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Contents

1 It’s Just a Play

2 Hello

3 A Falling Piano

4 The Four Geeks

5 Stages

6 It’s a Process

7 Goodbye “Hello,” Hello “Goodbye”

8 Smudge Sticking

9 The God Mike

10 We’re Not Ready

11 Breakdowns

12 Plotting

13 Plan X

14 The Serenity Coin

15 Spidenfreude; or, How Do You Want to Fail?

16 The Crucible

17 Mutate or Die

18 A Goblin in a Box and an Eensy-Weensy Spider

19 The Russian Hairdresser’s View of History

20 Rise Above

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About Glen Berger

Index

This book is for Karin Almquist

An honest-to-gosh, show-stopping glitch occurred, just as the title character of this new musical was about to vanquish or be vanquished by the evil Green Goblin. Never fully explained “mechanical difficulties” were announced by an amplified voice . . . And for the first time that night something like genuine pleasure spread through the house. . . .

Patrick Page (who plays the Goblin) ad-libbed a warning to Reeve Carney (who stars as Spider-Man), who had been awkwardly marking time by pretending to drink Champagne.

“You gotta be careful,” Mr. Page said. “You’re gonna fly over the heads of the audience, you know. I hear they dropped a few of them.”

“Roar,” went the audience, like a herd of starved, listless lions, roused into animation by the arrival of feeding time. Everyone, it seemed, understood Mr. Page’s reference to the injuries that have been incurred by cast and crew members during the long (and officially still far from over) preview period for this $65 million musical. Permission to laugh had been granted, and a bond had temporarily been forged between a previously baffled audience and the beleaguered souls onstage.

All subsequent performances of “Spider-Man” should include at least one such moment. Actively letting theatergoers in on the national joke that this problem-plagued show has become helps make them believe that they have a reason to be there.

This production should play up regularly and resonantly the promise that things could go wrong. Because only when things go wrong in this production does it feel remotely right . . .

—Ben Brantley, New York Times, February 7, 2011

JOAN MARCUS

1

It’s Just a Play

The four drinks I knocked back on an empty stomach in the empty VIP room were finally kicking in. The conversations around me in the crowded lobby had become amplified and muffled, like I was floating in a diving bell surrounded by a lot of classy-looking fish. Fine. Just so long as I didn’t have to talk to any of them. Any moment now, the lights were going to blink, and then we’d have to take our seats, and I’d be saved. Except, no, I’d still be screwed. Because there wasn’t a drug in the world that would make sitting through the show tonight anything but unremitting torture.

We were already thirty minutes behind schedule. They were holding the curtain because everyone was having such a fine time gabbing with each other. So I had to come up with a plan because hiding would be pathetic, but people were going to try to talk to me, or worse—congratulate me. It was opening night. And I was the cowriter. Giant letters spelled out my name on that building-sized sign out front. So congratulating me would seem like the thing to do. But this show was a special case, and I was a special case in this special case, and so collecting “congratulations” was like collecting a pile of wet socks.

Of course, I imagined it was a hundred times worse for her. And, oh man, how the two of us yattered so eagerly about this night once upon a time. To think there was a time when—no, I couldn’t think about any of that—I just had to walk purposefully and no one would stop me to talk. So I sidled past Bill Clinton and Lou Reed, Salman Rushdie, John McEnroe—it was like being trapped in an updated version of the Sgt. Pepper album cover. I figured I’d be fine so long as I didn’t run into her, because I wouldn’t know what to say. But I ran into someone else, and he immediately walked away which, like a sliding set piece, revealed . . . her. And I didn’t know what to say.

Julie Taymor. She was standing near the doors that led out to Forty-third Street. She wasn’t going to come at all tonight, which was boggling. Yet understandable. And, in being understandable, even more boggling. It had been three months since I’d last seen her, and the rush of old, cozy feelings smacked against The New Reality, and the impact made me just sick.

Even now, I carry the dream with me every day—to make up with her. So it all can be as sunny as it once was. Publishing a book detailing our six years together might not be the most effective way to achieve that. In fact, I was warned not to write about any of this. But I can’t help it—it’s a story, and that’s what we do with stories. We tell them. In fact, this whole book is a story about storytelling—the story of an epic attempt by earnest human beings to tell a story and to tell that story brilliantly. Only, there’s this:

Before something can be brilliant, it first has to be competent.

—from My List of Lessons Learned

One should probably begin the story of the making and remaking of a Broadway musical about Spider-Man with that hallowed day in 1962 when Stan Lee, along with illustrator Steve Ditko, came up with The Big Idea: Bullied high schooler acquires spider powers.

It’s a trim little setup. And just different enough to be revolutionary. Not only was this teenaged Peter Parker suddenly burdened with “great responsibilities,” he still had to run the every-day gauntlet every teenager has to run—the social troubles, the money troubles, the dermatological troubles . . .

A comic-book panel would depict a publisher sitting behind a cluttered desk in the cramped Madison Avenue offices of Marvel Comics staring at a sketch of a figure wearing a bodysuit covered in webbing. Lee and Ditko would be standing on the other side of the desk, looking on expectantly. The publisher would be looking . . . doubtful.

“Several months later . . .” would read the caption in our next panel. Lee and Ditko’s new superhero is swinging with a hoodlum under his arm on the cover of Marvel’s Amazing Fantasy #15. It’s our webslinger’s debut, and it’s in the final issue of an anthology series already slotted to be canceled. That’s how dubious the publisher was of this new “spider-man” idea.

The next comic-book panel would flash us forward forty years. It would be a split screen depicting the gleaming offices of media giant Marvel Entertainment on one side and the makeshift office of two almost-entirely-untested Broadway producers on the other. The producers are being informed via phone that they’ve just been granted the rights to make a musical out of Marvel’s most treasured property: Spider-Man. Exclamation points shine above the producers’ heads.

But if this is a story about storytelling cast through the prism of Spider-Man the Musical, then maybe we should be starting fifty-thousand years ago, back in a time when the world was teeming with Paleolithic ceremonies featuring singing, dancing, and human characters endowed with animal powers. In a large, single-paneled splash page, we would see two prehistoric figures arguing over just how their musical performance is supposed to go. On their hairy faces—anger, exasperation. Why? Because collaboration, by definition, requires humans to interact with each other. Which means every moment in a collaboration quivers with the potential for transcendental connection. And also fury, and hair-tearing frustration, and silences as icy as distant planets. Just look at Lee and Ditko. You think they had a falling-out? Of course they had a falling-out.

Another scene to ink and color: a twenty-first-century living room, somewhere in the United States, or Sweden, or South America. Children have commandeered couch cushions and bathrobes. One of them is pretending to be Spider-Man. By the looks of it, their pretending includes a large cast of characters and an elaborate plot.

Storytelling. It’s what homo sapiens do. We do it as automatically as a pancreas produces insulin. We’re compelled to codify otherwise-random events into cause and effect. Into patterns. Into narrative. It’s a drive that in part makes humans so human. And it’s a hunger that drove the creators of this confounded musical (as well as its audiences) into spasms of excitement, disappointment, and a few dozen other emotions as the show careened down the long road to its much-delayed opening night.

And it’s why my last comic-book panel would depict a scene from opening night. I would draw it in an emo-manga style, with a smudged, cocktail-sipping crowd in the background. In the foreground, a woman with flowing hair framing sad-smiling eyes is regarding the addled-looking man in front of her. The man’s heart is on his sleeve, his tongue is in a knot, and in the banner at the top of the panel, that poor schmuck’s thoughts from over a year later are revealed:

I loved her. I still do.

With heart-scarred bewilderment,

I love her. . . .

And the thing of it is . . . she despises me.

Julie Taymor despises me with photograph-shredding rage. Or so I hear. Though maybe by now she’s past caring. After all, it’s been thirty months since that last phone call; that last lit match on a kerosene-doused relationship, six years of collaboration KAFWOOOSH! . . .

Sure, yes, maybe she’s moved on. But I doubt it. While I was writing this book, teams of lawyers were busy submitting suits and countersuits. Among other demands, Julie wanted half of my money. And I wasn’t about to give it to her.

Here’s what happened. . . .

Or—wait—let me say one more thing first.

I am aware—I really am—that the following pages contain metaphors more appropriate for an account of an amputation tent in the Crimean War; adjectives best saved for the Apollo space program or the Bataan Death March. Next to events of actual weight, I know this whole thing sounds self-important as hell.

That said, for those who lived through this odyssey, very high stakes were involved, and very real costs were exacted, and I wouldn’t want to minimize that fact. And so it is with simultaneous irony, bitterness, and innocent awe that I state this (because I know it, but I’m going to forget it):

This book? It’s about a play.

Just a play.

Just a fucking play.

Okay. Here’s what happened. . . .

2

Hello

There once were two men with little in common. Tony Adams was an Irishman whose charm was off the charts. In 1975—and only twenty-two, mind you—he coproduced The Return of the Pink Panther. This movie would turn out to be the first of several films he worked on with both Peter Sellers and director Blake Edwards. Soon bloomed a deep, lifelong friendship and artistic partnership with both Blake Edwards and Blake’s wife, Julie Andrews. The three of them shared the belief that one of a producer’s greatest tasks was to conjure up the circumstances by which artists can create their best work.

As Julie Andrews (as Mary Poppins) once explained: “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and—snap!—the job’s a game.” Tony carried this principle with him throughout his career. If it’s going to be a drudge, then what’s the point? Thirteen years after coproducing the film Victor/Victoria, Tony—for his most significant theatrical credit—shepherded a musical adaptation of it to Broadway.

Tony then began working for billionaire Dutch media tycoon and theatre producer Joop van den Ende. He developed a show titled Oh What a Night. The script wasn’t working, so Tony eased the writers off the project and brought on scribes Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice. The script was renamed Jersey Boys. But somehow the rights lapsed, and Tony lost the property. Jersey Boys would open in four years’ time to profits galore, but none of those profits would go to Tony.

Unbowed, Tony launched Hello Entertainment. Why “Hello”? Because that was the name of his “business entity” back in the 1960s when he was just a teenager living in Dún Laoghaire. A budding impresario, young Tony was booking rock bands and clearing a few quid, but was at a loss for office space. So Tony had the phone number of a local pub printed on his business card along with HELLO, figuring odds were fair the publican would answer the phone with a “hello.” Or not. Bit of a wheeze, worth a shot at any rate.

And now Tony, nearing fifty, had resurrected that wink-of-a-name from his youth for a production company whose specialty would be to bring popular culture to the stage. He was going to find already branded entertainment ripe for adaptation, and reconfigure it for Broadway. This was 2001—no one but Disney was trying to do this in any concerted way. For his crew at Hello to get their feet wet, Tony selected a project called Star Trek Forever. He envisioned the show as just some fun—a limited-run event slotted to open in London in time for an enormous Star Trek convention there in 2002.

Are you feeling torn

Because you fought a Gorn?

Are you stuck between a Horta and a real hard place?

Yeah, sights weren’t set very high on this one.

•     •     •

Financing was still up in the air when our second man came into the picture: David Garfinkle. David was primarily an entertainment lawyer from Chicago, and he was . . . less charismatic, but that was hardly his fault. Different people are born different people. A kind fellow, certainly, and pure-heartedly enthusiastic about bringing popular culture to the stage. And did it matter that he wasn’t as charismatic as Tony? Yes, it did matter. Not then, though. It would matter a great deal later, but not in 2001, when Tony and David first met each other in Sag Harbor during the intermission of a one-woman show about Janis Joplin. The two of them hit it off, and soon Tony was getting legal advice from David for Star Trek Forever. David had a Rolodex of contacts, cultivated over years of working with clients in television and film such as Paramount Pictures and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. Tony invited David to come on board Hello. Finding investors—that would be David’s bailiwick.

