Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (37 page)

“Be totally frank with me, Glen. I have no ego in this. I swear. Anything you want changed, change it! It’s done!”

I was swayed. I think we even hugged. I didn’t want Roberto demoted. As Edge wrote me later that week: “I think our prospects for success rest squarely on the new book. If you and Sacasa can thread the needle, I think we’re in business.”

Then adding: “No pressure!”

•     •     •

Friday, March 25. As the actors performed for yet another preview audience that evening, echoes of a
Turn Off the Dark
from a parallel universe sounded in their heads. Because that afternoon, they crowded into the conference room at PRG for their first read-through of
Turn Off the Dark
2.0.

There’s always a nervous excitement in the room on the first
day a new script is read. But this cast had already
had
that day.
Seven months ago
. This felt a little too much like attending the wedding of a groom’s second marriage, with no one wanting to talk about the spectacular failure of his first marriage. In addition to the nervous excitement, there was awkwardness. Julie’s absence was conspicuous. As was the absence of our four Geeks. Our Jameson, Michael Mulheren, gave me a big hug and said, “Just so you know—we all think it’s awful what Julie has been saying about you.” He was sitting down at the conference table before I processed his words, and now it was too late to ask him to elaborate.

Stephen Sondheim, in the lyrics compendium I had gotten for Christmas, nailed the source of my ambivalence about the new script:

[The content] has to be clear . . . but it must also be
mysterious
. . . . Something should remain unsaid, something just beyond our understanding. Of course, if it’s
only
mysterious, it’s condescending and pretentious and soon monotonous. . . . But if it’s only clear, it’s kitsch.

That was it.
Our new show was
kitsch.

And yet today in the reading there were laughs at lines that hadn’t seemed funny the day before (and they didn’t seem funny today either, but every new laugh just seemed to further prove that I was being a grouch). There was a delighted shock from the actors at discovering the sheer
extent
of the rewrite. And they had every reason to be shocked—it had been only a week and a half since Roberto, Phil, and I met for our first script meeting. And you could feel the morale of the company lifting as the scenes progressed; you could see hope flicker behind the actors’ eyes—
maybe they wouldn’t be out of a job come June after all
.

Patrick Page (who had seen his part expand more than any other) summed up the consensus of the actors afterward: “It’s clearer, funnier, and
shorter
.” Ken Marks (Uncle Ben), after first taking time to sing the praises of Julie’s vision, admitted that the original script and directing style were something of a straitjacket, with the skills of the actors suffocating under layers of “style.” Reeve, psyched, said, “It feels more like a hit, doesn’t it?” And Matthew James Thomas took me aside for hardly any words other than a very italicized
“Yes.”

But amid all the positivity in that PRG conference room, T. V. Carpio was undisguisedly miserable. She was miserable for her dear friend Julie; she was miserable because her part had been cut down to a sliver of what it had been; and she was miserable because—as far as she could tell—the new script sucked. If Phil couldn’t find a way to change her attitude, it was going to be a problem.

Meanwhile, Danny Ezralow was beginning to suspect a new choreographer was coming on board, and he was seriously contemplating having his union, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), pull all of his work from the show. All the dance and all the aerial work. The loom. Everything. If Michael Cohl and Phil couldn’t find a way to get through to him, it was going to be a problem.

Phil wanted to begin rehearsals on Tuesday, and so he wanted the actors to have a relatively final version of the first act in two days’ time. Even if Roberto was totally chill with having any line in the script changed to my satisfaction, Phil was a different story. In the name of giving these actors something they could start memorizing, he wanted to start locking this thing down.

And that was going to be a problem.

N
ear the end of March, I got an e-mail from Rob Bissinger on behalf of the design team: “Hey man: Why does the Goblin appear in a box? Is there an idea here? We’re trying to design a ‘Goblin Box.’ What
is
that?”

What indeed.

