Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (30 page)

I had to go home for a couple of days. I must have looked miserable, because as I was leaving the building, Julie called out to me, “Glen! Cheer up! We have a hit.”

She looked so . . .
fragile
standing there. I could hardly look at her, for all the care and confusion I felt toward her. I shrugged, mumbled a promise about cheering up, and took a call from Michael Cohl, who said we were going to spend the next three weeks putting everything Julie wanted into the show. He said he would then check the results of a survey he commissioned for later that month based on those additions, and he was going to check his own instincts. And if it seemed like we still didn’t have a hit, we were
“going to gut the show and start again
.” I didn’t believe him. (My dubiousness was seconded by my agent, Joyce Ketay: “Glen, it’ll never happen.”)

Michael also told me—prompted by a conversation with Julie—that he was going to loan me some money, since I had yet to be paid any royalties and I was at the end of my soon-to-be-repossessed rope. I wanted to be nothing but grateful, but nothing was pure anymore.

Should I be emotionally indebted to Julie now, for lobbying Michael to loan me money? What if she wanted me to be free of financial worries not because we were friends, but because only
then
would I give up on radically changing our script? But maybe Michael was expecting my allegiance to shift toward
him
—after all, it wasn’t
Julie’s
money getting loaned, it was
his
.
Or was everyone just being nice and four weeks of scheming had warped my brain?

•     •     •

“We’re fucked.”

Michael was sitting up in bed reading the findings from a focus group composed of
Turn Off the Dark
audience members. A more comprehensive survey had been commissioned for the beginning of February, but Michael had just boiled down this many-paged preliminary report to two words, which he repeated to me on the phone the next day.

“We’re fucked. The numbers for ‘emotional involvement’—they’re not just low in the second act. They’re low in the
first
act. Plan X isn’t going to solve that. It’s not going to solve our problems.”

And we definitely had problems. Riedel reported on January 21 that “ticket sales are slowing down,” and predicted that “. . . come February and March, the Foxwoods will be one big old empty barn.”

Up past one in the morning in Julie’s apartment, the discussion once again turned to the speech Arachne delivered before “Deeply Furious.” Since the sixth of December, I had been submitting rewrites, and none of them had satisfied her. Sensing my frustration, Julie reiterated that we
couldn’t
cut “Deeply Furious” because it would demoralize the female dancers. Artlessly, I told her what I knew: The dancers didn’t enjoy doing the song—it felt demeaning. The puppet legs were cumbersome, and the choreography took advantage of the fact that, with the puppet limbs, each female dancer could spread her legs for the audience in three different directions at the same time.

It was as if I had just slapped her face.

“I can’t believe you just said that—”

Oh God—I tripped the wire again?
She stood up from the table.

“How dare you tell me that . . .”

It was cortisol. It was her amygdala taking over. It was fear, it
was stress, I got all that. Still, the cannonade that followed was a drag, and it ended with her suddenly heading up to her bedroom. I sat alone at the table, feeling like a jerk. She didn’t come back down. So, walking home at two in the morning, I tried to work out how I screwed up. Because she didn’t just sound angry, she sounded
wounded
. Since her days working as part of a troupe in Indonesia, and certainly after thirteen years of
The Lion King,
Julie had come to expect a backstage exuding cheery solidarity. It was another reason to work in the theatre instead of being a novelist.
Camaraderie.
Oh, she knew there would always be a healthy amount of bitching behind the scenes, but hearing that these women she shot the breeze with in the VIP room just a week before had lost faith in a part of the show—well, it was a shock for Julie. And it was a shock because she was inhabiting a bubble—a bubble we all created because no one wanted to tell her how they really felt. But damn it to hell, if we really cared about her, if we really cared about the show, then that bubble of hers had to get lanced for good. And
soon
.