Though strictly business partners, Tony and David assiduously attended couples counseling to ensure their collaboration would thrive. They were swinging for the fences, you see, and that was going to require Trust, and it was going to require Communication. These capitalized words are going to come up a lot in this story.

Meanwhile, Marvel and Sony were working on a movie called Spider-Man, directed by Sam Raimi. It opened in summer 2002 to lunatic grosses. Marvel was eager to capitalize on their superhero’s newfound level of popularity any way they could. They had already fielded calls from several interested theatrical producers, including the Nederlander Organization—one of the largest operators of live theatre. However, Michael Parker, who worked in licensing at Marvel, remembered meeting a guy a few years back—a producer who had both the savvy and graciousness or, really, the humanity to serve this material properly. He gave Tony Adams a call.

Hello Entertainment was a production company without any producing credits. Yet, by the end of that summer, Tony Adams and David Garfinkle had persuaded Marvel to give them a chance to put Marvel’s precious property on the Broadway stage. How did they swing this? Did I mention Tony was charming?

Armed with provisional stage rights, Tony contacted fellow Irishman Paul McGuinness. Back in the early seventies, a young Paul McGuinness worked as a film technician for director John Boorman (Deliverance), which was how eighteen-year-old film assistant Tony Adams first met Paul. By the end of the 1970s, Paul McGuinness had dropped his work in film to become manager of a rock band called U2, consisting of four ambitious Irish teenagers.

So now, decades later, with Paul McGuinness’s encouragement, Tony and David Garfinkle were flying to Dublin. They were going to court Bono and The Edge of U2. U2. The “biggest band in the world,” according to a number of metrics and a consensus of critics. The scheme was pie in the sky of course. But upon returning home, Tony received a fax from Paul with the composers’ answer: Yes.

The fax contained more news: Literally just down the street from Edge and Bono lived acclaimed Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan. The two musicians popped down the road. “Hey, Neil—how about writing the script for our little show?” So Hello Entertainment now had Neil Jordan on the team as well.

Now it just so happened that two of Neil’s films were scored by his friend, composer Elliot Goldenthal. Elliot’s longtime domestic and artistic partner was none other than Tony Award–winning, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship recipient Julie Taymor, whose last Broadway project was the multibillion-dollar grossing The Lion King.

So through Neil Jordan, Hello approached Julie to be Spider-Man’s director. She was intrigued by the idea. But she was busy developing other theatre projects (including an adaptation of Pinocchio for Disney). She wasn’t going to get involved unless she could find a narrative something to spark her imagination; to ensure the show wouldn’t be just a by-the-numbers work-for-hire.

And during a forty-eight-hour creative binge, poring through comic books supplied to her by a volunteer geek, something in the first issue of the Ultimate Spider-Man series caught her eye. There on the first page, in the second panel, the character Norman Osborn recounts the myth of Arachne. Arachne was an artist so talented, and so intoxicated by her talent, that she refused to humble herself before anyone, even the goddess Athena. Ovid narrated in his Metamorphoses that when Arachne mocked Athena in a weaving contest, the irate goddess destroyed Arachne’s tapestry. In response, Arachne hanged herself with one of the tattered remnants of her own work. But! Athena didn’t allow Arachne to die. Instead, she transformed the girl into the world’s first spider. Arachne, an artist condemned to the shadows; Arachne, weaving her gossamer threads for eternity; Arachne, the future mother of all spiders. Arachne. There we go—Spark, meet Tinder. Julie had her hook. She called Tony. She was in.

In Ireland, in February 2003, Julie introduced Arachne to her new collaborators. They would meet again in the South of France, enthusiastically spinning musical and narrative ideas. By March 2004, Marvel had signed off on the creative team and, nine months after that, Neil Jordan delivered a twenty-two-page treatment to Julie, outlining the thirty scenes of their prospective musical.

What Julie read that January was detailed, imaginative, dark, and dauntingly . . . cinematic.

Neil Jordan has almost always been the author of the films he has directed. Mona Lisa, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy—Mr. Jordan can point to an impressive résumé as a writer. But he had never written for the theatre. And when Julie encouraged him to let his imagination run free, he gravitated toward scenes with complicated effects that would be almost impossible to render on a stage.

Julie delivered a wildebeest stampede in The Lion King. If you can serve up a wildebeest stampede, what can’t you deliver on a stage? Well, really scrutinize that stampede. Because you first hear the distant rumbling of hooves, but no, snap out of it—those aren’t hooves, they’re kettledrums. And on the horizon, that blurry herd kicking up dust and getting nearer? They’re just paintings of animals on a long scroll that’s spinning fast. There’s no dust, no horizon. And they’re not getting nearer—larger wildebeest puppets have simply been introduced. And the charging wildebeests now full-sized and practically on top of you? They don’t even look like wildebeests—they’re dancers with hairy pants and horned shields stamping their feet to louder drums. And Julie staged it this way because her objective wasn’t to render reality. It was to make an impression.

So, it was really Neil Jordan the screenwriter who described in his treatment how Peter and Mary Jane’s big second-act love song “is interrupted by a wind, which drags hats, umbrellas, deckchairs, even a little girl in its wake. Peter grabs the little girl, holds her to the trunk of a swaying tree. Then, freezing rain, encasing everyone in icicles . . .”

His treatment depicted Norman Osborn as a fanatical scientist who becomes disfigured during a laboratory experiment. However, in Neil Jordan’s telling, Norman Osborn never becomes the Green Goblin, and the narrative’s primary villain is Arachne. Continuing a predilection seen in such films of his as The Crying Game or The Miracle, Mr. Jordan zeroed in on Arachne’s potential for sexual unorthodoxy. Norman Osborn, flirting with the disguised Arachne, “strokes Arachne’s shoe, remarks on the delicacy of the foot beneath it. ‘There are more where that came from,’ she remarks, whereupon another foot probes his crotch, reducing him to paroxysms of ecstasy. . . . More and more legs emerge and twine around him, and his song of ecstasy becomes a wail of terror . . .”

Mr. Jordan’s culminated with Spider-Man vanquishing the unrepentant spider-woman. Peter sends her “hurtling toward the dark waters of the Hudson” to her death.

“It was all and always you,” sings Mary Jane.

“I loved you. And he loved you,” Peter sings.

“But you are he. Even now you love me.”

And Peter Parker bends down toward Mary Jane, turning upside down on his web, and kisses her again.

The End.

After reading what Neil had delivered, Tony and Julie gave Neil their notes. Or rather, their one note: They were cutting him loose. The awkwardness of the situation wasn’t lost on Julie. After all, Neil had brought her onto the project in the first place. It pained her that their friendship went into the freezer as a result. But as she sighed to me during an elevator ride years later, “I’m not sure what else I could have done.”

3

A Falling Piano

In 2005, my friend Jules was working as Julie Taymor’s personal assistant. I learned through her that Julie and the producers had begun searching for a new writer. Or rather, a new cowriter. To avoid being disappointed a second time, Julie was going to get more involved in the generation of Spider-Man’s story and dialogue (known as the musical’s “book”).

Celebrated playwrights like Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard were considered and dismissed. Finally, a handful of playwrights were asked to deliver a scene based on a two-page “vision” of the musical that Julie had penned the year before. But dialogue is generally the least interesting part of a Julie Taymor production. Giving Julie a few pages of the stuff seemed to me like a recipe for disappointment.

So I didn’t submit a scene. Instead, I turned in a treatise explaining why I wouldn’t be submitting a scene. I raged, I rambled, I explained Julie Taymor’s entire career to her. I spewed half-baked ideas for ten dense pages and ended it all with “Or perhaps not. Anyway, it’s a thought.” It read like I was on drugs.

I was simply wiped out meeting writing deadlines for PBS, and distracted coraising two toddlers. And, most of all, I just wasn’t taking the assignment seriously because I knew there was no way I was landing this gig. Yes, I had pages of sparkling pull-quotes, and yes, I had been following Julie’s career half my life. In fact, it was painfully obvious (to me) that out of the five billion writers in this universe, I was the writer they were looking for. But. C’mon. Julie Taymor? Bono? Spider-Man? There was no way I was landing this gig.

But Julie had actually seen my Off-Broadway play Underneath the Lintel, and something in it resonated with her. Tony and Julie read my ravings, were intrigued enough to request an interview, and that next week, on a sunny Saturday in May, I was ringing the bell to Julie’s Union Square office.

I left an hour later with my brain fizzing. Tony had this warm, casual-yet-stylish vibe that put you immediately at ease, as if he had just handed you a mimosa. And Julie? Her aura cleared the sinuses. We three sat at that long table of white-painted wood—Julie’s artwork from a thirty-year madly inspired career decorating the walls—and I didn’t want to have to leave this place, this world where spring breezes wafted in through loft windows, and everything that hit the eye was pleasing. I wanted to soak in it, for a while at least, yes, absolutely—what did I have to do to make that happen? Write a scene? I’ll have it for you tomorrow.

So, up late that night I settled on a setup that had the Green Goblin hoisting a grand piano to the spire of the Chrysler Building. We’d have him sing something cocktail-loungey and unhinged—why not? I had nothing to lose. I typed out a scene containing lots of puppet-violence, beginning with the Green Goblin proposing a partnership with his archenemy, and ending with the Goblin pushing a Steinway off a skyscraper only to be sent to his own death because he didn’t realize he was attached to the piano by Spider-Man’s webbing. A little inelegant, but whatever.

Birds had begun twittering outside my window; the sun was rising. I hit SEND. That afternoon my cell phone rang. It was Julie. I was the new bookwriter for Spider-Man the Musical.

So, yes, this scene got me the job; and yes, it was that easy; and yes, this same scene . . . this same scene would lead to Julie’s dismissal from the Spider-Man project. The scene I wrote that night would lead to lawsuits, shattered friendships . . . tears . . . scandal . . . rigmarole . . .

But all that would come much later. It was nothing but innocence on May 15, 2005, when Julie and I rendezvoused at her Upstate New York country house to dive into the story. We didn’t take a break. If we did, I don’t remember it. What I remember was how I kept staring at my new cowriter. She was mesmerizing. Her movements, her gestures—even when she wasn’t paying attention to them—had not only a grace, but a precision.

Dance traditions from around the world have catalogued the kinetic phrases that most potently connote emotion and drama. Anyone can study them, but a dancer’s body intuitively understands them. Julie possessed this talent (when she was sixteen, she even lived on her own in Paris studying mime), and it was undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools in her kit. It meant she could more effectively elucidate, intimidate, captivate, and otherwise persuade. And in Julie’s business—whether it’s pitching a project to investors or getting her collaborators to embrace a vision—persuasion was the name of the game.

So, there we were at her country house, brainstorming, and at one point she stood up to describe yet another idea—this one had Peter Parker visited by Arachne in a dream and becoming entwined in web silks coming out of their hands. . . . And this graceful, intense, and absolutely erotic Indian dance Julie was suddenly executing changed the room, excited the particles in the air—how else to put it—cast the spell. Where had this woman been all my life? When she was on, when she was in it, she transformed a room like a traveling carnival transforms a parking lot.

And her brain never stopped. It was all Art all the time. We drove to the train station the next morning, and while we stood on opposite platforms waiting for different trains, we gleefully shouted new ideas to each other across the tracks, as commuters looked up from their Times to furrow their brow. She understood IT—that you’ve got to get obsessive, that only fanatics create something of any worth.

