Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (36 page)

And Phil wanted the violence in “Bullying by Numbers” toned down. “Frankly,” he reiterated later, “the more we can make this a number about kids having ‘fun’ bullying Peter, we’ll have a better launch to the show as opposed to beginning a show with a suicide, a beating, and two dysfunctional family arguments.” Lyrics like “We’ll burst your nose” got changed to “We’ll
punch
your nose.” Less
graphic,
I guess.

And lines like “Peter Peter beats his peter” were right out. It was a lyric currently sung in counterpoint by the high school girls. For teen cred, it couldn’t compete with
Spring Awakening’s
“Totally Fucked,” but at least it was
something
for the adolescents in the audience. But Phil wasn’t having it. He knew the Midwestern family of four was going to be our bread and butter, and he wanted them to feel safe.

“And the choreography where it looks like the bullies are jerking off? Come
on
. There’s no place for that in a family show like this.”

He had a point, and I wasn’t about to get on a pro-masturbation soapbox.

“And these lyrics by the bullies in ‘D.I.Y. World’?—‘Do yourself, yeah, do it to yourself ’? They’re out too.”

Geez—how much masturbation did we have in this show?

And most of all, to brighten the show, they wanted it clear from the top that MJ and Peter were into each other. Our leads should be kissing before the end of the first act. I rolled up my sleeves—the Canadian and I had already come to the opposite conclusion.

“It’ll suck out all the dramatic tension! If we make it too
easy
for the audience—”

“See, Glen?” clucked Phil. “
That’
s why your show didn’t work. You guys wanted to make it so
hard
for the audience.”

Roberto gave me a look. “Why are you being so weird about this?”

I relented. It was out of my hands. In Sardinia, the cure for tarantism required burying the victim of the spider bite up to his neck in a heap of dung. If he laughed while seven women danced around the dung, it was a sign of recovery. If he couldn’t laugh, then the prognosis was death.

Start laughing, fellow.

Roberto sent me a note at the end of the night.

Hitting the hay, my friend, but wanted to tell you how incredibly jazzed I am about this. It was actually . . . kind of . . . really . . . sort of . . . fun today, wasn’t it? Thanks for welcoming me aboard.

I guess we were all competent, collaborative, and (more or less) sane that day. Roberto and Phil seemed genuinely surprised that I was willing to alter the show. So much so, that the next day Roberto would ask me, “If you disagreed with Julie so much from the very beginning, why didn’t you just quit?”

“Quit?”

Hell, I was almost fired. And then I turned my radio dial to her frequency and never looked back. Quit? What, and give up the chance to learn from a master? Would Roberto have quit? Or would Julie have fired him before he had the chance, like she said she would have done after reading his notes?

“Quit?” I said to my new cowriter. “But there was no proof she was wrong. In fact, it seemed like there was plenty of proof over the years that she was
right
.”

No, the more pertinent question was this, Roberto: With so many things destined to be decided in these next two days that I so fiercely disagreed with, why wasn’t I quitting
now
?

•     •     •

The fourteen-hour-long meeting to remake Act Two the next day was more contentious. The changes to the script were far more extensive than what the Tech staff had signed off on with Plan X.
These two didn’t come here to do a little remodeling. This was a gut renovation.

Perhaps the unkindest cut was the excision of “Think Again”—Arachne’s hard-driving song of vengeance that began with the startling sight of Arachne hurtling down from the balcony. I argued until I was hoarse, but it was no use. And it unsettled me because I could
feel
this cut. It felt like, well,
a mastectomy
.

“MUTATE OR DIE,” the Goblin says as he reveals his plans for a new world order to the terrified reporters at the
Bugle
. It was the Goblin’s catchphrase in the new script, and it would become the motto for our entire endeavor for the next three months. Everyone had to get with the program.
Turn Off the Dark
had to mutate or die. (Very quickly, people began to refer to the version onstage as
Spider-Man
1.0
,
as if it were first-generation software in bad need of an upgrade.)