•     •     •

Julie was absorbing the news that Michael had commissioned a survey. That a questionnaire was going to be draped over the back of every seat in the auditorium. A questionnaire that said, “Thank you for your participation,” but
really
said, “Our show is in trouble, and we’re not really sure why.”

Julie was nauseated.
Art by poll.
“These people have no idea what they’re doing,” she muttered as I followed her down the stairs that led backstage. “What they don’t understand,” she continued, sounding bone-weary, “is that the only shows that really succeed are the ones that were the result of
one vision
. When you start diluting that . . . throwing in all these other voices . . .”

As Julie spoke, she passed under a tangle of bare-thighed, shoe-clad, disembodied legs. Quick-changes happened on these stairs, and so assorted costume pieces were hanging on the walls, including the “Deeply Furious” puppet legs.
One vision
. As we turned the corner in that little stairway, it felt as if I were turning a corner in a fold of Julie’s cerebral cortex. Those puppet legs, the set, the script, the advertising campaign, the casting, the songs—it was all
her,
and I could almost see it on her shoulders literally weighing her down. New lyrics Bono and Edge had written for “Boy Falls From the Sky” came back to me:
You can hold on so tightly / It all just breaks apart.

I found my family and fled to Mexico.

•     •     •

What we feared would happen was happening. With Ben Brantley of the
Times
leading the way, at least a dozen reviewers from major newspapers and magazines had decided that Michael Cohl’s latest postponement was beyond the pale. They weren’t going to wait until March to review the show. They were going to pretend opening night was still February 7, and publish their reviews the next day. So the rogue critics bought tickets for Saturday, February 5.

The February 5 show was, of course, a cavalcade of glitches—the worst since the first preview. “Because we’re cursed,” said Julie. Lengthy stops had been becoming mercifully infrequent. On February 5, however, there were two excruciating stops near the end of the first act. “That just takes the villainy right out of ya!” Patrick cracked as Randall White announced the first stop in the middle of the Chrysler Building scene.

When I returned the next day from the Yucatán (a week spent rewriting Geek scenes under a tropical sun), Michael invited me over to his apartment. He just wanted a quick chat (the Steelers
were playing Green Bay in the Super Bowl in a couple of hours, and he wanted me gone by then). He poured me a beer, and then said he wanted to give me a “heads-up” that Plan X probably wasn’t going to happen. Marvel and Disney were concerned about the cost of the plan ($3.5 million would have been tolerable, but the price tag was looking more like five million). They were also concerned that shutting down the show for three weeks would “disrupt the show’s momentum.”

The show’s
“momentum”
?! How much “momentum” were we still going to
have
in a month?
And as I was thinking this, he let drop:

“Oh, and also? Julie wants another writer.”

The next day—February 7—was dubbed “Fauxpening Night.” Complimentary tickets ensured that the auditorium was packed with friends and family. My wife and two of my children were in the audience, seeing the show for the first time. Also in the auditorium, taking pages of notes, were two people invited by Michael Cohl. One was Marvel Entertainment’s chief creative officer, Joe Quesada. The other was a writer named Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. As for myself, I spent the show with my two-year-old, who—even at that tender age—was obsessed with Spider-Man, and couldn’t understand why he was watching the show on the little video monitor in the VIP room instead of inside the theatre with his siblings.

Because you’re not old enough to be in the auditorium. And, no, you’ll never see the show in the theatre, because it will be gone long before you turn three.

It was a smooth show—that is, until the final scene. One of Arachne’s wires jammed. So without a web net, on practically a bare stage, Arachne and Peter wandered around instead of having a fight. The open bar at the Fauxpening Night party was hit
hard. I found an empty booth and ate a bunch of breadsticks in an alcoholic stupor.

So it was with a serious hangover the following afternoon, waiting for takeout in a neighborhood Thai restaurant—with reviews of the show and reviews of the reviews circulating around the world—that I wrote this note to my wife:

Here’s what I’ll bet. They’re gonna keep me working on the script as-is: dialogue lines, nothing structural. Until early March. Then we’re going to freeze the show. Open on March 15. And then we’re going to close before June. I’m really sorry I couldn’t bring home that whale.