Three nights later, I was at a New Dramatists function. New Dramatists is a sanctuary for those playwrights who have the good fortune to be selected for one of the organization’s seven-year residencies. Julie’s personal lawyer, Seth Gelblum, was speaking to me. He happened to be on the New Dramatists Board, and as I was drinking my beer he was confiding in me and killing my buzz.

“You’re about to jump into some seriously deep water. You have no idea the amount of money and expectation riding on this project. And there are some extremely . . . challenging . . . personalities that you’re going to have to contend with. But you’re the right person to do this. You’ll be fine.”

“That’s good, because you’re freaking me out.”

Seth then leaned in close and said, “But I’m going to give you some advice. Whatever you do, whatever happens, stick with Julie.”

Then and there I decided to follow this advice single-mindedly. For once, I wasn’t going to neurotically parse it or add caveats. I would hew closely to this blessedly easy set of instructions and, in doing so, win the grand prize. And seriously, why wouldn’t I “stick with Julie”?

An hour later, a car was taking Tony Adams, David Garfinkle, Julie, and me to the Meadowlands. We were all off to see “the boys.” Bono and Edge were still smarting over Julie’s decision to give friend Neil Jordan the boot, and they were even more dubious after reading my résumé. So, they insisted on meeting this new bookwriter before signing off.

U2’s Vertigo Tour was on its way to becoming the highest-grossing tour of the year, featured on magazine covers all summer long. In a few minutes they’d be performing in front of twenty thousand, but at the moment they were offering us cans of Bud from a metal bucket in a small room somewhere in the backstage warren of the Meadowlands.

There was conviviality, there was small talk, but I kept my mouth shut, and thought about U2’s back catalogue. Twenty-five years they’ve been putting out albums. How was it I only knew three of their songs?

Bono clapped me on the shoulder—“Your problem, meanwhile, is that you’re too bashful.”

“Ah, give me a chance!”

Now Bono was looking me in the eyes.

“This has to be brilliant. Do you understand? It has to be.”

There was no mistaking his sincerity—he had absolutely no interest in doing something that wasn’t bloody genius. Otherwise he would walk away. In survival mode, I got animated, swung my hands about, gave him my word—no, no, no, absolutely, if it killed us, we were going to deliver an experience that would blow minds.

Bono threw a glance to Julie—“You’re sure about this one?” I could see doubt, terror, rising behind her eyes, and now she was shaking my shoulders—“You better write something brilliant, you hear?!”

I nodded. I had already decided not to tell them about the three other writing jobs I’d committed to that summer.

The concert began with a spellbinding cascade of luminescence while a ringing guitar riff—as iconically “Edge” as a riff can get—built in tension and complexity until the band erupted into their recently released “City of Blinding Lights.” Right away this concert was confirming what I imagine all playwrights feel whenever they watch a rock concert: Plays blow.

If only a play could replicate those first seconds of a rock concert—those moments mad with anticipation and excitement. Eight bars on Edge’s guitar and a whole stadium was galvanized. The immediacy, the rawness, the sexuality, the spectacle, the relevance, the passion, those monster lights, and that massive sound—was this what we were shooting for with Spider-Man? Was this where everyone’s head was at? I spent the entire concert raising the bar for our show ever skyward.

But the real revelation for me at that concert: Until tonight, for whatever ignorant reasons, I thought Bono and Edge were wrong for this project. But tonight I heard both a mischievousness in their music, as well as a dead-earnest, aching yearning for justice, grace, humility, and transcendence. In other words, I heard the soul of our superhero. I was ready to bow down to Tony Adams—he was a genius.

But he wanted pages. Immediately. Yesterday. Progress was beginning to stall because I was having a hard time selling Julie on my ideas. So I headed to Julie’s country home to hash out the story yet again. But I couldn’t get enthusiastic about anything she was pitching, and meanwhile she was looking at me like I was speaking Urdu.

Finally, I blurted, “You know, Julie, in a certain light, Spider-Man the Musical is kind of a ridiculous idea.”

Julie frowned, furrowed her brow, and said, “Ridiculous? I don’t think so. No.”

She wasn’t just serious, she was solemn. I stammered out a “Oh—but in a certain—well, no, I didn’t really think that either.” But now I was scared. I just assumed everyone thought this project was potentially ridiculous. Obviously it wouldn’t be ridiculous by opening night, because Julie Taymor would make sure of that. But—hoo—was I really working with someone who hadn’t once entertained the notion that perhaps a musical about Spider-Man was . . . just . . . you know . . . ludicrous?

Another week went by. Having no choice, I turned in what I had—a long-winded treatment of the first act. Tony and Julie were “very unhappy” with this product. I had blown it. I couldn’t convince Julie of my vision for the show, and now she was ready to sack me. So be it. It was fun while it lasted. But then personal assistant Jules called me to say she had just overheard her boss telling Tony she didn’t want me fired. She, in fact, “loved working with Glen.” And, my God, to the point of tears, I loved working with her. And here she had rededicated herself to our collaboration! My loyalty to her was now complete. I vowed I would move my radio dial to her frequency and keep it there. So I headed to the New Amsterdam to scrutinize The Lion King once again.

And here was something that hadn’t struck me before: When Scar and Simba fight, they lock arms, make a half-revolution, and break. That’s it. That’s the fight. It isn’t a real fight; it isn’t even a dance-interpretation of a fight. It’s a signifier for a fight. On one level, it’s incredibly unsatisfying—where’s the action? Julie unfolds new tableaux in front of us, and what we get is an illusion of action. In fact, a single scene is almost always anchored by just a single image, a single gesture. Julie—as she herself had noted in myriad interviews—had been drawn to this approach ever since she was an undergraduate studying under Herbert Blau at Oberlin. Distill and keep distilling, said Blau, until you have the essence—a gesture, a moment, pulsing with narrative power, unencumbered by distracting detail. Blau called this the “ideograph.”

And what medium came closest to expressing this ideal? Of taking an audience frame by frame, as it were, through a story, each frame designed for maximum impact, always with an ethic of economy in both word and gesture? Yeah. Comic Books. This beautiful, ancient-souled woman knew exactly what she was doing: a Spider-Man musical—there was nothing ludicrous in that. How could I ever have thought otherwise? I saw with newfound clarity that I had to start trusting Julie’s instincts. And Julie and Tony had to stop looking to me to lead the way in this treatment. Julie could only direct what she understood. And Julie couldn’t understand what I had been pitching to her. In fact, it seemed like she could only understand what came from her. And it seemed like somewhere in Julie’s brain was the entire story she wanted to tell, and therefore the most helpful thing I could do was to tease it out of her. I went back to Julie’s country house reborn. Within two weeks, we were finishing the last scenes of the treatment.

“So what shall we call the fight between Arachne and Peter? ‘Last Dance of the Spiders’?”

Julie’s eyes lit up. “Oh—no—it has to be a tarantella!”

“A tarantella?”

“A tarantella! Like Captain Hook in Peter Pan! ‘Methinks I see a spark! A gleam! A glimmer of a plan! / In which perhaps it may redeem me honor as a man!’ ”

I guarantee you she hadn’t seen Peter Pan for forty-five years. For day-to-day details, Julie’s memory was spotty at best. But discussing theatre with her? It was like hanging out at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts reference desk.

•     •     •

So we did it. Before the end of July, a twenty-page treatment was completed, taking the reader scene by scene through the proposed musical, with made-up song titles for the eighteen songs yet to be written. We sent the document straight to Avi Arad, chief creative officer of Marvel Entertainment. Approval was right around the corner.

Or . . . maybe not. Within two weeks of receiving the treatment, Avi had rejected it. Flat out.

“The concept is entirely wrong and the tone of the treatment, which is quite dark, is not what Marvel anticipated receiving at all.”

“Does that mean maybe he didn’t like it?” I asked Tony.

“Get Arachne out of the script or we’re done,” said Avi.

“If Arachne’s out, then I’m out,” said Julie.

“There’s still a bit of a divide between Avi and Julie,” said Tony Adams to me delicately one day in October. “You’re going to have to find a way to bridge the divide. I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

“Righto.”

“We need both Avi and Julie on board.”

Undoubtedly.

But the divide was unbridgeable. In August and September, while Julie shot her film Across the Universe in New York, Tony was busy mediating a series of heated chats between Avi and Julie. “Some people look really calm on the outside,” Bono once observed, “but deep down, they are cauldrons. They’re boiling with nervous energy.” Tony continued to present his consistently calm presence, but privately he was swallowing a lot of anxiety pills.

At least things were moving forward on the contractual front. On October 20, with the legal issues finally hammered out by lawyers, and with Julie’s and Bono’s signatures already procured, Tony popped down to Edge’s SoHo apartment with the deal memo. After some optimistic chat between Tony, Edge, and Paul McGuinness, Edge exited the room to fetch a pen. His signature was the last one Tony needed, so Edge planned to crack open some champagne for the three of them in just a bit. Tony smiled at Paul, gave a thumbs-up, looked back at the contract, and shuddered.

He was looking at a stack of stapled pages on a coffee table, a black leather couch, faces, a water tower, autumn leaves through a window. Then blood leaked in his head. It compressed his brain.

As Edge was coming back into the room, he heard his manager asking with escalating urgency: “Tony? Tony. What’s wrong?” With eyes rolling back in his head, Tony slumped onto the table. Edge held the unconscious man while he and Paul waited for the ambulance. Two days later, at the age of fifty-two, Tony Adams was dead.

•     •     •

Friends and family from Ireland congregated at a nearby pub after Tony’s memorial service, and there they spoke movingly to me of Tony’s devotion to the Spider-Man project. And perhaps as a consequence, for the next five years I was afflicted with magical thinking, confident that Tony was watching over us from above, ready to pull a cosmic string when we needed it, as if he were Obi-Wan Kenobi or something.

I was eventually well cured of that.

But for a good month after the memorial service, I even continued to call Tony’s cell phone, addicted to the sound of a dead man’s voice asking me to leave a message. I left him updates on the show’s progress, though it wasn’t a pretty picture. With the lead producer gone, and the treatment a nonstarter with Marvel, prospects for the show looked bleak.

But David Garfinkle, who had taken over as head of Hello, continued to schedule meetings in the hope that we could nudge the treatment in a Marvel-friendly direction. By the end of 2005, Avi was hinting at a new willingness to consider the inclusion of Arachne. A revised treatment was drafted and delivered to Marvel in January 2006.

We were confident that the outline now conformed to Avi’s (softened) demands. But January turned to February. No word from Avi. Calendar pages flew away, March became April, and there was still no word from Avi.

On a splendid spring afternoon on the Taconic Parkway, I was pulled over, slapped with a speeding ticket, and now the world seemed an especially small-minded, malevolent place. I called David Garfinkle. “Damn it, David, we’ve done what was asked of us. Is this show ever going to happen?!”

David, as matter of fact, had news.

It turned out—though no one bothered to inform Hello Entertainment—that Avi Arad had been in the process of leaving Marvel. So the treatment spent a forlorn winter in Avi’s inbox before it was eventually brought to the attention of new chief creative officer David Maisel.

“And,” David Garfinkle reported to me on the phone, “Maisel has finally replied.”

Apparently David Maisel expressed some concerns about the sexuality in the story, and about secondary characters overshadowing Peter Parker and Mary Jane. Nevertheless, Hello Entertainment had been granted a green light, accompanied by David Maisel’s sincere hopes that fruitful collaboration lay ahead.

Keep pulling those strings, Tony . . .

