Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (28 page)

All these years, it was a
given
that
Turn Off the Dark
would be a hit. There was never talk about whether or not it would succeed on Broadway. The talk was always about all the
other
productions we’d have up within the first three years. Or about which actors Julie would cast for the feature-film adaptation. The idea that this show—with all the effort and inspiration that had been devoted to it—might be gone forever by this time next year . . . it was literally
too much for certain people to grasp. The very real possibility of closing had to be driven into them. But how?

Julie sought me backstage before the show. Danny, the mensch, had taken her out to dinner and delivered a pitch. Not for Plan A, or Plan C, but for
friendship
. He reminded her of the affection and bond between us, and he must have found her heartstrings because, outside the assistant director’s room, she took my face in her hands. She looked into my eyes, she kissed my cheek, she apologized, she pledged that she’d ask Michael Cohl to lend me money, “but please,
please,
let’s never fight again, Glen. I love you too much for anything to come between us.”

I felt her tears on my cheek.

•     •     •

“That a brother should be so perfidious! He whom I did charge to execute express commands . . . instead undid,
subverted
 . . .”

Julie had asked me the year previous to rewrite about thirty lines of Shakespeare to accommodate Prospero’s gender change in her
Tempest
. The lines all described the treachery of Prospera’s brother, Antonio. And now the same month that this movie was disappearing from theatres, Rob Bissinger and I—out of Julie’s earshot—were plotting in the Foxwoods’s men’s room. As in, Rob was pitching me new thoughts about the plot, because—like Edge—he couldn’t make heads or tails out of the ending.

“It’s a Gordian knot,” I told him. “And heck if I know how to untie it.”

Spider-Man doesn’t kill his adversaries if he can help it, and the webslinger certainly couldn’t kill Arachne—she spent half of
Turn Off the Dark
as an anguished and lonely woman just trying to
help
him. Also, he
literally
couldn’t kill her—she was immortal. So, really, the climactic battle could only resolve with Arachne allowing
Peter to be with Mary Jane, the goddess Athena transforming Arachne into a young woman again, and Arachne ascending into the stars.

But because Arachne’s spider legs were attached to a twisty belt that was impossible to take off without the help of stage managers offstage, no miraculous transformation could occur as Julie had always envisioned. Awkward staging makeshifts had to be employed instead, resulting in hundreds of audience members leaving the theatre every night scratching their heads. And that was on a
good
night—when the web net actually succeeded in making it into the web-net scene (which Randall White predicted wouldn’t happen two or three times every
week
).

Up at three in the morning on January 6, pacing up and down my East Village sublet, looking for a way to untie this Gordian knot, I noticed the
I Ching
on the bookshelf. I was desperate, so I took it off the shelf. I came up with a random number and turned to the page: “Remorse disappears. Take not gain and loss to heart. Undertakings bring good fortune.
Everything serves to further.
”

I needed a brilliant suggestion for a plot twist, so this didn’t really help. But then I read the page again, and I breathed. Because in my sleep-deprived state, I was pretty sure the
I Ching
was telling me,
“It’s cool. It’s all good. You just watch. Keep your eyes open, because the answer is coming today if you’re open to it.”

•     •     •

On the way back from dinner that night, Jere told me about a member of the stage crew named Jack. I had already heard about Jack back in September. When he wasn’t hauling equipment or repairing sets, Jack was rewriting Broadway shows. Sometimes he made little fixes; sometimes he overhauled entire productions. He never presumed to show his efforts to the writer or director.
It was just a hobby. Like doing crossword puzzles. If you were on the crew of a show, you watched every performance, you heard the audience’s reaction, and you were bound to have a few opinions.

“So what do you think?” asked Jere. “Any interest?”

“Sure, man, why not?”