Geneticist Norman Osborn thought he had things under control, even as god-like visions of rewriting Creation danced in his eyes. So, in the end, what turned Norman Osborn into the Goblin?
Hubris
. The Green Goblin was a cackling, bright-hued personification of the warping effect that comes from overestimating your own capabilities.

But now consider what the composer Andrew Bird once said: “The only thing that separates a mess of seemingly disparate observations and a song is a moment of excessive confidence.”

He was being wry, but let’s take him at his word. What if there have been so many “egotistical” artists throughout history because
hubris is one of the tools in their toolkit? Like Popeye’s can of spinach, “excessive confidence”—in controlled doses, and timed correctly—is what gets the job done. However, if it’s the
main
tool in your kit, then you’ll probably end up flying too close to the sun, or flipping off the goddess of wisdom.

In other words—if you have relatively unsung artists volunteering to fix the work of
Julie Taymor
on the most expensive Broadway show of all time, and do it all in just three months, then chances are you’ll wind up with a Foxwoods full of dysfunction, overreaching, and ideas like the Goblin Box.

Which—I explained to Rob Bissinger—was just a big box delivered onstage to reveal the Green Goblin at the
Daily Bugle
.

“Well . . . instead of a box,” suggested Rob, “can’t we just reveal Goblin by having him swivel around in Jameson’s high-backed chair?”

That would work too.

When this new
Turn Off the Dark
gentrification project was launched, the indispensable Rob Bissinger was going to be shoved out, but he got a reprieve. Danny Ezralow, on the other hand, was still in exile. He called me one night from Los Angeles.

“So, Glen, have you met
Chase
yet? Chase
Brock
? Of ‘The Chase
Brock
Experience’?”

Danny Ezralow was putting a lot of ironic spin on that name. Danny was not amused that he—an award-winning, internationally-celebrated choreographer who hand-selected every dancer in the show and expressed a perfect willingness to work with
Spider-Man
’s new director—had been replaced with a twenty-seven-year-old tenderfoot best known for developing dance moves for a Broadway-themed Wii video game, and being the founder of a then five-year-old Brooklyn-based dance troupe called the Chase Brock Experience.

“Uh, no. Not yet.”

“Have you seen his work?”

“No.”

“Listen, Glen,” he said delicately. “Go online. Check it out. And just . . . tell me what you think. Tell me if you think the work of Chase
Brock
is up to the standards of what we’re trying to do.”

I went to YouTube. I saw some stuff. It was what it was. It was frolicky, and there were bright-colored underpants, and wiggling. I didn’t watch very carefully. I’m not the best assessor of dance. What I
did
know was that there was only one new song to stage (“A Freak Like Me”) and a couple of scenes in the second act that
might
require a choreographer’s assistance in reblocking. I told Danny there was neither the time nor the willingness to even
contemplate
additional choreography. Changes simply wouldn’t be happening.

“Well . . .” said Danny, chuckling in lieu of raging, “that’s not what I’m hearing.”

When Mr. Brock was fifteen, he took a plane to New York City from his home in North Carolina, and, with no previous New York theatre experience, landed a part in Susan Stroman’s 2000 revival of
The Music Man
. Two years later, he chutzpahed his way into becoming assistant choreographer on Kathleen Marshall’s revival of
Wonderful Town
. Four years after that, he founded a dance troupe that he named after himself. Obviously, this was a young man who knew how to find his “excessive confidence” switch.

And it enabled Chase, within a week of being hired on
Turn Off the Dark,
to identify which bits of Danny’s work could do with some refinements. In short,
all of them
. Practically every scene in the show was going to experience Chase Brock. The last nine months’ worth of dance rehearsals went up in smoke. Moves explored and rejected back in August were discovered and considered and rejected all over again as if for the first time. By the
last day in March, Erin Elliott—one of the dance captains—was meeting me for drinks, describing the scene in the dance studio in urgent, bewildered tones.

“He’s even adding movement for the weavers when they’re kneeling,” said Erin.