4

The Four Geeks

We already knew Spider-Man was going to be one of the bigger shows Broadway had seen in over half a century—it was going to have a bigger budget, a bigger publicity machine, and some gargantuan technical demands. And David Garfinkle had never produced a play. A single play. Ever. So the British producer Martin McCallum, who helped shepherd Miss Saigon and Les Misérables to the stage, was brought on by David Garfinkle to be “line producer.” Martin lived in Australia, but when the time was right, he would move to New York and carry on in the role Tony Adams was meant to play. Meanwhile, Bono and Edge were instructed to start composing music, because a crucial staged reading was just twelve months away.

Julie flew to Èze, in the South of France, to meet with them. As Julie explained to her co-bookwriter: the last time she had gone to the French Riviera to meet with our composer/lyricists, Neil Jordan was the fourth member of the creative team.

“So best not to bring you over this time, Glen. Emotions are still a bit brittle.”

Still?

“I want to pave the way for you. But next time, I promise.”

In France, Julie took Bono and Edge step by step through the treatment, and the boys played Julie a half-dozen songs. Rough demos. Just themes, really. They didn’t have any lyrics yet. Bono sang extemporaneously over the tracks in a language Edge called (in Bono’s honor) “bongelese”—a smattering of intelligible words and phrases mixed with a lot of random phonemes. Over the deeply somber piano chords of what would become the anthem “Rise Above,” Bono sang:

Cause the sense is in the side

Cause the marble’s in the slow

And the sheepers in your heart

In batten you will grow . . .

On the page it’s silliness, but with the music, it really wasn’t. In fact, in song after song, the emotional content was so clear and untainted by left-brain comprehension I began to wonder whether I was going to prefer bongelese to the lads’ actual lyrics.

The tunes themselves were exciting. Everyone thought so. Julie captured them on a shabby miniature tape recorder as Edge played the songs from his computer. But through the wobble and distortion, we could hear that the demos were mysterious, playful, varied . . . theatrical.

“Arachne’s Theme” was a series of descending notes that managed to sound ancient, grand, and foreboding. And a riff they called “Boy Falls From the Sky” was going to be the driving electric-guitar-fueled hit of our musical. Which, according to David Garfinkle’s schedule, was opening in previews in Chicago on August 21, 2008. Two years from today. So it was time to start writing that script. Julie might suggest a line or two, but I was expected to generate all the dialogue. I then had to submit it all to Julie. If she rejected a word or a sentence, there would be no arguing—just a frogmarch back to the keyboard.

Julie liked her scenes written with concision, and always with an eye toward how it would play a hundred rows back. So our main characters had to be designed with the capacity to be played big while retaining their integrity. We couldn’t have the actors resort to shtick and mugging. So Peter Parker would be a charmingly fumbling teenager. He’d have an endearing, self-deprecating humor whenever he was around his unrequited love or confronted with bullies looking to do him harm. I had Peter covered. And newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson? He was already well established in the last forty years of comic books, TV episodes, and movies as an obsessive, cigar-chomping, self-righteous, self-promoting penny-pincher. He was like a stock character out of commedia dell’arte—a form Julie had often dipped into, most recently in her Green Bird on Broadway. You couldn’t ask for a more “theatrical” character. Arachne had no dialogue until the final scene of the show, so I wasn’t going to worry about her quite yet. The Green Goblin? In my audition scene, he was a Tom Waitsian carnival barker. A loose-limbed philosophizer, with wild mood swings and a happy unawareness of other people’s personal space. Standard supervillain/trickster tropes, but no point reinventing the wheel.

But what about Goblin’s pre-supervillain incarnation as scientist Norman Osborn? Julie was unimpressed by the character in the first movie, as embodied by Willem Dafoe. She felt a soulless entrepreneur wasn’t a fraction as sympathetic or compelling as, say, Alfred Molina’s scientist in Spider-Man 2. In that film, Otto Octavius’s earnest desire to save the world through technology led to his accidental transformation into supervillain Doctor Octopus.

So we’d make Norman Osborn a brilliant scientist and humanitarian who believed that “speeding up evolution” was the only way to save humanity from Earth’s imminent ecological implosion. However, Norman’s fears that competitors would steal his work would lead him to rush his research, resulting in his accidental transformation into the Green Goblin.

At Èze, Edge remembered encounters with media mogul Ted Turner. Bono jumped at this, recalling the time they went for a walk in the fields with Ted and his assistant. Ted was holding forth on one topic after another when suddenly he spied a snake on the ground and reached to pick it up. His assistant cautioned him that it was a poisonous copperhead, which Ted dismissed.

“That’s no copperhead.”

“But—”

“Nah, the hell it is, honey, the—ah GEEZ, you’re right!”

Ted jumped back in fear and then, not missing a beat, added, “Hey, I’m gonna keep her.” And right on talking and trudging through the tall grass he went.

An enthusiastic, fast-talking genius from Georgia with a soapbox always at the ready. Someone who could launch into the patter of an auctioneer or preach salvation like a Baptist minister with the zeal of The Music Man’s Henry Hill? Yeah, I could work with that. And hey, maybe we’d slow down that Southern accent once he was the Goblin. It would add a dash of Klansman, which would go just fine with the Goblin’s embrace of a perverse eugenics.

The song demos played in an endless loop as I typed. Haunting, some of these songs, there was no doubt about it. Scene by scene the script began to take shape. The writing that September would have been going just fine, in fact, if it hadn’t been for . . . the Geeks.

Julie feared that getting through the whole “origin story” before the end of Act One would be impossible without some narration. Before I was hired, she came up with the idea for a “Geek Chorus.” She claimed the pun was unintentional, but the concept for the Geeks was certainly similar to the role of the classical Greek chorus: Four teenagers—three boys and a girl—would remain onstage for the entire show, comment on the action, wax philosophical, and fill us in on all the plot points we didn’t have the time or wherewithal to dramatize. Employing a Geek Chorus was a good idea.

Wasn’t it?

Yes.

Probably.

We weren’t sure, actually. If they voiced the confused thoughts and feelings of Peter, it would eliminate the need for endless monologues. That would be helpful. They could add four spirited backup voices to any song. They could juice the whole show with fanboy passion. They could convey comically yet sincerely the veneration that comic books command.

In theory, these were sound reasons to write a Geek Chorus into the show. But we decided to add a few more rules: They would have to sound like teenagers today. Fine. But no contemporary slang could be used, because what was hip today was dated tomorrow. So instead they’d speak in an argot that we would invent. Well . . . okay. That worked for West Side Story, I suppose. Oh—and to set these four teens apart from the rest of the characters in the show, they should speak in verse. Rhyming verse. But Julie was allergic to hip-hop, so even though everything that rhymes these days inevitably sounds like hip-hop, it mustn’t sound like hip-hop. But it shouldn’t sound like Dr. Seuss either. Or Gilbert and Sullivan. And the four characters should each have a distinct personality. But every now and then they should speak in unison. And they absolutely must be funny.

I didn’t blanch. I have an indefatigable confidence in my writing abilities, so I took this assignment and ran with it. After an hour, I blanched. I was sure I’d figure out how to write the Geeks eventually. Hell yeah, I’d figure it out. . . . Eventually.

•     •     •

By the beginning of October, a ragged version of Act One was completed—just in time for a two-day summit in Bono’s Upper West Side penthouse apartment. I didn’t know U2’s music the first time I met Bono and Edge—it was easier to be indifferent around them. But now I was a hard-core fan, with their entire catalogue committed to heart. So I should’ve been producing flop sweat like crazy. But trying to get pages written in the days leading up to this conference had turned me into a sleep-deprived shell of a former self. I shuffled into Bono’s den and took in the surroundings and the excited banter of my collaborators like some quietly amused Peruvian sloth, and when Julie suggested I read the script out loud to our composers, I launched into the show unthinkingly.

Within minutes, Bono’s sunglasses were off and he and Edge were voicing approval, tossing new suggestions into the air, pointing out how the Girl Geek’s narration matched the sean-nós Gaelic singing style Bono had been considering for Arachne. Julie and I acted out the first scene between Peter and MJ—a scene relying on stumbling lines and long, horrible pauses in lieu of content. Through grins, Bono called it “kabuki,” “brutal,” and meanwhile I was marveling over my acting partner’s comic timing. Now Bono was playing Mary Jane’s abusive father, and Edge was convincingly playing gentle, well-meaning Uncle Ben as the four of us volleyed lines with increasing intensity until it culminated in a song yet to be written.

Doing his best Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, Bono turned to me, tapping his fingers together. “How long have you been with us, Smithers? You’re going to get on very well in this corporation.”

Well gee, this was getting gratifying . . .

Your life seems to be going in one direction, and then suddenly you wake up on the ceiling, with strange new powers. That’s when Peter sings “Spun Around” (later renamed “Bouncing Off the Walls”), another song needing music and lyrics.

“There’s an expression in our band which we use all the time,” said Bono. “A ‘throw yourself around the room’ song. I think this might be the place for one of those.”

Indeed. Seeing as Julie wanted to stage the scene with Peter actually throwing himself around the room. With the help of cables, the actor was going to leap and flip from wall to wall. And then the whole bedroom was going to break apart, and Peter would dance toward the high school with the Geeks cheering him on.

Bono told us his definition of a “geek”: “a person full of passion, unencumbered by cool.” And he wasn’t wrong. Julie demonstrated a silly ecstatic dance for the song right there in Bono’s living room as Bono scatted a tune, improvising something sounding like the joyous flipside to the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” He and Julie played off each other, flirting and daft, while Edge studied them with a grin, and I gaped at these goofballs who were skipping and gesticulating, pulling faces, exclaiming, and just . . . playing.

And like the old fellow in Krapp’s Last Tape, this is the scene I rewind over and over again. Stupefaction. Rewind. Play again. There’s Julie buck dancing, or doing the Charleston, or whatever the hell she was doing in that room of giggling and twinkling inspiration, and yet almost exactly five years later, the New York Post was depicting the Inferno reimagined by Julie Taymor. In the ninth circle of hell, “dangling from two of [Satan’s] three mouths are Bono and The Edge, ‘their backs being skinned so as to leave not a patch.’ In the third mouth, being ground head first, is the greatest traitor of all—Taymor’s cowriter, Glen Berger.”

To get from a scene of collaboration and affection to this vengeance-steeped hellscape . . . well, you’d think, at the very least, it would take a couple dozen implausible plot twists. But no, it just proceeds, step by sensible step. Hooved swamp dwellers evolve into humpback whales. Earnest intentions turn into intractable wars. I’ve never written nonfiction before, but I can tell you the fiction-teller’s directive for millennia has been to simply copy the way life unfolds; to wend an ever-flowing series of circumstances from a beginning to a very different endpoint and make every bend and cataract feel inevitable. These things happen. Just ask any divorcée about her wedding day. These things happen. All the time. Rewind. Play again. We were four jolly sailors, four imperturbable Argonauts set to capture the Golden Fleece. Full of passion, unencumbered by cool, we were also—and this is painfully clear—four geeks. And all I know is . . . those friends will keep dancing and laughing in that Central Park penthouse, but they’ll never be anything again but ghosts.

Now Bono was playing a clip from (of all things) The Matrix. He and Edge selected a tune by Radiohead to mix into the scene. The effect was inspirational, mysterious. Bono and Edge had pinpointed a mood for the song they were going to write that would carry an audience from the nihilism sparked by Uncle Ben’s death toward the musical’s defining moment—when Peter vows to fight in the name of love and justice as Spider-Man.

“Rise Above,” suggested Bono. “Rise above the difficulties around you. Above the sadness within you. Be your better self.”

The new anthem for our musical was born.