Serendipitously, moments later we were running into Matty, another member of the stage crew. He said he’d pass the message on to Jack. So on the morning of January 7, I awoke to find several e-mails. Amid all the offers for male enhancement and cash loans, I almost didn’t notice this one from Bono:

Glen you are bearing up very well. I am going to speak to JT today about bad behavior. A) shooting ideas down before taking time to understand them; B) threatening to throw the toys out of the cot when confronted with problems. . . . We need to support the director’s vision up to but not beyond the point of stopping truthful introspection . . . We’ll get there. What is already amazing is way harder to accomplish than fixing what is not.

And then there was a message that Jere forwarded to me. It was from Jack the stagehand, who wrote:

Maybe you’ll decide this is presumptuous, but rather than just sit on the sidelines and criticize, I thought you’d have more respect for me if I grew some balls and got in the game!

I was already amused—I couldn’t help thinking about
Bullets Over Broadway,
the Woody Allen film with John Cusack as the up-and-coming Broadway writer who was in over his head until he got career-saving dramaturgical advice from—

Holy shit—

The
I Ching
was right. One glance at the document was all it took. Jumper cables to the brain. I didn’t read the content because I already saw what Jack had done. I had made notes about it back in October.

He moved the Spider-Man–Goblin fight to the
end
of the show.

I closed my eyes as the implications crashed down in my head. Putting the fight at the end would eliminate all future web-net snafus. The frightening images of Goblin and the Sinister Six in the second act wouldn’t be Arachne’s illusions—they’d be real. In fact, the whole subplot of illusions—which was confusing audiences every night—would be eliminated. The undisputed highlight of the show would end just two minutes before the curtain call. How did Alexander the Great untie the Gordian knot?
He didn’t. He used his sword.

Plan X.

That’s what it would come to be called. And I wasn’t certain yet. But I was beginning to think it was the only way the show could be saved. And if I breathed a word of it to my writing partner . . . I’d be fired.

O
n January 7, I tried to watch Danny’s dance rehearsal for “Deeply Furious” but couldn’t sit still, so now I was standing by the elevators just outside the room, staring at my laptop propped on top of some stacked chairs. And now I was pacing back and forth as if I had just had ten lines of coke; my heart was pumping weirdly; my skin was clammy; I grabbed my laptop and crouched in the corner; I pounded the wall; I was acting like people acted in a padded cell, and when Danny found me during a rehearsal break, he asked if I was okay. I took him through the big points of Plan X and he didn’t understand why I was expending any neural energy on this one. At this stage of the game—even assuming that Julie would go for it (which, surely, she wouldn’t)—such an overhaul would be logistically impossible. Danny was right, of course.

But just before the show that evening, I ran into Jere in the lobby as it began filling with ticketholders.

“Hey,” he said jovially, “did you get a chance to check out Jack’s little outline?”

“Yeah. He put the Goblin fight at the end.”

“Yeah. He did.”

Pause
. And then I added:

“If I thought there was a chance we could do that . . .
it’s what we should do
.”

Jere wasn’t jovial anymore.

“Then let’s have some dinner
.
”

He grabbed Michael Cohl and the three of us headed to Frankie & Johnnie’s, a steak joint that used to be frequented by Bugsy Siegel and his goons back when it was a speakeasy in the 1920s. My boss’s voice was full of concern.

“Act Two is a
mishegoss,”
said Jere. “Do you know what that word means?” he asked the Yid. I nodded between bites of steak. It literally meant “madness,” but
The Joys of Yiddish
says it can also be defined as “a state of affairs so silly or unreal that it defies explanation.” Sounded like Act Two to me.

“Julie can’t treat this show like her . . . artistic
sandbox
. There’s a place for that. It’s
downtown. Off
-Broadway. But this is
Broadway
.”

Jere continued, and he wasn’t flip. “This show employs a lot of people. . . . Some of the guys on the crew are relatives of mine. A lot of them—the actors, the people behind the scenes—they’re supporting
families
.” He spoke of their dedication to the show. He named a married couple we both knew who had their first baby that past summer. “And yet they’ve been putting in sixteen hours every day on this show ever since then.” Jere didn’t talk about art. He talked about
livelihoods
. He said, “If I thought there was a way to increase the chances that all these people were
not
going to be out of a job anytime soon, I would do anything I could to make it happen.”

