Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (26 page)

Julie returned to the theatre, where George Tsypin had an idea for her. The web net failed to be deployed at several previews that month, resulting in a thoroughly perplexing finale for our audience. And two days before, Jaque’s mother died. So our grieving aerial rigger—already unutterably distraught at word of Chris Tierney’s accident—wouldn’t be coming back to the Foxwoods to
work on the web-net fight until after the holidays. George—armed with this news—proposed to Julie that we just forget the web net. Give Arachne and Peter a spectacular fight in the house instead, like the Spidey-Goblin fight at the end of Act One.

Julie couldn’t believe her ears. In her mind, this whole web-net fiasco was George’s fault, and now he had the temerity to suggest we just
cut it
? She stopped listening to George. In that minute, and for the next three months. She was done with him.

Turn Off the Dark
was always meant to be a spectacle, but the spectacle was supposed to be confined to the stage. Now it was becoming one of those cultural events that blazed across the mediasphere like a grease fire. The cover of
The New Yorker
in a couple of weeks would depict an entire hospital ward filled with convalescing spider-men. An invitation to a Lincoln Center gala during the holidays had engraved at the bottom
NO DISCUSSION OF
SPIDER-MAN
ALLOWED
. Julie, perversely, had gotten her wish. She never wanted
Turn Off the Dark
to be thought of as a Broadway musical, and now it wasn’t. It was being talked about instead as if it were some giant art installation ensconced in Times Square for who knew how long—like one of those Christo projects where half a city gets wrapped in fabric. A Broadway show hadn’t sucked up this much oxygen in a generation or more.

And Julie needed to get the hell away from it all for a week or her nerves were going to snap. On Christmas Eve, she jetted out of the country, intending to recharge at her Mexican hideaway.

I stayed behind and struck up conversations in the Foxwoods lobby with assorted folk on the creative team. Julie never liked that bourgeois lobby, with its faux-marbled Greek columns. She wanted it defaced with graffiti art—anything to make it feel less “Middle America.” What she got instead, in late December, were tidy holiday wreaths decorating the railings.

And it was there in that evergreen-bedecked lobby—while Julie was away—that dry tinder ignited. As a Boxing Day snowstorm dumped twenty inches on the New York streets, the air in the Foxwoods lobby was becoming infused with the unmistakable fumes . . .
of conspiracy.

I
n a suburban Chinese restaurant outside Philly, a cookie blew my mind. On the twenty-sixth of December, as I enjoyed one of the forty-eight hours I was allotted to spend with the family, I grabbed one of the seven fortune cookies brought to the table. I cracked it open, only to read:
CLEAR WRITING ARISES FROM CLEAR THINKING
.

Was I being punked by the universe? It didn’t matter. I was holding a wise cookie, and I needed to listen to it. I needed to pull myself out of my ass
. The face of that boy coming out of the Foxwoods bathroom came back to me. An offhand comment Teese Gohl made about the second act a couple of days ago started doing laps in my brain. The words of my cookie continued to admonish me all the way home from the restaurant. By the end of the night, I knew what had to be done. And it wouldn’t be difficult. It was mostly a cut. And if we executed this cut, the show would be saved. Or maybe not “saved.”
But we would have bought ourselves some time
. This hot air balloon was dipping into shark-infested waters. We needed to start throwing stuff overboard.
We needed to buy some time.

The next afternoon, my phone rang. It was Bono, calling from Ireland. He and Edge had been literally ten thousand miles away from New York the last month, but they had been keeping tabs. I knew he and Edge were making weekly calls to Julie. What neither Julie nor I knew was that they had also been sending a trusted cadre of artistic consultants to the Foxwoods to be their eyes and ears.

“And the consensus—”

“Before you say any more, Bono—let me tell you what I think.”

I told him the audience always chattered excitedly during intermission, eager to return to their seats. I told him that despite opening the second act with the “Ugly Pageant”—which the audience was receiving with the same pleasure one received from a wedgie—the audience was
still
with us with only a half hour of the show remaining. But then we would lose them—and you could
see
it happening. It was like watching the slowly drifting odor from the tail of Pepé Le Pew reach their noses.