The rest of the summit was spent chewing over plot points. From one scene to the next Edge and Bono dove into the weeds of dramaturgy with the ardor of regional theatre literary managers.

Also, with nary a half-minute of discussion, the musical’s title was decided upon. Bono and Edge suggested it. It was inspired by the bedtime request of the young daughter of a friend of theirs.

So, good, now the project felt a little more real—we had a title. But it was a secret title. And it would be a secret for four more years. No document could contain the title, lest we blow the surprise. Later the title would blaze with unintentional irony. After that, the title would endure a fusillade of Internet mockery. Still later, the title would point the way to a new beginning for the show. But on that day, all we knew was that we woke up that morning thinking about Spider-Man, and went to sleep that night thinking excitedly about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

•     •     •

We were going to land this show right in the middle of the zeitgeist. Gordon Cox was reporting in Variety how “musicals are once again becoming part of the pop-culture consciousness,” with musicals referenced in everything from The Sopranos to Gap Khaki advertisements and the music videos of Beyoncé. Broadway musicals took in a record $850 million in the 2006–07 season alone.

I finished a draft of the whole script by the beginning of 2007. We were seven months away from the big presentation that would showcase a revised script and all the completed music in front of our investors. Right, yes. The investors. David Garfinkle had tapped a network of monied folk based mainly in his hometown of Chicago to put up the funds for the show, and they were anxious to see what their money had bought them to date.

So in January 2007, our two producers, along with Julie and me, went to Ireland for another summit with the boys and to get an update on their progress. After a bracing hill climb through gorse and sheep dung with Julie leading the way like Tenzing Norgay and with David Garfinkle laboring behind in dress shoes, we rang Bono’s bell, and then joined him for a stroll to Edge’s house down the road, discussing on the way how the Democratic Primary was shaping up to be a battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “Oh, it’s win-win,” said Bono, who then began riffing on a Sesame Street tune, singing, “Oh, a rock star is a person in your neighborhood,” as he waved at honking cars passing by.

In Edge’s little guesthouse, the espresso machine was fired up, and we plunged into the new batch of melodies he and Bono had put together. First up was a sound unlike anything in U2’s catalogue. Playing around with the Phrygian mode, they had laid down an otherworldly wall of sound that could have been constructed by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir. With these harmonics, the audience would be introduced to Arachne. The hubris-infected young woman boasted in her lyrics that anything the gods created, she could make more beautiful, for she was an artist. Julie was thrilled. “Elton John, Andrew Lloyd Webber, eat your heart out.”

But some songs were proving more elusive. There’s a fine line separating the crystalline and the clichéd, the resonant and the cloying. Bono and Edge would sooner impale themselves on sticks than be caught crossing that line, but if you wanted to write the big anthem, you had to dance right up next to it. “Rise Above” was their current concern. Bono stood up—he was getting passionate: “If I’m gonna actually plop something like that onto a fucking page, it better be something that people will sing in football finals in ten years and make everyone cry. I just mean it has to be a classic. In the ‘rising-above-it’-type genre, if you follow me.”

We were following him. The “rise-above-it” genre was a perilous one.

He added, “It better be as good as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ which is one of the greatest songs ever written.”

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is from Carousel, the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

I need to back up. Between the last summit and this one, David Garfinkle decided Bono and Edge needed a crash course in the Broadway musical. The two lads grew up in a rough-and-tumble section of Dublin; they started the rock band when they were teenagers. Bye Bye Birdie? A Little Night Music?

“Em . . . not really on our radar, David.”

So David had the office burn a four-CD compilation. Sixty songs from the last sixty years of musical theatre, divided into the strictest of categories. There were exposition songs, eleven o’clock numbers, Act One closers, charm songs, anti-charm songs, show-stoppers, character-driven songs, torch songs—a fantastic mix, really, if you were into that sort of thing. Bono and Edge would eventually dismiss nearly all the songs as mawkish, dopey, or just “pants.”

But here Bono was extolling “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from one of the more sentimental midcentury musicals. And the song wasn’t even on Garfinkle’s Fabulous Broadway Mix.

“So did you go out and download Carousel from—”

Edge shook his head—the song happened to be one of the most popular football anthems in Ireland. Of course—football anthems. If you were European, and a musician, that was the brass ring you were going to be reaching for, that was the—

“I’ve got to make a few serious calls.”

Suddenly, Bono was heading out of the room.

What?

“I’ll just excuse myself for half an hour. There’s some stuff I just can’t avoid.”

Rats. We were only in town for three days, and we wouldn’t see each other for another three months. Hadn’t we all vowed to stay focused on this musical for eight lousy hours? Surely whatever Bono thought he needed to do could wait—he had assistants, hadn’t he?

Bono returned in a better mood. The U.S. Congress had originally committed to give funds to African AIDS relief but then, just before Christmas, the commitment started to look ropey. So, Bono was in the other room getting assurances from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi—Pelosi herself—that $1.2 billion in AIDS funding would be reinstated. That was how he had spent the last half hour. I spent it polishing off an espresso.

Julie and I killed time the next morning taking a too-long walk down Vico Road in the blustery wind to Dalkey. I lent her my scarf, which she wrapped like a babushka to protect her freezing ears, and we were exchanging grins and gazes, and I didn’t know what to make of any of this. She was too young to be my mother, too old to be—what—I didn’t know what, but this was getting heady. A maternal, powerful, alluring artist recognized a kindred spirit and they met on a dream-plane outside the workaday world. This was Act Two, scene two.

“With me alone you have nothing to hide,” whispered Arachne to a bewildered, flattered, turned-on Peter.

“And then she starts to pull threads out of his body,” Julie was explaining to Bono.

“It should feel disorienting, and a little terrifying,” I added, suddenly feeling like I was speaking from personal experience.

We were back at Edge’s guesthouse, trying to pinpoint the mood for “Turn Off the Dark,” the title song. Spring Awakening was on Julie’s mind—“Teenagers are lining up—they think it’s gonna be hip and edgy and sexy.”

Steven Sater’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play of adolescent angst, with music by Duncan Sheik, had nothing in it production-wise to make Julie envious. Michael Mayer had directed it with minimal design elements, and—by Julie’s estimation—middling rock music.

However, the show had “cred.” It had the most devoted teen following Broadway had seen since Rent. It had songs about masturbation, and songs with titles like “Totally Fucked.” Marvel Entertainment was pretty clear on the latitude we had for Spider-Man. We could have a song called “In a Pickle,” maybe. “Fucked,” no.

So here we were, seeking an angle for Mary Jane’s big Act Two song that was going to get the teens saying “righteous,” or whatever teens were saying these days. The composers played a tune we hadn’t heard yet—a tender, haunting piece, with a strong melody, played with nothing but an acoustic guitar. Best thing they had turned out so far. Sounded like a classic.

“Too French,” Julie pronounced.

Too French?

She was ready to send it to the bin, but then she started thinking out loud—thinking about how she began work on this show just months after 9/11, when life in the city had an apocalyptic tenor, and we all felt a certain vulnerability.

“Because I think when people come up against the end, there’s that honest-to-God clarity about what matters. ‘The world is ending, but if you’re with me, it’s okay.’ It’s the husband and wife holding hands as the plane goes down. It’s Romeo and Juliet, vowing to kill themselves together. A double suicide.”

She laughed. “If the Marvel people heard what I’m saying now . . .”

Putting a suicide pact between Peter and MJ in the show wouldn’t make the suits so happy. But this comic-book musical was parched for some authenticity. Call the song “If the World Should End,” said Julie. Act Two was getting dark, and it felt good.

Martin McCallum and David Garfinkle decided lunch on this last day together was the time to have “the serious discussion” about the schedule. As Edge and Bono began going through their calendars, I could see the color drain from Martin’s face. The days our composers had cleared to generate the songs for this show . . . well, they hadn’t really cleared any.

Martin never raises his voice. And his British accent was wrapped in his trademark cottony diplomacy as he expressed to his composers the urgent and sincere need to get this thing accomplished in a timely fashion, as this staged reading in July—“well, it’s going to be a major outlay of funds.”

I put down my fork and watched, full of empathy for both composer and producer, because Bono was doin’ the ol’ tap dance. He was fudging numbers, giving assurances, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Boy, did I recognize that dance—I had been doing it my whole professional life. Bono was arguing they’d get it done in a couple of weeks, and the producers were saying that was impossible.

I had seen plenty of artists—musicians in particular—generate everything required in a couple of intense spurts of productivity, so I wasn’t concerned. Martin, on the other hand, left a lot of his lunch on the plate.

For our final night in Ireland, we all drove into Dublin and dined at the Clarence Hotel, which Edge and Bono had bought and converted into a five-star lodging in 1992. There in the tea room Bono delivered a heartfelt toast to the future of our little project, adding a nod to Tony Adams surely in a cloud above us. And when the bill came, Edge and Bono graciously offered to cover it. Which was great, because I was broke. Julie protested—we should all split the bill evenly. The producers chimed in, agreeing with Julie.

I nodded with a smile, but I was sweating. I was skint. Completely. And that Pinot was off the charts. This was serious—my wife and I made our mortgage by the skin of our teeth every damn month. I looked around the table. I was surrounded by millionaires, multimillionaires—if they saw my bank statements, they’d be stunned. They’d wonder what sort of writer I actually was. They wouldn’t understand that public television had limited funds to pay writers, especially now with the Republicans in charge and—no—I couldn’t let a single doubt creep into their brains. I would pay the bill, and it was going to sting. I pulled out my wallet, ready to fling one hundred dollars onto the table—or, in other words, all the money I had saved for my children’s college fund. But Edge put his foot down—it was their hotel after all, he and Bono insisted on paying. I wanted to tearfully clutch his hands in gratitude, like I was some Russian peasant woman. I was exhausted from the stress. That was almost a catastrophe. Christ, how pathetic.

The next morning, huddling alone over a free scrap of bread in the Delta Business Lounge, waiting for my flight home, I felt—what the . . . !—a pair of hands sliding down my chest from behind, and now something was on the back of my neck! It was nuzzling, it was . . . it was Julie.

She held my head in her hands. “I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long time.”

“You have no idea how I’ve begged the world for a partner like you,” I said, trembling.

“We’ll be working on a lot of things together,” she promised in a whisper. My flight was called. I walked to my gate with cotton fluff for a brain and two pieces of artificially flavored licorice for legs. The rest of the journey passed in a fog.

•     •     •

“We were dealing with a woman who has absolutely no sense of commercial potential.”

“You try to help her, but it’s only ever a one-way street. She has a narcissistic disorder.”

It was still six months before Across the Universe opened in theatres, but toxic gossip about Julie’s film was being reported with relish on the Deadline Hollywood blog by dirt-dishing Nikki Finke, who larded her article with quotes about the “impossibly artsy-fartsy cut of this $45 million pic which audiences dislike” and about how difficult it was to collaborate with Julie:

At one point, Amy Pascal [cochairman of Sony Pictures] took [Julie] to dinner and diplomatically told her ‘how good it could be’ if only she’d cut the movie. But Julie still refused. . . . Five months had gone by and she didn’t listen and she didn’t care.

I saw an early screening of the film. I thought it was a gas. It was a love story, it was the Beatles, it was eye candy and high spirits, what’s not to like? Would it sell $100 million worth of tickets? Who the hell knew?

