Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (17 page)

Because I had to write her that night. I had to let Julie know that I had her back. We saw confirmation that our aspirations for this piece, birthed all those years ago, were still intact. Without the benefit of any expensive spectacle, the stumble-through delivered real laughs, authentic tears, and awe. We had come this far and she
was going to know that her collaborator was also her grateful pupil and also her most ardent defender. So I closed with a thick slathering: “Just wanted to say what a gift—what a mind-cracking, heart-swelling gift—it’s been having these front-row tickets to you . . .”

She wrote back just this: “I wish you could see my eyes.”

One year later, my gushing e-mail was quoted in the
New York Times
because it was included in the initial disclosures that were submitted by Julie Taymor, the plaintiff, in
Taymor, et al. v. 8 Legged Productions, LLC, et al
.

That second “et al.
”
referred to
me.
In other words, I was being sued for treachery, while I got to sound to the news-reading public like a world-class suck-up.

If you’re trying to decide if it sounds better for the press to call you a “traitor” or a “toadie,” things have clearly not gone according to plan.

—
from My List of Lessons Learned

•     •     •

A nerve-wracking promotional event was scheduled for September 10.
Good Morning America
with George Stephanopoulos was going to host Ms. Taymor, Bono, and Edge, and then the segment was going to culminate with Reeve Carney singing “Boy Falls From the Sky” live from the Hudson Theatre. After doling out glimpses of the show to a few dozen or a few hundred people at a time, we were about to flash an audience of five million.

Julie had already proclaimed that there was no way she was taking “shit” out of “Boy Falls From the Sky.” It was the acid test—either
Turn Off the Dark
got bowdlerized into a shopping-mall holiday show, or our artistic integrity remained intact.
She was serious
. So now we were less than twenty-four hours away from
the prospect of Reeve singing “shit” on a cheery morning television program, with the subsequent media frenzy (“Sh*tstorm for Broadway’s
Spider-Man
!”) all but guaranteed. All of our work, and one word was going to tank it all.

After a short, spirited debate with Michael Cohl, it was agreed that as a
temporary
measure, the word-in-question would be altered to “trash.” Reeve was informed the night before the performance, and so long as months’ worth of muscle memory didn’t kick in during the live performance and change “trash” back into “shit,” we’d be just fine.

The next morning George Stephanopoulos got Edge and Bono to tell the abbreviated history of the project via video feed, Julie shared some costume designs, Reeve and his band launched into “Boy Falls From the Sky,” and “trash” was sung, accompanied by a freakishly loud sigh of relief from somewhere in the audience.

Within hours, the whole thing was up on YouTube. The comments section was depressing. We clearly still had our work cut out for us when it came to persuading the fanboys that our show was legit. So Julie and I went over to the PRG offices directly after the event to discuss the latest advertising campaign proposals with Michael Cohl and Jere Harris. Bono was being patched through on the speakerphone. “Very blue cheese,” was what Bono called the proposed radio spot. He didn’t want to be associated with something so square. Julie not only thought the spot was awful, she seemed really agitated about it. Michael Cohl, trying to keep things relaxed, promised we’d come up with something good.

“We’ll put Glen on it. Glen’ll save the day,” laughed Michael as he clapped me on the back.

Bono seconded the sentiment, and was launching into another possible angle for the radio spot when Julie muttered something and abruptly got up from the table.

“Great. Then you’re on your own,” she said.

She was out of there. Out of the conference room, out of the offices, headed for the elevators.

Michael looked at me with a “What just happened?” face. Bono, unaware that Julie had scarpered, was still spinning radio ad ideas. Jere silently mouthed, “Did something set her off?” Michael shrugged, and mouthed a “What should we do?!” I mouthed a “Should I go after her?” We were behaving like actors in a silent movie because Bono was in the middle of a monologue on the speakerphone and it was best he didn’t know that everything had just gone weird. But now Bono was waiting for a response to his proposal and hearing only silence. “Guys? . . . Hello?”

I knew what set her off. It was the implication that I was the one doing all the creative wordsmithing for the show.
Julie,
after all, was the one making most of the suggestions about how to fix the ad campaign. Feeling unappreciated, uncredited, she lost it. I dashed out of the office to try to catch her. I found her pacing, still waiting for an elevator. As soon as she saw me, she vented and then vented some more.

And as I listened to her, I realized what set her off wasn’t even what
really
set her off. This display was happening only hours after she was on television, revealing details of her unfinished show in front of millions. It was easy to forget how that sort of thing puts you in a profoundly vulnerable state. Surely I was watching biochemistry on display—any amount of adrenaline, vasopressin, and norepinephrine had gotten released that morning, and the fight-or-flight chemicals were still flooding her system. I mean,
surely
.

And no doubt an extra dash of jitters was due to the fact that Julie’s
Tempest
was receiving its world premiere in Venice
the next day
. She was heading to the airport in literally a couple of hours. In fact, she was
so
anxious to leave for Italy that one part of her
brain probably just seized command and instructed her body to leave the advertising meeting before the meeting was even over.

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 . . .

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 microphones to their heads for the first time. We were about to tech the opening scene.