Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (13 page)

Soon after Reeve was cast, his band released their first-ever single, “Love Me Chase Me.” In the video, Evan Rachel Wood played Reeve’s lover. They looked good together. Evan two-times him, then kills him, but they still looked good together. Which was excellent, because Evan just notified Julie: She had decided to play Mary Jane after all.

Danny Ezralow had already put the multitude of prospective dancers through a grueling all-day boot camp. (After watching the dancers krump, leap, and tumble for six hours, all the work we non-dancers had been doing in audition rooms suddenly seemed so
constipated.
) Danny’s list was now winnowed down to a couple dozen dancers.

So now in a Telsey agency audition room, headshots of all the actors and dancers still being considered were taped to a wall. Bernie moved pictures around, discarding some, replacing others, as a consensus began to form. Within an hour, the only photos left on the wall were of those performers who would be in our show. It was June 23, 2009.
Turn Off the Dark
was cast.

This thing was actually going to happen
.

Because of delays getting building permits to renovate the Hilton, the show had just been pushed another five weeks, putting opening night sometime in April 2010. But! Spider-Man was swinging in front of a full moon and shooting a shimmery web on posters now on display outside the Hilton Theatre. Inside the theatre, plaster was raining down as renovations got under way.

And Alan Cumming finally signed his contract.

Holy crap, this thing was actually going to happen
.

By the end of July, Danny Ezralow had secured an apartment. His wife and young son uprooted from Los Angeles so they could be with Danny in New York for the next nine months.

“Have you found a place yet, Glen?”

“Shit. No, Danny. I forgot. I’ll get on it.”

I trawled through apartment rental websites and found a groovy little studio in the East Village. I’d be abandoning my wife, who was going to stay upstate all autumn tending to the needs of our three little ones. It’s not what she bargained for. I felt rotten. We had moved out of the city because no one seemed to care that I was in the city when I was in it. And, wouldn’t you know—now that we had left it . . . well, no matter—this was for a good cause. I was going to finally get our finances back in the black. It was just three months. It would be like heading off to sea in a whaling ship.
I just needed to make sure I brought back a whale.

I wrote the general managers at Alan Wasser Associates. I would
be subletting and it was time for them to send the first month’s rent and security deposit to my landlord. They promised to do so.

A week later, the landlord called me: “So where’s the money?”

“They haven’t sent it yet?”

“Hey!” said the landlord. “I’m letting the apartment go if I don’t see the money
this week
. I’ve been screwed before by theatre people.”

“Yeah, theatre people are the worst. Well, don’t worry. This is for
Spider-Man
. We’re good for it. I’ll just give them a call.”

I reached one of the general managers.

“We can’t give you the money.”

“Why not?”

A pause. A sigh.

“Glen . . . I wish I could tell you. But I can’t.”

“?”

I called Erin O over at Hello. She’d know why there was weirdness. She knew everything that went on with the show. It was probably some mix-up with my contract. But Erin didn’t answer her phone at Hello. And, damn it, Danny had put the fear in me—I was going to be homeless if I didn’t secure an apartment soon. I called Erin on her cell phone.

“Hi, yeah, I didn’t answer my phone at Hello because I’ve been let go.”

“?!”

“Yeah. Happened last week.”

“But you’ve been there since the beginning! You and Tony Adams!”

“Exactly. I was
Tony’s
assistant before I was David’s. And Tony’s not around anymore.”

“Oh man, that sucks. I’m so sorry. So you don’t know what all the weirdness is about.”

“Well . . .” She sighed. “I would just check the newspapers tomorrow.”

“?!?!?”

•     •     •

Should Broadway’s Spidey sense be tingling? Rumors have spread among legiters that the production sked for incoming mega-musical
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
may be threatened. The extensive work being done to prep for the technically demanding show, both in the shop constructing the physical production and in the theater where
Spider-Man
is due to bow, is said to have stopped . . . The halt is attributed to cash flow obstacles . . .

—Variety,
August 6, 2009

“Julie?” My voice was pitiful.

“Yeah. It’s bad. David is twenty million short.”

“Godalmighty.”

“Yeah.”

“For a moment there, it sounded like you said ‘twenty million.’ ”

“I’m gonna make some calls.”

The one thing we didn’t have to worry about was money the one thing we didn’t have to worry about was money. . . .

There was a twitching on my web this week, and when I crawled out to see what I’d caught, there—all tangled up and weary from the struggle—was Julie Taymor’s
Spider-Man
. . . . This show is in chaos, plagued not only by financial problems but also by a nasty internal power struggle.

—
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.

T
imes 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 reports 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.”