Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (22 page)

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. What
ever
.”

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 that 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.

We had thirty seconds to spare.

And not that night, and not the next day. But. The day after that, we would learn that rushing through those two hours of Tech might have screwed us. Might have truly and royally screwed us.

•     •     •

Michael Cohl, Julie, Danny, and I were walking back to the theatre after the dinner break, sifting our memories for tales of disastrous first previews of shows that eventually went on to success. Michael related how the first preview of
Les Misérables
in London was over four hours long. We were certain our show that night—with a gruesome number of delays—would be a minimum of four hours. So it already felt like our show had entered an exclusive pantheon—
Les Miz
and us!

“How long
can
the show be tonight? Are there union rules? Can we go past midnight?”

“Would we serve midnight snacks to the audience if it came to that?”

“Someone could do a White Castle run. Buy two thousand sliders—”

“That, and free drinks and maybe they won’t burn the theatre down. . . .”

We reached the theatre and there was already a line of people around the block. Just one year earlier, the theatre was shuttered, with Michael Cohl trying to get his head around the
Spider-Man
account books. Now the Foxwoods’s lobby was about to be packed with more people than the theatre had seen for years.

And we weren’t ready.

Looking at the long line of eager people, I couldn’t help feeling like Bernie Madoff the day before his Ponzi scheme unraveled. These good people didn’t know what they had bought a ticket to. But then again, neither did I. The Department of Labor had signed off on all the aerial moves. Spider-Man could land in the aisles. With a little bit of luck, we’d be able to string some scenes
together, deliver some of the beautiful moments, and the audience would see a spectacle like nothing they’d seen before.

Backstage, just before curtain, the company gathered in a circle. While waiting for the circle to form, I checked the floor again, and instantly found a daddy longlegs. And in such stupidly plain sight I thought I was hallucinating at first. Good—I was going to dwell on that guy tonight if things went weird. Michael read a note sent by our absent composers in Australia. Julie delivered some words. The usual things that got said got said. I wasn’t really listening to any of it. I was staring at the curtain, trying not to worry about the two thousand people on the other side of it. And failing.

And then the huddle broke with whoops and cheers, and as we headed to seats and stations:

“Break a leg.”

“Break a leg.”

“Break a leg.”

“Break a leg.”

The origin of this ninety-year-old expression is obscure, but it’s most likely something to do with the idea that wishing someone good luck is bad luck, so you wish them bad luck instead. Which feels Jewish. Or Russian. Or human. Theatre is a superstitious profession because success seems to depend on inspiration, planning, competence,
and blind stupid chance
. It’s why ancient agriculture had all those gods. Other superstitious activities: golf, horse racing . . .

Anyway, it was time to take our seats.

•     •     •

“I’m hellishly excited,” Michael Cohl said to the audience. He was in his usual T-shirt and shaggy beard. He was standing in front
of the curtain, his unceremonious vibe instantly disarming. He got the audience laughing as he described the devices installed in the theatre designed to snatch any cameras or video-recording cell phones out of the hands of the offenders. He read an actual statement from the Department of Labor cautioning audience members: “Please don’t hitch a ride on any of the actors.”

And then the lights dimmed. Down in the backstage depths, Kimberly Grigsby punched her hands on the downbeat, a blast of horns splatted out of the speakers, searchlights swept over the audience, and there was no going back. The show had just gone public.

The opening number went off without a hitch, and segued smoothly into the Geeks scene, which went right into the myth of Arachne scene, which then went straight into the Queens High School scene. And yeah, the Geeks let adrenaline get the better of them, and the loom’s horizontals didn’t function perfectly, but we had already gotten through more of the show in one go than ever before.