Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (10 page)

Which was all to say that rewriting during the preview period would have to be minimal. The script—structurally speaking—had to be pretty much the same script from the first New York preview to our opening night some fifty performances later.

Were we anxious about this? Nope. Not with that killer reading back in July. If you looked carefully at Martin McCallum’s face, you’d see it twitch a bit when these facts were mentioned, but even Martin recognized we had no alternative.

Given the show’s financial and technical parameters, David Garfinkle and Martin McCallum had a pretty clear idea what kind of New York theatre they were looking for:
a big one.

There were only three non-Disney-owned Broadway theatres that could comfortably house
Turn Off the Dark
and two of them were booked (with
Wicked
and
Shrek
)
.
This left the Hilton Theatre. Since first opening in 1998 as the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, the 1,800-seat theatre had been consistently described as a barn. You usually don’t want to perform a Broadway show in a barn. Intimacy is what you’re going for. But if you’re swinging spider-men and other spider-like creatures over the audience’s head, a “barn” suddenly doesn’t sound so bad.

Mel Brooks’s
Young Frankenstein
was currently running in the Hilton, but it had gotten poor reviews. It became an open secret among Broadway insiders that
Turn Off the Dark
was circling
Young Frankenstein
like a starving vulture. Finally, in January 2009,
Young Frankenstein
gave up the ghost, and the theatre was ours.

Julie was disappointed. She didn’t want
Spider-Man
on Broadway. Bono and Edge weren’t married to the idea either. If the show was on Broadway, it was just going to be judged by the same old hidebound Broadway criteria, and this show was
different.
(“Let’s not even call it a musical,” said Julie to her cocreators. “It’s a
‘circus-rock-and-roll-drama,’ so let’s start calling it that.” And we did. Every chance we got.)

But settling on a theatre meant that the Hilton’s specific dimensions could start getting inserted into the blueprints and plugged into flight-programming equations. Set design meetings could finally begin in earnest. And I started thinking a lot about that quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the same fellow who wrote
The Little Prince:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Because if we were merely servants doing one person’s bidding, then we would never get this massive ship built. Julie had inspired us all with her vision of a dream-island not found on any map. So through the winter, spring, and summer of 2008, meetings scheduled to break by dinnertime routinely went well past midnight, the weather and light of Queens shifting outside those warehouse windows of George Tsypin’s third-floor studio.

Martin McCallum said certain cuts to the set had to happen if our budget was going to retain a semblance of sanity. The big snag budget-wise was the flying. Those motors and winches were far too expensive to buy. So they had to be rented. But, oh man, were they expensive to rent. And the extra crew needed to supervise the flying was also boosting the price tag. So we had to trim the budget wherever we could. Julie did not—

Wait, I’m going to start another paragraph here, because this really needs to be stressed—

Julie did not balk at the idea of cutting down production costs
. She heard the concern in Martin’s voice, and she leaped into the breach. What was important? What wasn’t? What about those giant beakers in Osborn’s laboratory—did we really need three? No? Great, cut a giant beaker.

We understood this was a business venture, and we understood that some of the stuff was expensive, but if we got rid of too much of the good stuff, we wouldn’t sell as many tickets, right? And what was the real worry? Because it wasn’t as if we couldn’t find some extra funds. As David Garfinkle told Julie and me on several occasions, “If there’s one thing we don’t have to worry about, it’s money.” Heck, there was a
waiting list
of investors hoping to get a piece of the action. And if it took an extra month or two of performances to recoup those extra funds—so what? What was an extra month or two when you took the long view—the years the show was going to run, the other productions it was going to spawn. “But yes, Martin, we hear you, and look—we just cut a giant beaker!” Just so long as he didn’t make us lose the model subway train with the little working headlight that crossed the stage after the bullying song. Totally unnecessary, that train. But just so cool.

After yet another meeting, Julie and I staggered in the middle of the night to her upstate home, where she collapsed into a chair.

