I had another life somewhere north, but the whaling ship was still at sea, and we couldn’t sail home until we found that whale.
When the opening was pushed twenty days, all the ticketholders and ticket agents and press agents and marketing folk were unhappy with the news. But who cared. It was that one other person I was concerned about. The wife. By the middle of November, I had left her alone for a quarter of a year with three children, three adorable children as relentless as three woodpeckers searching for grubs by pecking at the back of your head. I also left her with a decrepit dog whose incontinence was getting worse. And not just any incontinence. Fecal incontinence. On phone calls home, I stopped asking, “How was your day?”
On November 18 I got the call: The dog had taken a turn for the worse. I skipped rehearsal and took the bus upstate. The kids were already at school. The dog was lying on a blanket near the kitchen. She was unable to get up, but she wagged her tail excitedly when she saw me after such a long absence. She licked my hand. I went to the sink for some water, and when I turned back, her mouth was open and unmoving. She was staring out into space with unblinking eyes. A minute later, her eyes were green. Her fur was still as soft as ever, but her mouth was frozen, and she was growing stiffer by the moment. My wife and I were newlyweds when she convinced me to get a puppy. She was now quickly stitching a makeshift bag on the sewing machine, so I could carry Crumby to the car.
Crumby.
Into the trunk with you.
I grabbed some overdue bills from the huge pile on the desk. I took the corpse to the animal hospital with cremation instructions, then hit the bus back to New York City, heading directly to the private, wainscoted room in the Lambs Club on Forty-fourth, where Patrick Healy of the Times was conducting an exclusive and up-to-now elusive interview with Edge, Bono, Julie, and me. Bono ordered martinis for the table before dinner, and canny Mr. Healy sat back without touching his glass and let the drinks go to work on the rest of us. Before we were midway through the meal, Julie-the-lightweight was letting out that—just ten days before our first preview—we still hadn’t figured out how we were going to make the ending of our show work. She went on to say she hoped those who bought tickets to previews would “get to enjoy the art of making theatre, as well as the magic of it.” This was another way of saying, “Boy, do we have some ragged moments for you.” Bono, meanwhile, was name-dropping Rilke, William Blake, and the Ramones in the same sentence. Edge didn’t say very much, and I followed his lead and quietly ate my fish. A free dinner was a free dinner.
Patrick Healy followed us back to the Foxwoods to watch Tech. A couple of journalists from Time magazine were also there. And the 60 Minutes crew was getting a little more footage for Lesley Stahl’s report, which was finally airing next week after eighteen months in the making. All these reporters were observing a process that felt kinda private and kinda boring. As if you had invited some folks you met in the elevator to watch you shave.
I suddenly noticed an elderly fellow seated in the gloom behind me. “Hey, Michael,” I whispered. “Who’s the geezer in Row G?” Michael Cohl rolled his eyes.
“Bono brought him in. It’s Murdoch.”
Michael Cohl was smiling, but he was also fidgeting as if he were breaking out in hives. Michael has bankrolled a documentary about blacklisted union-championing folksinger Pete Seeger (The Power of Song). He has produced films covering the antiwar activism of John Lennon (LENNONYC) and Harry Belafonte (Sing Your Song). And now Rupert Murdoch, the man who has done more to advance the Conservative cause than Saint Reagan himself, was in the Foxwoods Theatre. We had all made silent vows: the “what-I-would-say-to-that-man-if-I-ever-came-face-to-face-with-him” vows. And they all went out the window. Michael Cohl was a realist. And Bono was a realist, which is why he brought Rupert in for a peek at Tech. If there was any chance this media magnate might put his weight behind our show, then by all means we were going to make sure he knew the pretzel rods on the production manager’s desk were his for the taking.
The actors were released at nine thirty that night. An hour later the crew had called it a day. The evening production meeting wrapped at midnight. And now everyone had gone home except Julie and me. And only then, in the abandoned theatre, the ghost light glowing bravely from the middle of the stage, did it occur to Julie that the lads were leaving for Australia early in the morning. We probably wouldn’t be seeing Edge and Bono again until opening night.
“And Bono didn’t even say goodbye!” Julie said, absolutely indignant, as she stomped out the door onto Forty-third Street, where a clutch of people was crowded around a town car. And in the middle of that excited gaggle—
“Bono?”
He was signing autographs. And all of Julie’s indignation melted into a head-shaking smile.
“Hey! Get in!” he beckoned to us. “I’ll drive you home!”
