Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (33 page)

This is an amazing situation. I am so sorry it has come to this when we have been creating a story of transcendence. What larks, pip. xxx

I
t was three in the morning, and Julie had just called me Pip. In
Great Expectations,
Joe the blacksmith was like a father to Pip when Pip was poor and without prospects. Later, Pip cast his good-hearted friend aside. I stared at her e-mail. How in the hell did we get here?
Don’t play dumb; you know how we got here.
Okay, but was there a way we could still salvage this relationship as well as salvage the show?
No, it’s one or the other.
Damn it, there
had
to be a way . . .

It was Saturday morning, and so the building housing Seth Gelblum’s law offices was deserted. Seth, our downcast arbitrator, had gathered us around a long table—Michael, Edge, and Julie—with Jere on one speakerphone, and Bono on another.

And the unflinching conversation that could have happened on January 7—and January 8, and every day after that until this thing
got solved—was finally happening on February 26. It had taken until today, when we needed a lawyer to play den mother. Today, after a dozen major papers had already practiced vivisection on us in the Broadway operating theatre.

Michael admitted at the top of the meeting that he made a mistake. He said he should have convened the meeting weeks before. He said it was “out of a respect for Julie and her vision” that he hadn’t. There was a lot of irony in his voice when he said that. Julie snorted. They could hardly look at each other.

The meeting was five hours long, and not one of its eighteen thousand seconds was fun. Michael said this meeting wasn’t about who was right
artistically.
This was about
survival.
“If
Spider-Man
were only a twenty-million-dollar show that needed eight hundred thousand a week to break even, we wouldn’t be having this meeting.
But it’s not
. So we need ‘the big fix.’ ” He put it baldly: We didn’t even have enough money to make it to March 15. If Marvel released more funds, it would be on the one condition that the show got thoroughly revamped.

Seth suggested we go around the table and state how we thought we should move forward. Julie wanted to open with the show we had on March 15. Bono, privately, wasn’t confident Michael Cohl could find the money for Plan X. So Bono supported Plan X, but with a lot of caveats, and wondered if we couldn’t open on March 15, and just keep adding changes intermittently to our
current
show over the next four years, like
Wicked
did. Julie suggested she could get behind that plan. Michael and Jere were skeptical—
did they not just say we could barely make it to March 15
?

Edge came out strongly for Plan X. He saw no alternative, and he hoped Julie would come to embrace the option. Now it was my turn to speak, and from the perspective of those in the room, I’m sure I looked like a glasses-wearing waffle. The forty-five-day
delay in considering Plan X had muddied the waters—I worried for the cast; I worried for the lack of a viable director; I worried for my dying friendship with this woman looking so bewildered and betrayed at the end of the table.
I tried to split the difference
. I said, “I’m not here to defend this Plan X plan. I’m not prepared to do that at this moment. I—”

Michael Cohl suddenly got up from his seat and walked around the room toward the little table where the iced tea was. He was so disgusted with my equivocating that he couldn’t sit still. As I talked, he dropped ice into his cup, rattling it loudly while breathing heavily. He didn’t look at me. Which was fine, because the less I saw of the scowl on his face, the better.
I’ve lost him
.
Is Julie taking note of this? Is she going to be grateful? Or am I just going to end up ostracized by everyone? Well, to hell with it:
I said we should all put off the decision until Bono could get back to New York on Tuesday to see the show. I said that even if we put off the vote for one week—until March 5—we’d still have time to vote on whether we should open on March 15 or not. And, incredibly, that was how we left it. After five brutal hours, it was agreed to table the final vote until the next Saturday, March 5.

So Julie left for Long Beach, California, to spend six days at the TED Conference, where she was invited to give a speech on “Worlds Imagined.” George Tsypin and I sat on the steps in the empty vestibule off Forty-third Street. George worked for years designing the sets for
The Little Mermaid,
and I began to understand why he had been such an early and strong advocate for Plan X. The previews for
The Little Mermaid
were packed, and even after it opened, the mostly stinko reviews didn’t affect ticket sales.
At first
.

“Glen, you wouldn’t believe it—the lines—one day they’re going around the block, and the next day, we’re closed. Just like that.”

You can get suckered into feeling like you had a hit, George
cautioned. “But you can sense when the crowds—
when they aren’t real
.” A chill wind slipped into the Forty-third Street vestibule. I told him Julie called me from the airport and said Don Holder would quit if a new director came in.

“Well, there’s Don now,” George said. He beckoned our lighting designer into the vestibule. “Julie says you told her you would quit if she left the show.”

Don grimaced, looked around as if checking to see there were no directors around, and then clarified, “Well, . . . no . . . that’s what
she
told me I should do.” Apparently Don wasn’t the only one Julie had called with a similar message. And why not? Now was the time to gather your troops.

And what about T. V. and Reeve? Would they quit? Michael had a heart-to-heart with Reeve. Our lead repeated his love for Julie (“She’s like my fairy godmother,” Reeve said in an interview around that time). But his contract didn’t allow him to leave the show until late June, so we didn’t have to worry about our Peter Parker jumping ship. Apparently Reeve didn’t want the opening postponed again because it would make the show (and him) ineligible for that year’s Tonys.

“Reeve,”
Michael told him, “you’ll never get nominated for a Tony this year. It has nothing to do with your performance. It’s politics. But stick around, and the 2012 Tonys could be a different story.”

On March 1, in an auditorium with
seven hundred
empty seats, Bono saw the show for the first time since January. He liked it. He liked it too much. He didn’t want to install a radical fix. Meanwhile Michael and Jere had just received lousy news from Marvel that made finding the money for Plan X seem unlikely. So in a windowless VIP room that had lately smelled more and more rank, as if this whole enterprise had started to rot, the producers and our
composers’ dramaturgical advisers discussed one more time how to fix the ending. I stopped listening. “March—the month we’re currently in—will be the last month of the show,” I wrote my wife that night.