But Phil and Roberto clearly didn’t understand yet that
Turn Off the Dark
wasn’t a show, it was a machine built to teach humility. They couldn’t begin to comprehend that I had already seen it all. As the history of the show unfolded, I was there. I was the Ancient Mariner. Or Forrest Gump. Either way, they needed to heed my words of caution. If they started diverging too far from Plan X, the Tech staff would balk.

I honestly couldn’t figure out who these guys were—swaggering revolutionaries putting their feet up in the empty palace of the swept-out rulers? Or sincere servants of the production, unaware of their own baggage and biases? When Phil learned that Bono and Edge’s new song for the top of Act Two was called “A Freak Like Me Needs Company,” his eyes lit up. He just had an epiphany.

“No, no, no—it isn’t
company.
It’s
family.
‘A Freak Like Me Needs
Family
’!”

He wanted me to e-mail Bono and Edge immediately to inform them of the title change. Because—Phil explained—the Goblin
didn’t want to feel like an outcast. More than anything in the world, what he wanted was
family
. I listened to Phil, trying to understand why this song title was getting him so animated. This didn’t just seem like a plot point to Phil. There was a fervor in his voice as he spun this new scenario.

“I think Phil’s a lonely man,” I said to Roberto as we left Phil’s apartment late that night. “I think he sees himself as a freak who needs family.”

Roberto rolled his eyes. “Get some sleep, Glen Berger.” He was right—this was the last night for that. Roberto was assigned Act One, I was assigned Act Two, and a first draft was due in five days.

And maybe I was just projecting. Maybe
I
was the lonely man. Where
was
everyone? It felt like the last episodes of
I, Claudius
—where were all the characters who once filled these halls? Teese Gohl and Martin McCallum; David Garfinkle and Michael Curry; Dodd Loomis, Jonathan Deans, Danny Ezral—

Yeah . . . where was
Danny
?

Instead of sleeping, I stayed up until three in the morning updating Danny about the goings-on. He was currently in exile, waiting for the call that would bring him back from Los Angeles. It was a call that would never come if Phil had anything to do with it. And Phil had plenty to do with it. He had begun searching for a new choreographer. Phil would say it wasn’t his choice to cut Danny loose. But he seemed relieved to not have to deal with such an influential member of the old team.

The official word was that Danny was being let go because the stage managers and crew told Michael Cohl that they were confident Plan X could be implemented in the time allotted, but only if Julie
and
Danny weren’t in the theatre. Apparently Danny had used up all of
his
Goodwill Points too. Michael also had it on good authority from his spy that the worn-out dancers didn’t want
Danny back because they were worried Danny would take the opportunity to rework all the dances
again
.

“Who’s the spy, Michael?” I asked.

“Guess. He’s in plain sight. He’s there all the time, and everyone talks to him freely in a way they never would with the management.”

I couldn’t think of who it could be, even though it turned out I had talked to him as much as anyone:
Jacob Cohl
.
Not only our documentarian, but also Michael Cohl’s son.
In two weeks’ time, nearly all the dancers would recant, desperate for Danny to return. But it would be far too late by then.

Meanwhile, the actors were meeting with their union—Actors’ Equity—to explore their options. Did they really have to keep rehearsing just because they were still “technically” in previews? Weren’t they being exploited? Couldn’t they get some vacation time? Talks between Equity and the producers would be ongoing—this was all rather new territory.

•     •     •

When we didn’t open on February 7, it was “Fauxpening Night.” March 15 was unofficially dubbed “Nopening Night.” There was no party. The next day, Roberto and Phil introduced themselves to the cast before the show, and Phil whipped out for the first time (but hardly the last) his favorite rallying cry from his circus days: “Let’s make the impossible possible!”

Meanwhile, Bono and Edge were busy working on “A Freak Like Me Needs Company” (they didn’t go for Phil’s proposed title change). They asked me to come down to the near-empty studio that evening and check out what they had so far. Bono was lying on a ratty couch in the middle of the recording room improvising Goblin lines into a handheld mike over an endless groove.
He was in character: a dissipated lounge lizard shaking off last night’s bender and warming up for some new kicks. He was scatting, hacking up tar, yawning, cackling into the mike: “Bring out the DANCING GIRLS! The crossroads of the world needs a little
resurrection
. Heh, heh. It used to be REALLY ROTTEN ’ROUND HERE! Now, can’t even BUY ME AN ERECTION! Hoh, hoh, hoh. Sorry, darlin’.”