Julie and I hopped into the backseat. Bono instructed his driver to head south. He was in the front passenger seat, eager to play some new U2 demos for us. They had been working with a new producer—RedOne (Nadir Khayat, from Morocco)—who won a Grammy a few months earlier for his work with Lady Gaga. The first song wasn’t loud enough. Bono cranked it up.
“It’s very plastic!” he shouted over the music. “Great for the clubs!”
As Bono grooved to the synths in the front, Julie grimaced my way, a) because the music was really not
her cup of tea, and b) because Bono spent his days that month working on this, working on songs with his bandmates, instead of hanging out in the Foxwoods with us. What exactly she’d have had Bono and Edge doing most of the time wasn’t clear. And the next day she’d be saying she was actually glad they were in Australia—their critiques of an unfinished show were becoming a distraction. Nevertheless, they were our collaborators, and it felt a little less of a burden, a little less lonely an endeavor when they were around.
The car dropped Julie off at her door. She gave Bono a kiss, and in that kiss there was nothing but love. And it was the last time that would be true. It was the last time they would ever see each other free of the freight that would get heaped onto the relationship. I was dropped off four blocks farther south. And the very first week I was freed from work on Turn Off the Dark, I picked up Crumby’s ashes from the vet.
It was the following June.
• • •
Some people already know this about collaboration, but it bears repeating: If you want to keep the wheels humming smoothly, do not assert or even vaguely imply in your memoir that your artistic partner has a small penis. Especially if your artistic partner is a rock star.
Keith Richards’s book Life had recently hit the shelves, with a few sentences devoted to “Mick’s tiny todger.” Now a meeting Michael Cohl set up between the Stones to discuss plans for their next album was on ice.
“Glen, this Spider-Man musical has to be a success. Because working with rock stars acting like ten-year-olds—I can’t take it anymore.”
Practically grabbing my lapels, Michael Cohl was making this plea to me a week before our first preview. But Danny Ezralow and I had it covered. Danny had already made some inquiries with the general managers, and there were a few dollars in the budget for a “Success Blessing.” (It was apparently a common-enough Broadway line item.) A “Ritual Maven” and her assistant would swing by the theatre during the dinner break on November 20 to clear out all the lingering bad juju that the smudge sticks hadn’t dealt with.
A smattering of actors, dancers, and assistants showed up. Not Julie, of course. “Oh, give me a break,” she said over the dinner that she dragged me to the night of the Ritual Maven. Her disdain for “this new-age crap” was as deep as the sea.
“Where were you?!” asked Danny afterward.
“I had to go to dinner with Julie. She said if we really wanted to do a proper ritual—”
“Yeah yeah,” Danny said, “she and her Indonesian shamans again. Whatever.”
The Ritual Maven wound up identifying the floor of the pit as the place containing the most ominous negative energy. The space got an extra chant. And she gifted us lots of little colored beads to keep in our pockets for extra luck.
The next day during Tech, the hydraulics beneath the floor were mistakenly activated, pushing up against two of the towering, deathly expensive LED screen legs. The sickening crunching sound was of LED legs getting more and more bent before the hydraulics were finally turned off.
“Some ‘success blessing,’ ” snorted Julie. “It couldn’t even last a day without something like this happening.” Score one for the Cynics. But wait! Miracle of miracles! The integrity of the LED legs was still intact, allowing the legs to be mended, with the remaining damage all-but-unnoticeable to an audience. Score one for the True Believers. So the score was one to one. It would be a close game through Christmas.
• • •
The press was going to get its well-deserved comeuppance on the twenty-eighth of November. We were finally going to return fire on years’ worth of hit pieces. We were going to reveal our show in all its spider glory. The scenario we envisioned was not unlike a scene deep in Act Two: A pissed-off Arachne descends from the astral plane and strides into J. Jonah Jameson’s office disguised in widow’s weeds, demanding Jameson beg in his newspaper for Spider-Man’s return. When Jameson refuses, and disparages “this broad” slinking around in his office, Arachne rips off her tight-fitting gown, and eight enormous, startling, black spider legs spring out, thereby cowing the bumptious newspaper publisher into submission.
Only . . . that scene was on our Why-Michael-Curry-is-sorely-missed list. How exactly do you stuff eight enormous spider legs into a tight-fitting gown? The only answer in the offing was to make the gown ridiculously huge, and to make the legs kinda puny, and out of cheap-looking foam. The result was that the legs didn’t “spring out” so much as “uncrumple a little.” And otherwise, Arachne was wearing nothing but an embarrassingly revealing undergarment.