The suits didn’t understand that the film wasn’t about the 1960s. It was about what it meant to be in your twenties, no matter what era. And most of all it was about music. For humans, music has the same purpose it has for birds, whales, and other musical animals—mood synchronization, as the scientists would say. Why did Julie gravitate in her work toward musicals and opera? Because singing was a mode of communication more emotional, more immediate (and more ancient) than “talking.” In Across the Universe, where thirty-five Beatles songs were crammed into a 125-minute film, it wasn’t the plot per se that kept us on the edge of our seats so much as wondering how we were going to be made to feel next. When Max sang “Hey Jude”—as earnest and optimistic a song as ever’s been written—the formerly bleak world seemed transformed.

This was an incredibly hopeful and persuasive artistic statement. And those Hollywood philistines weren’t getting it. I wanted to punch them out, they were distressing my cowriter so. But it looked like the chances of Across the Universe opening in the fall with her cut of the film were very slim.

Meanwhile, the Telsey + Company casting agency had been hired to find the actors for our workshop reading, now only three months away. However, with the project cloaked in secrecy, the agency had no idea who they should be looking for. So Julie and I worked up descriptions of the main characters and sent them off to the agency, hoping it would provide some guidance.

Only, it turned out they weren’t seeking guidance so much as the actual descriptions that they would then send verbatim to every talent representative in New York. On April 16, our unedited breakdown went out in an e-mail blast announcing the Actors’ Equity Association–approved staged reading of Spider-Man the Musical.

Within the hour, the announcement was picked up by every single blog that specialized in either comic books or Broadway shows, or Civil War memorabilia, potato salad recipes—I mean it was everywhere. The show was now public knowledge. And Arachne? The one novel narrative element in the show? The element we had been hoping to keep under wraps till the first preview, which was at least two years away? She was out of the bag.

Arachne: Female, 20–35 years old. A beautiful, boastful young woman turned into a spider for her hubris. She subsequently appears to Peter Parker and the audience as—in turn—someone to inspire Peter; a lover; a bride; a terrifying (and sexy) dark goddess of vengeance; and, finally, a lonely, fragile young woman. Strong Celtic, Balkan style. Outside the box ideas are welcome.

Arachne’s entire story arc, just sitting there naked for everyone to pass judgment on. And pass judgment they did. In our naïveté, Julie, David Garfinkle, and I had imagined that word of a Spider-Man musical directed by Julie Taymor with music by Bono and Edge would be greeted pretty unanimously by the fanboys with “Wow!” and also “Cool!” But they didn’t express excitement. Or even cautious optimism. They didn’t even bother with dubiousness. The news sent them straight into brain-melt. They could barely believe the news was true. And they hoped—God, how they hoped—that it wasn’t true. Why? Because they were Spider-Man’s self-appointed guardians, and they feared the show would be an embarrassment for everyone involved, for everyone who had ever been associated with Spider-Man for the last forty-five years—real people, fictional people, everyone.

So at the end of the day, having trawled through the snark and speculation and cris de coeur of commenters like Mr. Bong, laserbrain, Calico Pete, and Jabba the Griffin, I got past my own fear and bafflement and began to think, How edifying. Here was an opportunity to study the comic-book geek in his natural habitat. These blog posts were the raw responses of true Spider-Man devotees. I made a note that the Geek Chorus in our show had to be these geeks—they had to be protective, unfair, dubious, melodramatic defenders of the pure.

But these posts were also a warning shot across our bow. We had to be extra-smart about this. We had to be respectful; we couldn’t stray too far afield, or we would suffer a world of wrath. The fanboy’s imagination was deep. But I was beginning to learn it wasn’t very wide.

•     •     •

Bono and Edge were ridiculously behind in their writing chores. We were three months away from a massive workshop and how many songs were completed, as in “actually ready to be performed”? Five? How about three? Any?

David Garfinkle, looking distressed, confirmed to me that a whole lot of nothing had shown up from the boys to date. Most of his distress at the moment, however, was from his having just deposited his precious cell phone into a paper lunch sack. Meanwhile, an old man in a homemade Spider-Man outfit was walking by. More spider-men were wandering about. We were in Queens, at the Kaufman Theater, for the premiere of Spider-Man 3. Sony and Marvel were desperate to keep pirated footage off the Internet, so into the lunch bag your cell phone went. The sack in turn was placed on an enormous table containing a sea of completely identical-looking lunch sacks. David was never seeing that BlackBerry again.

Julie had just walked the red carpet, and was now cheerfully bringing up the cost of this new Spider-Man movie.

“Two hundred fifty-eight million! That’s a new record—most expensive movie of all time . . .”

She knew this factoid was especially pertinent in light of the article that appeared in the New York Post just two days before.

$pider-Man. Could the upcoming stage version of “Spider-Man” be the most expensive musical of all time?

The May 2, 2007, edition of the Post was notable for running the first-ever newspaper article written about the Spider-Man musical. The article was penned by notorious Broadway muck-meister Michael Riedel.

Word is that the show, which is getting a staged reading this summer, could cost almost $30 million to bring to Broadway. “The numbers are going to be astronomical,” says a producer, who is familiar with the show’s finances.

“Thirty million is ‘astronomical,’ ” snorted Julie, “and meanwhile the Spider-Man movie costs a quarter-BILLION. And David, it’s not really going to be thirty million anyway, is it.”

“Uh, no no . . . it’s more like twenty-three . . . twenty-four—”

“And who wants a ten-million-dollar Spider-Man musical anyway!? That’s just stupid. And you know, The Lion King, in 2007 dollars, cost easily thirty million—it’s just that nobody cares, cause it’s taken in over a billion in grosses . . .”

We were eager to check out Spider-Man 3 because the teasers suggested that Peter Parker would be drifting toward the “darker” side of superherodom. Julie was hoping Marvel’s exploration of darker themes would give her license to touch on some grittier material herself.

But we and the rest of the audience were disenchanted by the results on-screen. Peter’s “darkness” was mostly a new, emo-style haircut, a surly attitude, and an out-of-left-field dance number. That number, along with a song Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane performed, prompted Spider-Man junkies online to predict that Taymor’s Broadway musical was going to be nothing more than two and a half hours’ worth of the very worst parts of Spider-Man 3.

We clearly needed to inoculate this show against potential embarrassment. Julie and I went back to Dublin in June 2007 for three more days of work with the boys, with all of us making sure we didn’t lose sight of the storm clouds inside every adolescent.

“I’m not the crack of the pavement . . . I’m not the trash can overflowing,” suggested Julie, trying to pin down Mary Jane’s frame of mind. “That’s such a teenage sentiment. I’m not going to let the place define me.”

Edge and Bono nodded in agreement. They’d been there. Bono grew up in Ballymun, five miles from Dublin’s center, near a dodgy tower block called Seven Towers. Barely out of their teenaged years, the two lads would become—like Peter Parker—as close to mythic figures as the real world allowed. Walking down the street with Edge or Bono, I would see on the faces of pedestrians the same reaction as the cabbie or child in a Marvel comic book whenever Spider-Man swooped by: Eyes would widen, mouths would gape, and they’d point, as if they’d just seen a giraffe.

So now Edge and Bono were making the case that Peter Parker was “an indie kid, like Kurt Cobain before Nirvana”—back when Kurt was considered the geekiest kid in his high school. After Peter is beat up at school, what he sang had to feel real.

Bono closed his eyes to concentrate. “I hear it as bummed-out garage rock.”

Bono then sang the verse while demonstrating how to “walk home dejectedly.” He started at the back of the room and slinked toward us, moving with the feline yet masculine strides only rock stars can get away with.

Edge grimaced. “Could you try and be more like the geeks?”

“Edge is giving me geek lessons,” explained Bono, apologetically.

“He’s having a hard time,” said Edge, shaking his head with a grin.

Moments later, however, the room was shot through with tension as Julie insisted with an unnerving fervor how “Think Again” (Arachne’s song of vengeance) needed to get to “an unearthly, terror-rising, terrifying moment.” She explained how Arachne was so enraged by Peter Parker’s betrayal, she was now “pulling the vaults of heaven and hell into her presence.”

Like Arachne, Julie herself seemed to possess this frightening capacity to rain down retribution. The day after I landed the Spider-Man job, a former assistant director for The Lion King told me how he witnessed Julie dressing down an assistant designer for wasting her time. He said he had never seen anything like it: “It was like one of those sixteenth-century disembowelments.”

In Julie and Elliot Goldenthal’s Grendel, the moment comes when the monster embraces its monstrous nature and unleashes a juggernaut of havoc. In Julie’s short film Fool’s Fire, the dwarf-jester Hopfrog brings down destruction on his royal tormentors. The climax of Titus, Julie’s first feature-length film, has the title character slaking his thirst for revenge in an orgy of cannibalism and carnage. Through the large glass windows of Edge’s guesthouse, we could see storm clouds rolling in from the Irish Sea, and as Julie conveyed Arachne’s fury, you could half believe it was Julie summoning those clouds. When I yowl at my five-year-old to stop jumping on the furniture, he bursts with laughter because I look like an idiot. Julie, on the other hand, possessed a demigod-like talent to unleash chthonic weather systems capable of sending wild beasts scattering. And all I could think whenever I witnessed one of these exhibitions was, God, I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of those. And, of course, one day . . . I would.

But for now, faith and fellowship were ever-blooming. Bono and Edge were bona fide collaborators. It wasn’t sheer luck or a random fact that they’d been working together since the 1970s, or even that Bono’s wife, Ali, was Bono’s high school sweetheart. The collaborative ethic was in their bones. I mean, with their résumés? Edge and Bono could have acted sniffy with me. But they didn’t. They banished every idea of an artistic hierarchy. They made the days and minutes about the work.

If Bono seemed a little sapped during our meetings this week, we can cut him some slack—his mornings were spent in international diplomacy, his afternoons on writing songs, and his evenings being the father of four. And “sapped” is relative—he was still overflowing with ideas—good ones, lousy ones, it didn’t matter because there was always another one on the way.

And even though Bono did more of the talking, you could catch him every now and then glancing toward Edge with the same expression I hope I’ll be wearing for my wife in our garden as we tend to the squashes in our sunset years. The glance that said, I know that you’re the brains behind Pa. And what a good egg Edge was—earnest, conscientious; and Julie—geez. Whenever I saw her, I felt the way Jane and Michael Banks felt the day Mary Poppins showed up at their door.

Really, as far as I could tell, our only problem was that Edge and Bono were off to Fez, Morocco, the next day to work on their new U2 album with bandmates Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton (work that would yield No Line on the Horizon two years later). Our composers still had twenty songs to finish for our musical before the July reading.

Twenty songs.

One month.

•     •     •

Hello Entertainment had rented out three rooms at Chelsea Studios, down on Twenty-sixth Street, for the first two weeks of July 2007. In the biggest of the rooms, where the reading would be held, Teese Gohl had assembled two guitar players, a keyboardist, and one multicolored-Mohawk-sporting drummer, as well as an array of computers programmed to produce more sounds, and also some heavy-duty speakers and subwoofers. Considering how small the room was, all this was going to make an impact.

The Swiss, avuncular Teese Gohl was the show’s music supervisor. Back in 1987, Teese produced Elliot Goldenthal’s first film score (Pet Sematary), and he has worked with Elliot and Julie ever since. He was now trying to get the band up to speed with hurriedly produced music charts.

Though Edge and Bono were going to drop by the room from time to time to mentor the musicians, they were mostly going to be cloistered in a smaller room generating all the lyrics they hadn’t gotten to yet. No plush couches, no open-air courtyard with trickling fountain and birds trilling in the trees like in their working space in Morocco. They were musical theatre composers this month, so all they got was a long table and some uncomfortable folding chairs. With hushed-voiced astonishment, Edge guitar tech and master roadie Dallas Schoo would end up remarking that in twenty years with the boys, he had never seen them as focused as they were these weeks.