We’ll clean it up for Phil, not a problem.

Slurring like he was three sheets to the wind, with stained-silk-bathrobe bravado he sang, referring to our show’s troubles:

If you’re looking for a night out on the town,

You just found me. . . .

I’m a sixty-five-million-dollar circus tragedy . . .

He shifted into a Tom Waits growl, slinging extemporized beat poetry and pausing every time a trio of Edge’s multitracked vocals were heard singing in falsetto,
“A freak like me needs . . . com-pa-ny.”

After those twenty-two hours of script meetings with Phil and Roberto, where it felt like the show was turning into a Sunny Delight juice product, this felt like something else entirely.

And then Elvis Costello appeared in the studio, wearing a pair of little red glittery devil horns.
Right—it’s March 17—St. Patrick’s Day
. He passed out extra pairs of horns to his Irish compatriots.
Costello.
I threw out my back camping out for tickets to this man’s
Blood & Chocolate
tour. But I kept my mouth shut about all that. Bono invited Elvis to listen to a few cuts from the unfinished
Spider-Man
album. Steve Lillywhite played the first track, and all the Irish-inflected banter in the empty studio stopped. Elvis listened intently, hardly moving until the songs were over. And after he said some
very complimentary things, and headed out into the night, Bono clucked and said, “Yeah—I heard the songs through his ears, and there are some things we need to fix.”

And that’s what you get with a
community
of artists. Beyond the compulsory slagging off, there’s also this exchange of ears. An artist is able to step into the shoes of anyone else and get a new perspective on their work, but not every artist is eager to take such a step. It requires a willingness to be self-critical. These guys in the devil horns had it.

I knew I was going to pay for that visit to the studio. Although it allowed me to get a better bead on Goblin’s character, I lost a half-day of writing. My fears were realized when Roberto, Phil, and I convened on Sunday. Roberto had a completed draft of Act One, and my Act Two was patchy. In fact, Roberto had done a very
thorough
revision of the act. He prepped us with apologies and acknowledgments of the scenes’ shortcomings. But like a true dick, I ignored every one of Roberto’s caveats. Where was the
intensity
? Where were the attempts to generate moments of
transcendence
? I figured Phil would instantly see that he put too much faith in Roberto, and he—of this I was
certain
—would assign the next draft of the first act to
me
.

And of course, I was wrong. Phil was excited by Roberto’s effort. So much so that he was assigning all of the MJ-Peter dialogue in the second act to Roberto. I smiled. I clomped home.
And I started writing e-mails.
I urged Bono and Edge to read the script immediately. Because maybe it was just ego, exhaustion, and churlishness making me think Phil and Roberto were taking the characters down the road to Vanillaville. I mean, really—jokes about
Applebee’s
?! I told the composers I was ready to resign. “Probably within the week.” I really was ready to quit, and—to my surprise—it felt good to say it. In fact, I was
hoping
Edge
and Bono responded with a shrug, because then I’d be
done
. But, nope, Edge called. After having read the script, he said: “I needed to pour myself a drink.” He was going to send “a howitzer of an e-mail” to Michael and Jere. Bono said similar words in a call an hour later.

Michael Cohl, of course, was sharing my fantasies about being free of the show. From the threats coming from Julie’s camp about litigation, to the complaints from his composers, it was the most tempting thing in the world to just close the show down and write the damn thing off come tax time. He told me “we either get something good done within a week or it’s over.”

Roberto, being a dramatist and, in his words, “a student of human nature,” could tell I was annoyed. So in a small office at PRG the next day he promised that the final draft would
not
be cheesy. It would be taut, entertaining, and—by trading pages back and forth until opening night—it would be of one voice.