And on November 26, that’s where we were. That’s where we were in that scene, and that’s where we were vis-à-vis our plan to cow the media into submission in two days’ time. Since Act One had never been run from beginning to end on the stage, November 26 was our day to finally try to do so. With technical glitches leading to dozens of “hold please”s, it took the whole day to get through it. But the captive bolt pistol to our foreheads wasn’t that. It was that the show was unrecognizable from anything we had seen in rehearsal; from anything we had ever imagined our show to be. The threats to Peter Parker, to Mary Jane, to the citizens of New York, seemed pathetic. Laughable. Nothing was felt—not Uncle Ben’s death, not Peter’s anguish, nothing. In other words, the show was camp.
For years we knew camp was a threat, and we were going to avoid it. But we stepped in it anyway. And the first preview was in forty-eight hours. It was like waking up to discover you’ve drifted into the wrong lane and now traffic was coming straight at you, and there was no time, no time.
We were still going to swerve as best we could. I determined (it didn’t take a genius) that our camp troubles emanated from the Goblin playing a green piano on the Chrysler Building. There was only one scene (a Daily Bugle scene) separating Osborn’s emergence from the transformer, and the appearance of the Green Goblin tickling the ivories. It was therefore paramount that the Daily Bugle scene drive home the idea that the Goblin had done unspeakable things. Otherwise—with the piano playing, the flamboyant costume—the Goblin wasn’t going to come off as a violent maniac whose brief evocation of Liberace made him all the more frightening. No. He would just come off as Liberace. Which would be bad. I rewrote the Daily Bugle scene that night, determined to make it as serious as the show could bear. I would make the audience feel sick to their stomachs. I’d evoke 9/11 if I had to. I would make the five-year-olds cry if that’s what it took to get the camp out of the show.
The dress rehearsal the next day was canceled. We ran the new Bugle scene (the actors had just one day to memorize their new lines), and we teched more scenes that needed teching. Consequently, it had come to pass that on the morning of our first preview, we had never run the whole show in one go. In fact, we hadn’t seen more than half of the show on any given day. In fact, we had never gotten through more than fifteen minutes of the show without having to stop for something.
So now there were just two hours of rehearsal left. And we had one excruciating decision to make, and it had to do with the web net. The web descending from the ceiling—that was scrapped months before. The web unspooling from the front of the stage—that too was a bust. So a new plan was devised. It was makeshift, but it was all we had. A mess of netting would get lugged onto the pit lift while it was down. Crew members would hook it onto cables, and those cables would haul it up into the air to make an upstage wall of netting for Peter Parker to scuttle upon. However. At present, the scene was not allowed to be in the show because the crew had never teched the setting-up of the web net in real time.
So here was the question that no one could answer with any certainty: With just two hours of Tech left, did we have enough time to tech the web net? Because we could spend the time teching the scene without the net for that night, and we would at least have a crudely dramatized final scene for our show.
If, however, we decided to gamble, if we tried to tech the web net, but we ran out of time, then what it would mean was this: The entire audience th
at night of 1,930 people—an audience packed with bloggers itching to broadcast their reports far and wide; an audience filled with opinion-influencing celebrities, as well as hardworking, full-price-ticket-paying folk—would sit through almost an entire show only to be suddenly informed that the last ten minutes didn’t exist.
The pros and cons were hashed out again as time ticked down. The stage managers lobbied strongly against attempting the tech of the web net: If we rushed it, who knew what would come of it.
“Let’s just do it,” Julie said suddenly. And everyone manned their stations—we were going to roll the dice after all. The net took up a lot of space on the pit floor, and just finding the corners of the net to clip the cables to was going to be difficult, especially because it needed to happen in the dark. The task was made more difficult by the fact that, in addition to the stage crew, Natalie Mendoza—in enormous spider legs—would also be on the pit lift getting dressed by dressers. There were also props assistants on the lift prepping the spider legs. There was also Jenn Damiano, who will have just been lowered from the Brooklyn Bridge and would be getting unclipped by a stage manager. There was also a Spider-Man who will have just tumbled in slow motion into the pit. He’d be getting unclipped. There would also be Reeve Carney, lying on the pit lift floor in his Spider-Man costume, waiting to be delivered by the lift. It was basically going to be that crowded stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, with a couple of superheroes and a giant spider thrown in.
So two hours flew by. It was five minutes before Tech was going to be called for the day—five minutes before the actors were released until the seven o’clock call. And the net still hadn’t been hoisted. Suddenly the top of the net appeared from the hole in the stage. It got caught on some protrusion, but it got unstuck and kept rising and rising. Moments later, Natalie was lifted by cables out of the pit and traveled in the air from one side of the stage to the other. The rest of the scene had already been teched. And that meant we had a whole show for tonight.