I told him I hadn’t spent any real time with the idea yet. I wanted to vet all the narrative implications. Jere and Michael emphasized
that even if it was determined that Plan X was doable, even if it was determined that it was the only way for the show to survive, the chances that they’d actually be able to carry out the plan were
infinitesimal.
It would involve a shutdown for who knew how long. “There would be mammoth considerations,” said Michael. To say nothing of the need to convince certain difficult-to-convince personalities that it was the only way forward. In fact, given all those factors, it was hardly worth having this discussion at all. But it was due diligence. They wouldn’t be doing their job as producers if they kept any options off the table.

I went straight back to my apartment and pulled an all-nighter. Julie called once, but I guess I was in the shower. She’d wind up never hearing about the meeting at Frankie & Johnnie’s.
Never.
I stopped working when I realized the bursts of noise from people and traffic outside my window were becoming more frequent. It wasn’t night anymore. I could smell coffee. I had written a new twelve-page outline. Act One ended fifteen minutes earlier, the “Ugly Pageant” was gone, and Arachne was amply represented in Act Two. In fact, only one of her numbers (“Deeply Furious”) would get cut. She retained her wrathful temper while continuing to be a zoomorphic guardian spirit. Socrates would have called her a daimon. She was basically Peter’s self-appointed superego, and this put the focus of the story back on Peter Parker where it belonged.
Plan X could work.

I wrote Michael and Jere that the amount of rewriting wouldn’t be so daunting. “Two or three days of coffee-fueled, Benzedrine-fueled, whatever-fueled writing would yield the pages we need.”

I then asked Michael permission to bring Rob Bissinger into the loop—if we weren’t on rock-solid ground from a technical perspective, we’d never be able to convince Julie that the plan was at least worth
listening
to
.
Michael responded: “No.”

Bother
.

He wrote back thirty minutes later: “Yes.”

I sent Rob the new outline. He was coming in on the twelve thirty Metro-North train from his house upriver. I met him at Grand Central. It was the only time in my life I ever had the urge to ask, “Are you sure you weren’t followed?” We found a discreet bar by the train station. Rob said he would do a full assessment of the plan that night, but from a cursory read-through on the train, he believed it could be done. And he believed it
should
be done. But he cautioned the planning stage would have to be rigorous.

Edge wrote to me with another idea he wanted to pitch for the ending. It was his third one that week. Dramaturgy fired him up. But his idea was going to be another nonstarter with Julie, who had spent the last month whacking Edge’s notions back over the net without breaking a sweat.

And though Julie hadn’t dressed me down in the last few days, her impatience with me was growing. I was taking too long getting pages xeroxed in the stage manager’s office. I was spending too much time talking with the Geeks. And my rewritten monologue for Arachne that launched “Deeply Furious” still wasn’t working (
“Because it’ll never work,”
I told her . . . silently to myself )
.
It was low-level haranguing, but it was ratcheting up my psychic exhaustion with her. I wasn’t alone. Those Goodwill Points everyone in the theatre spotted her? They were dwindling perilously.

So Edge and Bono were going to catch the Sunday matinee that day, and then Julie wanted a quick meeting with them and me to go over some suggested lyric rewrites.

“Be there at five, Glen. Don’t be late.”

I wasn’t late. I was early. Julie wasn’t in the VIP room yet, but Edge and Bono were. Bono was lying on his back because the last
summer’s injury still gave him trouble. (He had torn a ligament and herniated a disc, necessitating a postponement of the North American leg of the 360° Tour for a year.) But that wasn’t why he was wincing. “All I know is,” he was saying in an outraged voice to Edge as I entered the room, “there is no way I am allowing us to open with
that
.” He was pointing with disgust out toward the general direction of the stage. The web net didn’t deploy again. Act Two was again a
mishegoss
.