The first song the lads completed was “Bouncing Off the Walls,” their “throw-yourself-around-the-room” song. The finished lyrics read like—well, like “bongelese”:

And if feels like a flood

Tidal wave in your blood

Like a rush

Body crush

Sky-hook in the neighborhood . . .

There was, however, method in it. The story of Peter Parker was like the story of Everyteen, which included waking up to a new body whipsawing you from depression to mania. According to neuroscientists, the brain of the adolescent is crackling with more dopamine activity than at any other time in one’s life. This means that everything a teenager does or feels is just that much more vivid. The prefrontal cortex of the adolescent is still developing, so more primitive, emotional parts of the brain have an outsized influence. Our composers were trying to honor these neurological facts. They wanted a straight transcription from Peter Parker’s limbic system, catching the flow in midsentence. (I mean, who starts a song with “And”?) In other words, the song could be a personal account by any adolescent hopped up on a Frappuccino and throwing himself around the room with an air guitar and the stereo blasting.

And the fish they are fed

As you fall off your floating bed

And you dive in the pool

That is the window of your room

And you swim ouuuut . . .

Traditionalists would call the song insipid. We thought it was fucking inspired.

For “Rise Above,” the lads wanted the song to embody one of their go-to proverbs: “It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” Like any teenager (like Edge and Bono enraged enough by the Troubles to write “Sunday Bloody Sunday”), Peter’s growing awareness of the sickening injustice in the world spills over after his uncle Ben has been murdered. These feelings slowly transmute, however, into the revelation that

Every heart that bleeds

Will color your world red

And the sorrow in the night

Will be the blue you cannot shed . . .

The “red” and the “blue” refer to the colors of the Spider-Man costume, which was about to make its big reveal. In other words, the iconic Spider-Man costume wasn’t just “a costume”—it was the outward display of his suffering. Peter was literally going to wear his pain. But would any—and I mean any—of that come across to an audience? Would the soaring music and Julie’s staging compensate for any lyrical woolliness? These were good questions. We didn’t ask them.

As a standard Actors’ Equity–approved staged reading, only twenty-nine hours of rehearsal time were allotted. But several of the actors had worked with Julie before, and that was going to make her job easier. Six of the actors were recent alumni of Across the Universe. Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood, the movie’s leads, would be Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. Their mutual friend T. V. Carpio, who played heartsick lesbian Prudence and sang “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in the movie, would be “The Girl Geek.” And David Chandler, Julie’s companion from Oberlin College days, had agreed to play the Green Goblin.

So confidentiality statements were signed, scripts were distributed, and the sweltering summer days were spent in high spirits. Evan Rachel Wood’s flowing-haired hippie look in Across the Universe had evolved into Vogue magazine–ready black club dresses and black nail polish now that she was dating Goth-rocker Marilyn Manson. But her alabaster cool melted when she heard her new Edge and Bono–penned songs. “No way! That’s my favorite!” she shrieked, when Bono confirmed they sampled a sound from David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes.” She was already staking a claim to be Mary Jane “for the real one.” She didn’t want anyone else debuting these songs.

Jim Sturgess, meanwhile, seemed like he knew his career was about to break big once Universe opened in September. Whether he’d commit to performing Peter on Broadway was an open question. But he was obviously having a fine time that week in New York. During one raucous session while learning “Boy Falls From the Sky,” Jim suddenly found himself with Bono for a backup singer. The two of them shared one microphone as they belted the final lines of the song: “To give you must yourself receive / And when you do / . . . Then belieeeeve!”

The band whomped a final chord, and the rehearsal room erupted into whistles and applause. Suddenly aware of the hyper-sincerity of the lyric, Bono slipped into a Green Goblin drawl to catcall his own song. “Bravo, bravo. ‘Belieeeeeeve.’ Boy, that’s pow’r’ful stuff, ain’t it?!” The line went straight into the script.

Feeling confident, we did a run-through of the show the night before the reading. Hoo, was it lousy. Shrill, amateurish, embarrassing dreck. But that always happened with first run-throughs. Almost always. Anyone up for a drink? Or five?

•     •     •

Only eighty seats could fit in the biggest of the rented rooms, and on July 16 they were filled with investors and representatives from Marvel. The actors filed in. Julie got the nod from an ashen-faced David Garfinkle. She stood in front of the audience with winsome anxiousness.

“So this is the thing about Spider-Man. It’s a very visual piece. Look how gorgeous it looks.”

She mockingly swept her hand behind her at this drop-ceilinged room cluttered with performers and sound equipment.

“Glen’s going to read the stage directions, but there will be places where that just won’t work, and you’ll just have to go with the flow.”

Julie flashed me a “well-here-goes-nothing” smile. I leaned into the mike.

“Okay, then. Act One.”

The opening musical notes jolted the audience to attention. The Geeks’ first scene was actually entertaining. Jim’s and Evan’s charisma filled the room, and we were off to the races. Everything we had hoped the script contained was now coming alive in front of us: Jameson’s bluster amid the bustle of the Daily Bugle; the psychopathically charged tension between the Green Goblin and Spider-Man; the ululating electricity of Arachne’s “Think Again”; the bleak, hushed intimacy of Mary Jane’s “If the World Should End.” The story, the humor, and the whole emotional palette were being delivered, and now there was just one more scene:

Glen: Mary Jane falls screaming into the abyss. Peter’s web-shooter fails him. He impulsively leaps. He is revealed as having fallen into a giant web. Arachne stands over him.

We never had time to sit down with Teese to discuss how to underscore this final confrontation between Arachne and Peter. The music had to be something to get hearts racing, but Teese—at a loss, but knowing he needed to improvise something—began playing a slow, wistful sort of thing on the piano. Julie shot a panicked glance my way. This was awful. Peter Parker was trying to discover from a homicidal, eight-legged human-spider hybrid of mythic lore which cocoon his girlfriend was suffocating in, and meanwhile Teese was underscoring an “Eve-has-a-woozy-flashback-about-Chet” scene from an afternoon soap opera, circa 1981. Julie tried to get Teese’s attention, urging him telepathically to pick up the damn tempo, but Teese was too focused on the keyboard to notice.

The actors finally got through the dialogue and now we were reaching the climactic fight, which we envisioned would one day be performed with spectacular leaps inside a mammoth funnel-shaped web hovering over the audience. I read the stage directions for all they were worth: “A dizzying, frenzied mating dance and Dance of Death all at once!”

Killingly, it was also another scene no one had time to orchestrate. So the audience was treated to the recorded placeholder track: a puny galloping beat punctuated with a couple of mewing notes on an organ, all sounding like it was generated for a Donkey Kong video game, circa, oh, 1981. The actors slowed down their dialogue to match the music and a scene that should have taken ninety seconds took over four minutes. I made a mental note to myself not to listen to anyone’s opinions about the last ten minutes of the reading.

Which would turn out to be a serious mistake.

Meanwhile, Julie looked like she wanted to crawl under her chair. But! The audience was still with it—they wanted to find out how this whole saga got resolved. So with one final push, we drove toward the ending.

Glen: A new dawn. The web has disappeared. Light bathes the bare stage.

The music the band was playing now was surging; it was filling souls with light; it was making these last words work in a way they had absolutely no right to, and I rode it, baby, I rode it:

Glen: Peter is awkwardly standing in front of MJ trying to explain. He gives up.

Peter: (shrugging) I know.

Mary Jane: I knew it.

Glen: Peter and MJ kiss. But they’re interrupted by a wailing ambulance siren, distracting Peter. MJ shrugs, nods with a grin. Peter Parker shoots a web, and he soars away toward the rising sun over the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

The End.

The music reached a crescendo with a final roll on the big drums, and Pow. Applause, whistles, wild whoops. Julie sneaked a glance my way, then slumped in relief.

Bono was already back in Ireland. He missed the whole thing. A beloved aunt had passed, and he needed to be back for the funeral. No matter. The work, for now, was done, and Edge would of course report back to his partner the consensus of the investors, agents, producers, and Marvel representatives in the room: The top of Act Two needed work, a couple of songs required some rethinking, and . . . we had nothing to worry about. This show was going to be a blockbuster.

Marvel did have a few notes. David Maisel wrote David Garfinkle and Martin McCallum a month later that if the script was left unchanged, “. . . the musical will adversely affect Marvel’s brand [due to the] level of sexuality and extreme adult themes that are inappropriate both for the character and the musical.”

We couldn’t imagine what Maisel and company were imagining. Your typical Spider-Man comic book was chock-full of grisly deaths and women penciled and inked in just the way a sex-starved adolescent boy would want women penciled and inked. The show seemed perfectly chaste in comparison.

“It’s because you used the word ‘erotic’ in the stage directions,” Julie surmised.

“No, man, I had already changed every ‘erotic’ to ‘highly charged.’ ”

Julie urged our producers to ask Marvel to reserve judgment until rehearsals and previews began. Marvel responded—“We have no objection to doing so, provided that such discussion occurs sufficiently in advance of the opening for Marvel’s concerns to be effectively addressed.”

Fair enough.

5

Stages

We all climbed the stairs of the graffiti-graced Queens studio of our set designer George Tsypin. Over the last twenty years, Julie and George had worked on six operas together, including The Magic Flute, which had become a perennial favorite at the Met. Now Julie, our producers, and Edge, who happened to be in town for other business, were walking past the tumbledown toilets and toward the large loft office where George’s designs for the set of Turn Off the Dark were about to be unveiled.

Associate designer Rob Bissinger (hired to help prevent the sort of technical glitches that plagued Julie and George’s most recent collaboration, Grendel) was there to assist. While George pointed out details in his Russian accent, Rob switched out cardboard scenery pieces inside a three-foot-tall model of a theatre, complete with little figurines of supervillains and Spider-Man.

The sets took some getting used to. With misaligned architectural elements, Ben-Day dots, extreme angles, and forced perspective abounding, the inspirations appeared to be equal parts pop-up books, vintage comics, spiderwebs, and 1920s Russian Constructivism. In fact, the set by our mustachioed Kazakh set designer looked more like a 1921 Soviet avant-garde theatrical construction than anything since . . . 1921. The effect was dizzying, disorienting, cubist. We were looking at the city as a tumbling Spider-Man sees it when he’s swooping through the caverns of lower Manhattan.

Immediately apparent was what a departure this show was going to be from The Lion King. For African grasslands, all it took for Julie to evoke the setting was a herd of dancers, or a rising sun made of fabric. Scene changes could be made nimbly, and the materials employed created an overall effect of lightness.

Spider-Man, on the other hand, was going to be defined by heavy pieces, startling for their ability to tilt and fold. Scene changes wouldn’t be nimble, but they would, potentially, be showstoppers themselves. The last scene of Act One, for instance, promised a thirty-five-foot-tall Chrysler Building lowering from the flies upside down; and then, just before hitting the floor, it was going to unfold and thrust straight out toward the audience. With a city-street backdrop incorporating miniature taxicabs (little lightboxes) that moved back and forth, it would seem to the audience like they were suddenly looking down from a thousand feet up. Dazzling, bordering on the implausible, if this trick could actually be pulled off, our Act One climax was a slam dunk.

Martin took me aside on the subway back to Manhattan. He clapped me on the shoulder, and spoke in those calm tones of counsel he had such a knack for.

“Regarding the set, Glen—if Julie’s the id, then you’ve got to be the superego.”

“Come again?”

“We want the set to be great, but not . . . excessive. If it gets unwieldy no one will be happy. Ambition is grand, and grand ambition is great, but . . . well, you get the idea.”

I did.