March 2. Bono called early in the morning. “What would be helpful, Glen, is
index cards.
 . . . Can you have them by one o’clock?” Michael and Jere were meeting with Bono and Edge for lunch to make a final-and-they-mean-it-this-time decision, and Bono wanted to see how the scenes of the current show got switched around or substituted in Plan X. I was just gathering my stack of cards when Julie called. She sounded the worst I had ever heard her. Desolate.

In just a couple of hours she was going to be delivering her TED speech, but she still hadn’t worked out what she was going to say. She said she had been thinking a lot about the alchemist’s crucible—that place of infernal forces where the result is either a triumphant transubstantiation or burnt char. She was in a crucible now—her convictions as an artist and her methods for navigating the entertainment industry were being tested like never before.

So she was evoking the metaphor of the crucible to the one thousand TED conference attendees while,
simultaneously,
on the other side of the country, index cards were being laid out on a coffee table in the wood-paneled private room at the Lambs Club—the same room where Patrick Healy once interviewed Julie and her three collaborators a week before the first preview, with all of us awash in martinis and optimism.

She described to that packed auditorium in Long Beach one of the defining moments of her life. Just hours before she watched men dance in an otherwise barren Indonesian village square she had taken an ill-equipped climb and found herself stranded between a dead and a live volcano.

I am on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano on my left. On the right it is sheer shale. I realize I can’t go back the way I have come. So I got down on all fours like a cat. And I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me. . . . The only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me.

Back at the Lambs Club, two composers and two producers sat in leather chairs as Julie’s cowriter walked them through Plan X one more time. His private audience was nodding excitedly, they were asking penetrating questions, they were finding the answers persuasive, they were making compelling suggestions; eyes and brains were lighting up.

“It’s right there in the palm of my hands,” Julie avowed to her audience as she held out her hand, and it was as if she really
could
see it—the gleaming, ineffable, infinite thing you’d crawl on all fours on the edge of a volcano to reach.

Bono, Edge, Jere, Michael—they were convinced. Bono said “his people” (the colleagues who had been advising him on matters dramaturgical for the last few months) told him to “trust Glen—he’s the only writer you need.”

And Julie? She was going to be sent into exile.

“I have beautiful collaborators,” she told the audience in a careworn voice. “We as collaborators only get there all together. I know you understand that.
You stay there going forward and you see this extraordinary thing right in front of your eyes.
”

•     •     •

To think it was only nine months earlier that I was paging through the
Dao De Jing
that was sitting on Julie’s coffee table while I watched her serenely sculpt masks in her airy studio—Laozi’s
gentle counsel the perfect complement to the classical guitar playing on the stereo:
“Welcome disgrace as a pleasant surprise . . .”

Jesus, just nine months earlier:
“Thus the rigid and inflexible will surely fail while the soft and flowing will prevail . . .”

Whether the tussle was with Joe Roth over the final cut of
Across the Universe,
or with Harvey Weinstein over
Frida,
or with dubious Disney executives over how little “lion” you actually needed for a lion costume, Julie almost always prevailed when she held her ground. It was only natural that she applied the same strategy here. But the circumstances were different in this case in one key way: In the other instances, the tug-of-war occurred
before
the film was released or before the play went into production. In other words, “in the eleventh hour,” if not before. And over a year later, in more than one interview, she would mischaracterize March 2011 as “the eleventh hour”:

What’s tricky about my career is that people get really excited, they want all that groundbreaking or envelope-pushing stuff, whatever you want to call it, and then at the 11th hour, they get nervous. They smell more success if we don’t go too artistic.

But over 150,000 people had seen
Turn Off the Dark
by the beginning of March. It had been reviewed by the
New York Times.
We weren’t in the eleventh hour—we were well past midnight. And it made all the difference. She figured she was merely facing off against a producer. But a tsunami generated by public opinion was gathering behind her. And it was about to crash down on her.

She was coming home the next day.

I left the Lambs Club and headed to the Foxwoods, where I found Rob Bissinger outside on his cell phone, bearing the haggard look that marked him as a
Spider-Man
man.

I told him I needed a sounding board. Someone who knew how to put ideas through their paces; subject plot points to stress tests. Someone who could generate material quickly; someone who knew
Spider-Man;
who understood both theatrical possibilities and technical constraints. Someone opinionated, but not egotistic.

“I know a Canadian. I’ll give him a call.”

The Canadian was writer-director Jim Millan. Several people on the
Spider-Man
tech staff had worked with him before and thought he was just the fellow. He saw the show back in December and liked it for all the right reasons, and had issues with it for all the right reasons. He’d be in town in a day or two and meanwhile we could meet by phone.

Timetable-wise, Michael Cohl wanted an outline in three days, and a slammed-out, roughed-in draft of a script six days after that. We would start rehearsing with that script, and we’d keep refining it until the new show went into Tech.

Past midnight, back at my apartment, I turned on the television. The last minutes of David Letterman that night were reserved for a solemn, almost funereal “Rise Above,” sung by T. V. Carpio, Jenn Damiano, and Reeve in his Spider-Man jacket. They taped the performance at the Ed Sullivan Theater just as I was leaving the Lambs Club. All three of them looked heartsick. T. V.—as Arachne—sang:

Your strength will be a vision

Beyond visibility

And the gift I’ve woven for you

Will give you new eyes to see

That you can rise above . . .

yourself . . .

And I let out a scream—loud, ragged, and long—until the walls echoed and my throat hurt. I felt like throwing up. I felt like slamming my hand against a wall until I had shattered some bones.