Incapacitated, I was unable to do anything but stare at the Buddha in that restaurant. He had oranges and cut flowers in front of him. And he was looking serene, as always.

What you’re watching is the stem cells of a protean imagination dividing and dividing and dividing, right out of control. . . . The result is savage and deeply confusing—a boiling cancer-scape of living pain. . . .

—Scott Brown,
New York
magazine

A
nd that was our
good
review. Seriously. Scott Brown declared that the show was “never, ever boring,” although that pronouncement came at the end of a sentence that began by describing the show as “hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar.” So, yeah, there were some qualifiers in there.

To many of those hard at work at the Foxwoods, reviewers showing up in the beginning of February was like hearing a proctor
shout “Pencils down!” when you had three more answers that you
knew,
and just needed to write down before you turned in your—“Taymor! Cohl! I said ‘Pencils
down
!’ ” Your first thought isn’t that you should have gotten through your test faster. Your first thought is:
That proctor
—
what an asshole
.

And certainly several of the critics took an extra dose of asshole pills the day they typed up their reviews of the show. Peter Marks at the
Washington Post
confessed: “I haven’t seen every stinker ever produced, so I can’t categorically confirm that
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
belongs in the dankest subbasement of the American musical theater. But its application certainly seems to be in order.”

I spent the morning wading through sentences like:

A “65-million-dollar sinking ship, which goes down with all hands
.
”

“The creature that most often spreads its wings in the Foxwoods is a turkey
.
”

“The tale doesn’t so much unfold as ooze out.”

Sometimes you don’t need thick skin as a playwright, you need a hazmat suit. Ben Brantley had been sharpening his knives for so long in anticipation of the day he could review our show, our flesh must have felt like a yielding pat of butter. For a critic of his stature, it must have been a sensuous experience to write that the performers wearing Julie’s masks “. . . bring to mind hucksters handing out promotional material for fantasy-themed restaurants.” Or to say Danny’s choreography was straight out of the early 1980s, and “pure vintage MTV.”

But it was one sentence that gave him away, one sentence that allowed everyone working at the Foxwoods to dismiss Brantley’s whole review with a “whatever.” The head reviewer for the paper of record wrote: “
Spider-Man
is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.”

For everything wrong with the show, moments of undeniable inspiration peeked through the clouds. It was the reason no one in this theatre wanted to close up shop. So Brantley’s review only strengthened our resolve to do an end run around him and the rest of these pharisees. Scott Brown, for one, concluded in his review that the show should never open; that it “should be built and rebuilt and overbuilt forever, a living monument to itself.” Both Julie and Michael had begun some serious consideration of this option. After all, Cirque du Soleil employed “soft openings” for their shows, working out kinks for a year or more before “freezing” a show.

That sounds like a great idea, guys. Excuse me while I take this razor blade into this warm bath I’m running.

Anyway, the notion surely wasn’t viable. A lot of the revenue-generating hype for the show was a result of what Scott Brown dubbed “Spidenfreude”—the taking of delight in
Turn Off the Dark’
s misfortunes. So even though the February 12 episode of
Saturday Night Live
featured a law firm specializing in lawsuits related to
Turn Off the Dark;
and even though there was a microbudgeted stunt-musical called
The Spidey Project
that was getting a lot of publicity and opening in New York on March
14;
and even though yet another cheeky stunt-musical called
Spidermann
was garnering buzz and opening in New York on March
13;
all of this hullabaloo over our show was due to end any second.

Michael Cohl was of two minds. On one hand, he believed the show would be a hit if there were just some more clarity in the story currently onstage. On the other hand, he worried that Plan X wasn’t enough of a fix to save the show. These two opinions contradicted each other. Which explained the holding pattern we were in.