“What do you mean? If they’re kneeling, then what kind of movement could he be adding?”

Erin put the index finger of her right hand against the thumb of her left hand. Above that, she pressed the thumb of her right hand against the index finger of her left hand.

She’s not . . .

Erin pivoted one finger-thumb set while putting the lower finger-thumb set above the formerly higher finger-thumb set. And so on. Up and up.

“The weavers are doing ‘the eensy-weensy spider’?”

“Yes.”

“While Arachne is
transforming into a spider
.”

“Yes!”

“No. No fucking way. I don’t believe you.”

“Glen,
yes
.”

The dancers were stupefied—weren’t the problems with the show all having to do with the
script
? Why were all the
dances
changing? The few dancers that had banked on
less
work if Danny didn’t return were now getting a cruel cosmic comeuppance. And not only was all this reworking making for fatigue and frustration, it was also making for schizophrenia. The dance moves being performed at night were similar but different from the ones the dancers were rehearsing during the day. And if the exhausted dancers didn’t keep the two versions straight in their heads, the dance number would be botched, and worse, there was the risk of serious injury.

The challenges of this schizo lifestyle extended to the actors as
well. They had started memorizing new dialogue in the morning, rehearsing the new dialogue in the afternoon, and then performing with the old dialogue for their nightly performances. This situation would continue from the end of March until April 17, when
Turn Off the Dark
1.0 would have its final performance.

Even more difficult than keeping two sets of dialogue straight in the head was keeping two personalities straight. Jenn Damiano, in particular, was working hard to wrap her mind around an MJ so much less angst-ridden than the MJ she performed every night. In the current show, her “If the World Should End” was sung to a tormented, disoriented boyfriend as the city was seemingly being laid to waste by the Sinister Six. In the new version, Jenn sang “If the World Should End” snuggling on the fire escape, on a perfectly strife-free starlit evening, with her relaxed, charming boyfriend.

If Jenn Damiano were a plant, you would say she exhibited “negative phototropism.” Which is to say, she headed toward the darkness every time given half the chance. But Phil McKinley was determined not to give her that half-chance because, damn it, this was the new and improved
Turn Off the Dark,
now with fifty percent less “dark.” It wasn’t going to be an easy task. He had to coach this teen-anguish expert on how to make a song sound cheery and cozy even while its title was “If the World Should End.”

Blocks of hours were reserved for Phil to work exclusively with Jenn and Reeve. The hours were as much group therapy sessions as staging rehearsals. Phil wanted the two of them to shuffle off their brooding and furrowed brows, and start looking like they actually
enjoyed
each other’s company. And whether it was Phil’s counseling, or the hints of spring in the air, or just a surrendering to the inevitable, Reeve and Jenn
did
begin enjoying each other’s company. That spark that Danny and Julie pined for in vain back in the autumn had finally ignited.

However, there were pockets of resistance to Phil’s upbeatification program. Through the open door of her dressing room, I spied conductor Kimberly Grigsby sitting at her piano looking so demoralized. She
knew
the buttons Phil and Paul Bogaev wanted for some of the songs just
screamed
“musical theatre,” but Bono and Edge were on tour in South America, and so were only dimly aware of the changes being made to their songs. I wanted to tell Kimberly to keep fighting the good fight, but I feared that in her eyes I wasn’t a collaborator so much as a “collaborationist”—someone who cooperated with enemy occupiers.

And meanwhile, in the stage manager’s office, they asked me if I had heard the inspiring new motto for
Turn Off the Dark:
“Striving toward mediocrity!”

Stage managers are a cynical bunch.

“Have you fixed our show yet?” Kat Purvis asked as I walked into the office.

“Not yet!” I chirped.

It would become our standard greeting for the next two months, and it was packed every time with irony and rue. And whether I was chatting with stage managers, T. V. Carpio, or folks on the Tech staff, they all talked about what attracted them to the project in the first place, and then they all added the same bitter refrain: “This isn’t what I signed up for.”