There were five short scenes right in a row. One of the scenes included “Deeply Furious,” known on the Internet as “The Shoe Song” (and usually accompanied somewhere in its description with a “wtf!?”). The five scenes were a total of ten minutes of stage time that felt like thirty. There was a way to cut it without mangling the narrative. In fact, the story became clearer. With the cut, we’d come out the other side with only fifteen minutes to go before our actors were taking their bows. Fifteen minutes. Not enough time for the audience to bail on us, especially once Scott Rogers teched a more exciting ending. By all rights, we shouldn’t have been able to fix so much of what ailed the show so easily. But Bono agreed that this cut would satisfy almost all of the concerns of his secret agents.

“But, Glen, doesn’t Julie have a list of changes?”

“I don’t know if they’re gonna do the trick. We really
are
in trouble.”

“Well nevertheless, for sake of clarity, we’ll call her fixes ‘Plan B,’ ” Bono said. “Which might be worth trying first. But this cut, ‘Plan A’—I think that’s probably where we’ll have to go.”

Bono said he’d give Julie a call down in Mexico and at least prepare the ground for a frank discussion once he and Edge returned to New York. He reported later that night that his two-hour-long conversation with her was more arduous than he was expecting. “She’s very defensive about Arachne.” He decided not to broach Plan A, “as she needs some rest and I didn’t want to blow her vacation.”

My phone rang. It was Julie.

“He doesn’t get it.”
Fresh off her chat with Bono, she was letting me know that our composer’s month in Australia had warped his perspective.

“Well . . .” I managed before trailing off.

“What.”

Timid, stuttering—
why do I get this way?
—I put forward the details of Plan A. She treated it like a clay pigeon—
BLAM!
—it was a bad idea; I didn’t know what I was talking about; I shouldn’t let those blogs wig me out—she had been saying
for weeks
that I shouldn’t be reading them.

Then she launched into a defense of Peter’s “arc.” I had heard it before, Lord knows. They were the same words we had been using with each other for years.
But it sounded different to me now
. Now it sounded like a lot of abstractions that hardly anyone in the audience would ever apprehend, and it wouldn’t matter a damn if they did. It suddenly seemed as if Julie and I were two railway cars that had crisscrossed the country linked together, but now the last three weeks had removed the pin that connected us. We still
saw the show the same way—we hadn’t drifted apart . . .
yet
. But perhaps it was only momentum still keeping us together.

I crafted a lengthy letter to Julie, going beat by beat through my proposals for the second act. “Let’s have a thoughtful conversation about it when we have some time,” I wrote. And I reminded her that this wasn’t some schmo writing her, it was her partner, her cowriter, her friend. I closed with a “Love you” and hit
SEND
.

She’d certainly mull it over for a few hours, maybe even take a day, and I was sure she’d have concerns, and she’d probably challenge some of the—oh, she was calling me already.

“No.”

Damn it—forgot about that snap-decision-making mechanism of hers.

“But—”

“If all of you think the cut is such a great idea, you can do it without me, because that isn’t a cut, it’s a
mastectomy.
”

A mastectomy. On some level, every artist thinks of their creations as extensions of themselves, but I wasn’t prepared for how
invasive
this surgical procedure I was suggesting would feel to her.
But fine. Call it a mastectomy, Julie.
A mastectomy is sometimes the difference between life and death.

But I didn’t push the point with Julie. Instead I wrote Danny, hoping he’d help me persuade her. And I wrote George Tsypin. Julie had said George would never go for Plan A because it would cut out one of the more gorgeous stage-pictures in the show. But she misjudged him. George wrote back to me, “This change is a matter of life or death for the show.”

I crept up the back stairs of the theatre to the top-floor office of the production managers, who were busy putting together the January rehearsal schedule and despairing, because it was becoming clear to them that implementing Julie’s list of changes
before the critics started arriving was impossible. (On January 15, we would be switching to a full performance schedule, leaving precious little time for rehearsing.) I apprised them of Plan A. They were into it. Not only did they believe it would improve the show (everyone’s a dramaturge), it was
doable
. It freed up hours of crucial Tech time.