“I feel old,” she reported.

Old. She had just been presiding over fifteen hours of design meetings without a break. I was feeling like one of those small dried fish in a Chinatown barrel of small dried fish, but Julie? She was looking fine. When it came to Art, she had the stamina of a washing machine. She was wearing a ridiculous knit hat from Peru or Tibet, drinking a can of Foster’s, and keeping me up trying to nail down a way to end the show; trying to find a way around our technical obstacles. It was four a.m.

“What is it you want to see?” she asked me, circling back to the question of Arachne’s transformation.

“Well . . .”

But seriously. It was four a.m.

•     •     •

When Marvel sent their notes to Hello Entertainment after the workshop reading in the summer of ’07, they listed three concerns under the heading “Specific Reasons why the Musical, if Unchanged, Will Adversely Affect Marvel’s Brand.” They wanted to make sure that 1) secondary characters (like Arachne) didn’t overshadow primary characters; 2) the show didn’t get too sexy; and under 3) they wrote: “Marvel requires that the technology in all respects be cutting edge.”

Good. No argument from us. In fact, this note seemed to be encouraging
Turn Off the Dark’
s producers and creators to spend some extra coin. Which is why a contingent of designers, as well as Martin, David, Julie, and I, were on Long Island one Monday in August 2008, in a small office space in an anonymous industrial park near the Westbury LIRR stop. We were in the market for some cutting-edge technology.

In keeping with the skill-set described in the ancient myth, Arachne’s superpower was her ability to create “lifelike” images in order to captivate (literally “hold captive”) her audience. With Arachne’s supernatural artistry, she would deceive the citizens of New York. She would make it
appear
as if the adversaries Spider-Man had already dispatched
had returned
. Arachne was hoping the illusory “Sinister Six” would sow the citywide panic that would draw Peter Parker out of his self-imposed retirement.

The best reason for bookwriters to devise such a plot would be so that the production could exploit cutting-edge 3-D technology; to trump the eye candy of Act One with imposing, terrifying holograph-like villains who suddenly appeared and vanished again onstage or—better yet—in the aisles next to delighted and petrified young ticketholders.

In fact, if that 3-D technology
wasn’t
feasible, then coming up with such a plot would be . . . weird. And now a year after the workshop reading, we were learning that the technology
wasn’t
 . . . maybe all that . . . feasible.

Those ghosts in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion attraction were nearly the effect we were looking for, and the Imagineers cooked that one up back in the sixties. We thought surely there had been advances. And indeed, a fashion show for Diesel in the summer of ’07 presented live models walking a catwalk while manatees and giant sea turtles swam through empty space right next to them.

That. We wanted
that
. The effect was created with an antique technique known as Pepper’s ghost. But the illusion relied on mirrors, large panes of glass, and projectors. And after hours of set-design meetings it was determined that our whole production would have to be configured solely for the purpose of achieving this optical illusion, when it had already been rigidly configured to achieve the dozens of other effects required in the show.

So in a last-ditch effort to get three-dimensional illusions into
Spider-Man,
we took a train to Westbury to meet with Gene Dolgoff, 3-D pioneer, and the fellow responsible for those security holograms on credit cards.

Gene wasn’t promising us two-dimensional images that
appeared
three-dimensional. He was promising
actual three-dimensional projections
. He patiently explained the technology to us, but we couldn’t be confident that this would actually work in a theatre. Halfway through the tour Julie got a headache from looking at all the blurry imagery. We left Mr. Dolgoff ’s office thinking 3-D was perhaps the way of the future, but the Sinister Six’s future was going to have to be strictly two-dimensional.

So where did that leave us?

We had already imagined that most of the Sinister Six’s apocalyptic
hijinks would be presented as “news clips” on George Tsypin’s thirty-foot-tall LED screens. So now we just needed to make it clear to the audience that no one had actually witnessed these horrific acts
firsthand
. This framing would give us the wiggle room for Arachne to claim later that the Sinister Six and all their scenes of destruction were just illusions.