Julie had been out of New York five days. I was being a total sneak. But I got over it. I had discovered a theatreful of anxious coworkers. Actors stopped me as I headed out of rehearsal rooms, designers stopped me in the lobby, stage managers stopped me backstage. And I had more than one conversation at the urinals. All of them wanted to respectfully offer me their perspective on the show, their casualness barely hiding a desperate hope that the creative team was cooking up
something
that would keep the show running, because they believed in the show and, more to the point,
their jobs were on the line
. Julie and Michael Cohl (who was decompressing down in Florida) were returning to the theatre January 3, along with Bono and Edge. The expectation from seemingly everyone in the Foxwoods was that substantial revisions would be announced then. I told them nothing. I didn’t want to start any rumors. I really didn’t want to cause trouble. Lord knows I didn’t want to undermine Julie’s authority.

“I know in my bones you can do this,” Bono wrote from Ireland. “If you can sell [Edge and me] on a way forward that we three can sell Julie . . . [we] will defend your instincts. We understand your ass is on the line here as much, or more than ours.”

My ass was grateful for the recognition.

“We all adore Julie—the whole creative team,” I wrote back. “So surely there’s a way for accord to come.”

Julie, meanwhile, was trying and failing to find a respite from the show. From Mexico, she sent me an e-mail late one night as if
she were the Green Goblin—the Goblin’s disdain for the hoi polloi making him a useful persona for venting frustrations.

Don’t you get it Boy!? The audience just wants high-flying stunts and fun! Forget the story we want to tell. They ain’t interested. SO if just makin it shorter is your way of solving the problem maybe you right . . . Who are we foolin with SPIRITUALITY, MERCY, COMPASSION, TRANSFORMATION, RESURRECTION, ILLUMINATION AND SHIT?

Tongue-in-cheek, of course. She signed it, “Love J.” And you could hear it all in the phone call still later that night: the frustration with “commercial” expectations; the struggle to get her head around various dramaturgical proposals; and also the love. You could hear that too. We’ll be fine. Come January 4, the whole creative team would meet. We’d find consensus, and we’d be just fine.

•     •     •

Thirty-eight years before the first preview of
Turn Off the Dark
—thirty-eight years
to the day
—a Broadway show opened at the newly built Uris Theatre. The 1972 show was
Via Galactica,
starring Raul Julia, and I had never heard of it, but in the January 1, 2011, edition of the
New York Times
there was a remarkable editorial written by the daughter of two of
Via Galactica’
s creators. I was home for twenty-four hours to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the family, and I sat in bed that next morning experiencing the curious sensation of reading a
New York Times
editorial addressed exclusively to
me
.

Investors in the production knew
Via Galactica
was going to be the most expensive musical ever staged. . . . But in my house, growing up, it meant many other things: Regret.
Heartache. Disappointment. Failure. . . . I was 12 when my parents’ musical opened and closed. After a decade in the works, it lasted a fleeting seven performances.

I glanced at my children jumping on my bed. They were thrilled daddy was home from
Turn Off the Dark,
if just for a day. “As early as I can remember,” continued Jennifer George’s melancholy editorial, “
Via Galactica
was in the air.” Queasy, riveted, I read on. I read how actors were flown in the air, except for all the times that the rigging failed. How “Raul once got stuck in the spaceship and hung helplessly over the orchestra for 20 minutes until stagehands extricated him.” How “a production that had seemed like a sure thing . . . went over budget.” How “there were delays, . . . injuries.” How, at the climax of the show, the protagonist “had to choose: stay in the place he knows . . . or go with [an alien woman] to the stars,” which was, in essence, the second act climax of
Turn Off the Dark
.

Is there really nothing new under the sun?!

If the article had run on nearly any other day, my young ones wouldn’t have been nestled next to me as I read how, years after the play closed, Ms. George’s father “would still talk about things he would have done differently.
Via,
as he called it, would send him walking to the refrigerator late at night, reliving it in his mind.” The family was never the same after the show closed.