This plot-contortion seemed like a bit of a stretch. I informally polled the team. Everyone shrugged the “Whaddyagonnado?” shrug, and it was true that there was nothing to be done.

But
.

Without the audience really
experiencing
the illusions as
illusions,
would the audience truly comprehend the most important plot point in the show? For the first time since beginning work on this
Spider-Man
thing, a little vein in my brain began to throb—a nagging pin drop of a voice that said,
This show won’t be everything we want it to be.
I ignored the voice. Told no one else about it. Except . . . and I couldn’t be sure because the voice was so soft, but . . . maybe the voice wasn’t saying, “Want it to be.”

Maybe it was saying, “
Need
it to be
.
”

Might Michael Curry have a solution? We would never know—Michael was no longer with the show. Just a week before, Julie happened upon the website for Michael Curry Design Inc. Images swam in front of her, including shots from
The Lion King
and Julie’s production of
The Magic Flute
. And all these designs were credited solely to Michael Curry. In the main, the credits were referring to Michael’s contribution to the
engineering
aspect of the designs, and not Julie’s aesthetic contributions. But Julie found the attribution ambiguous. She found it deceptive. In fact, she found it smacking of theft.

She didn’t take a few breaths. She didn’t count to five. She immediately grabbed the phone and punched Michael’s number.
A phone rang in Oregon. Julie’s chthonic weather system hit the West Coast unannounced.

“It was as if I was standing outside of myself, watching myself on the phone,” said Julie, shaken and repentant in the aftermath.

Even the most financially strapped artists choose their projects with a degree of freedom. No competent work ever gets produced with a battered ego, and cash isn’t what makes for a fruitful group venture. It’s a different currency the artist is seeking—trust, respect, the open ear and open mind. Before the end of the week, Hello Entertainment had received a note from Oregon informing them that Michael Curry Design Inc.’s schedule was too full to commit to
Spider-Man
at this time. Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. But not having Michael Curry would become a problem.

But that was down the line, and at the moment, Julie was more concerned with the question of just who in our inner circle was yapping to the press. This was the autumn of ’08, and the financial markets were in free fall. Cue Michael Riedel over at the
New York Post:

In this economy, everybody’s tightening their belts. Everybody, that is, but Julie Taymor. The genius director has never met a budget she didn’t blow right past. Case in point:
Spider-Man,
whose budget has ballooned to $40 million, making it the most expensive production in theater history. Some of the people involved are starting to blanch at the price tag.

Riedel knew very well that Julie spent almost her entire career working within the constraints of Off-Broadway budgets, or cobbling together productions over in Indonesia out of some muslin
and secondhand bamboo. “Never met a budget she didn’t blow right past”? Come
on
. But it was one of the most toxic acids to be thrown at a director’s reputation: “she’s profligate, and la-dee-da in her profligacy.”

“The musical has a rock score by Bon Jovi—”

Hah. What a tool. It’s
Bono,
not Bon Jovi, you idiot.

“. . . (Quite a good score, I’m told; the messy book is another matter)—”

Wait—
What?
Who was telling him the book was “messy”?! Who had even
seen
the book? Damn it, Riedel, now it was getting personal.

“Where’s all that money going?”

The motors and winches! This wasn’t
Spring Awakening
. We couldn’t just put twelve chairs on a stage and call it a day. Look at Cirque du Soleil:
LOVE
cost $175 million!
KÀ
was $220 million!

“The source adds: ‘[Julie] doesn’t care what it costs. Does not care at all.’ ”

Who was “the source,” damn it? We all wanted to know. David Garfinkle didn’t have any answers, but he promised to root out the mole before we all became paranoid. Meanwhile, Julie had started packing for a two-month trip to Hawaii. She was heading to Lāna’i to shoot her film adaptation of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest,
because somehow she managed to find the time that year to also prep for a feature film.