And I didn’t. As Julie had begun repeating—“No audience wanted a ten-million-dollar Spider-Man musical.” I figured this was a time to remember Seth Gelblum’s advice: “Stick with Julie”—Julie, who was getting off the phone with Sony as we walked home after our Queens excursion. She was being notified that the final cut of Across the Universe was now officially locked. The version opening in theatres in September . . . would be hers. See? She won. And she pretty much always does. Or so it seemed.

In September 2007, however, Sony released Across the Universe in just twenty-three theatres. After three weeks, the forty-five-million-dollar film had grossed only $8.5 million. In mid-October, the film’s release was expanded to 953 screens, but it was accompanied by anemic marketing, and Julie began to wonder whether her refusal to make changes to the film back in March poisoned the well over at Sony.

The movie’s prospects weren’t aided by the wildly mixed reviews. “Mixed reviews” often means some critics kinda liked it and some critics kinda didn’t. But reviewers for Julie’s film found it either “a car crash in slow-motion,” or “a magical mystery tour with the power to restore one’s faith in both movies and music.”

Critics.

Julie couldn’t understand why her film was so “polarizing.”

“It’s not like it’s The Passion of the Christ!” she said, throwing up her hands. “It’s a love story! With Beatles music!”

And there was the rub. John Lennon once pointed out that the Beatles were bigger than Christ, and just like Jesus’s fans, Beatles fans generally don’t appreciate folks messing with the iconography. Making a musical about Spider-Man, who was also about as big as Jesus in 2007, meant Julie was just lowering herself back into the piranha tank.

But teenaged girls (according to the Los Angeles Times) were seeing Across the Universe “in packs, bonding with one another (and the film) through repeated viewings.” And a truly unusual number of people were writing testimonials on the web calling Across the Universe their favorite movie of all time. And on such evidence, Julie was left convinced that neither the reviews nor the movie’s debatably narrow appeal led to its ultimately underwhelming forty-five-million-dollar gross. No, rather, the culprit was the lack of aggressive marketing. And in a cabinet in her brain, Julie filed away this lesson—a lesson that would make a pivotal reappearance three years later.

•     •     •

Julie was still hoping Sony would make a last-ditch marketing push when Bono and Edge rang David Garfinkle. It was late October 2007. The lads had found themselves with a free half-day in Los Angeles—could Julie and Glen swing by the Chateau Marmont for a Spider-Man confab? Airline tickets were hastily arranged.

“Jim Morrison of the Doors stayed in this apartment,” said Bono as he stood on the balcony in his bathrobe. The lads were eager to assess the songs from the workshop—“Let’s listen to them, and then beat them up,” said Bono, who apparently was going to stay in his bathrobe for the meeting.

As we listened to recordings of the songs performed in the reading, we were all once more buoyed by what we heard.

“All hits, lovely hits, one after another,” Bono pronounced, only half-joking.

There was really only one major writing assignment left for the boys—Norman Osborn’s paean to self-empowerment and genetic engineering. What could Osborn say that would whip the high schoolers into an inspired chorus?

Bono had an idea: “How about ‘Who’s afraid of the future?! Don’t be! Don’t be a pussy!’ ” Bono was getting increasingly excited by this notion. “It would be a fantastic thing on Broadway, to have Osborn shouting, ‘Pussies! Pussies! You’re all a bunch of pussies!’ ”

Julie rolled her eyes. “Well us girls might get a little pissed.”

“Why?” asked Bono in his most innocent voice. “ ‘Pussies’ is a term of endearment. It’s pussycat. Do you not have that expression here?”

“No,” Julie said with her stern librarian face. “ ‘Pussies’ is ‘pussy.’  ”

“Oh.”

Julie flashed Edge a grin and then got serious. It was crucial to her—to all of us—that Turn Off the Dark wasn’t just going to be a cotton candy entertainment, dissolving in the audience’s memories as soon as the show ended. She wanted to deliver a positive idea to all the kids in the audience: “You don’t like the world? Change it.” This, Julie said, was the entire message in Across the Universe. It was the baby boomers delivering a message to the Millennials; a message that could be boiled down, as Julie put it, to “Get off your asses.”

Edge said they would put the song back on the blocks and deliver something soon. Julie then hurried off to her next appointment, but not before saying with gratitude and sincerity, “It’s just a beautiful musical. . . . I love it.”

•     •     •

But how feasible was this beautiful musical? That was the one question to be answered before the producers could make any serious commitment to a theatre and a schedule.

Dragging the intangible into the tangible world is a tricky business.

We were about to take a huge leap into a world where physics was actually applicable, where the immutable laws of gravity existed. From this point forward, motors, winches, and cables were going to be in the mix.

Three months after the Chateau Marmont meeting, nearly everyone involved in Turn Off the Dark had traveled to the site where evil monkeys once took flight. On Sony’s historic Soundstage 27, where remnants of the yellow brick road were still under the floorboards, aerial designer Scott Rogers and choreographer Danny Ezralow had spent the last month trying to figure out how to render the trickiest Spider-Man production numbers on a stage. A little over two years ago and just a few hundred yards away, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews had hosted an intimate memorial service for Tony Adams. Now, Hello Entertainment had put up enough funds to rent a vast soundstage there, along with a tractor-trailer load of aerial rigging.

With no heat in the airplane hangar–sized building, and Los Angeles in a cold snap, everyone was bundled in hats and coats as Scott Rogers prepared to demonstrate for the first time a dogfight between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin.

“Three, two, one, go!”

The “Goblin Glider” is a levitating, bat-shaped boogie board that has been an iconic Goblin accessory ever since his first appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man #14 in 1964. But acknowledging the difficulty of flying a Goblin performer on top of a Glider inside a theatre, Marvel granted Julie and Hello Entertainment a dispensation. The Green Goblin in this musical would instead have retractable wings—part of his genetic experiment gone wrong involving beetles and bats.

So as cables whirred, our Goblin aerialist was lifted into the air. Wearing makeshift wings, he began sweeping around the room as if looking for his nemesis. Suddenly, an aerialist playing Spider-Man sprang twenty feet from behind a platform. As the Goblin sped toward him, Spider-Man leaped another fifteen feet, and then flipped in the air backward over the Goblin, between the two lines suspending the Goblin aerialist. Landing on the floor, he pivoted into an iconic Spider-Man crouch, prepared for the next sally. That jump between the two lines—that was the pay dirt. It had never been achieved in a theatre before.

Our aerial designer—lanky, strapping Scott Rogers—had a drawl, an undaunted demeanor, and a commitment to conservative family values that contrasted merrily with the East Coast leftist theatre folk he had been hired to work with. Scott also had a high tolerance for getting flung around the air, and a doctorate-level understanding of parabolas. He would have made a fine astronaut in 1962’s Project Mercury. Instead, born when he was, he became a Hollywood stunt coordinator, and designed the aerial feats in several movies including Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2.

When he was tapped to design stunts for this Spidey musical, he appropriated an innovation from pro football coverage. TV networks had recently added a camera suspended by four cables above the playing field, which enabled an operator to send the suspended camera roving around the field via remote control.

Scott Rogers figured what worked for a camera could work for a human being. The “four-point bushing system” he consequently devised was going to allow a Spider-Man or a Green Goblin or an Arachne to zip at fantastic speeds literally anywhere in the theatre. With an adversary hooked up to a separate flying system, complex aerial battles between two performers were now conceivable.

Until now, Flying by Foy had maintained a virtual monopoly on theatrical flying systems. Back in 1953, Peter Foy developed a system to send Mary Martin and the Darling children whizzing through the air in Peter Pan. For the next half century, the company had been refining their systems in order to accommodate the needs of any large-scale theatrical production.

But the heart of every Foy system was this: guys backstage hoisting ropes. Flying by Foy was always manually operated. For Scott to achieve the effects he was after with precision and reliability, computers were going to be necessary. Once programmed, the computers would deliver all the instructions to the winches and whatnot. But as a theatrical strategy, it was a leap into the unknown.

“That flip over the Goblin—that’s called a ‘back-gainer,’ ” explained Scott with some pride in his voice.

Would we be able to duplicate this sequence in the actual theatre? He wasn’t sure yet. But the sequence gave everyone in that soundstage plenty of confidence that something pretty thrilling would be devised. Julie asked for a slight adjustment in Goblin’s flight pattern, and Scott said they’d get right on it, but it could take a while, because they’d have to program the new code into the computer.

This was the downside to bringing computers into the game. Programming took ages, and it was ratcheting up the anxiety levels of David Garfinkle and Martin McCallum. Nearly all the programming accomplished in this workshop would have to be redone once an actual theatre was found, since the new dimensions would require new algorithms. Would there be enough time to reenter all the computer code? What happened if an adjustment to a flying sequence was required at the last minute? Disastrous delays? Hope for the best, I guess. In the meantime, Scott would keep working, alongside Jaque Paquin—our long-haired, thick-bearded Québécois aerial rigger from Cirque du Soleil.

Michael Curry, meanwhile, was occupying himself with the challenge of making a web-shooter for Spider-Man. Michael was the man who devised, with Julie, all the puppet-work on The Lion King. Resembling a Wings-era Paul McCartney, he was the sort of fellow who sketched out solutions on the backs of napkins. Actual solutions. He intuitively understood how different materials behaved. He grasped the physics behind the fluttering of fabric. He worked with the universal laws that made an insect leg extend just so, or eagle feathers unfurl, or any of the engineering and aesthetic marvels all around us that we generally take for granted until we see their essence presented on a stage.

It was easy to see why he and Julie made for such felicitous partners on The Lion King. Michael’s engineering know-how was coupled with the sort of attitude that Julie prizes. The attitude that the unsolved was merely the not-yet-solved. The soon-to-be-solved. (Why Michael Curry left Turn Off the Dark—resulting in a number of never-to-be-solved issues—we’ll get to in a bit.)

So while we waited for the next aerial demonstration, we noticed Michael Curry picking up a wad of something in a Baggie. He walked a few paces away from us. He turned, lifted his hand, and—THWWWIPPPP!—a fifty-foot ribbon of white shot out of his hand in a blur. We rubbed our eyes, because the ribbon was still somehow hanging in midair, the whole length of it quivering.

Now the ribbon was fluttering away, and as our jaws returned from the floor, Michael explained how he attached one end of a bungee-like cord to the wall, and then affixed a fifty-foot length of silk to the other end of the bungee, and then wadded the silk up into this little pouch. Concealing the pouch in his hand, he walked away from the wall, thereby pulling the nearly invisible bungee taut. By holding on to the pouch but releasing one end of the silk, he achieved the web-shooting effect. Simple, with plenty of theatrical bang for the buck, it was a quintessential “Taymor Effect.” We could cross another item off the to-do list.

Now Chris Daniels—the stunt double for Tobey Maguire in the first two Spider-Man films—was being fitted in a “twisty belt” (actually, the “Climbing Sutra Spinning Harness”), a swiveling metal hoop, with three cables attached to it. He was standing in front of a mock-up of Peter’s bedroom—five large lightweight panels which formed the floor, ceiling, and three walls of a forced perspective room.

A recording of Jim Sturgess singing “Bouncing Off the Walls” blared from speakers, and Chris was hoisted into the air and sent backward, careening into a wall. A flip and a half put him into a handstand, enabling him to spring off the floor and spin like a pinwheel toward the ceiling and then sing the next verse upside down as the walls (held in place by puppeteers) twirled and swayed to the melody, so that it wasn’t just the music and the aerialist but the set itself telegraphing exuberance.

The scene was pretty fantastic, even though the cables were distracting, and the twisty belt was inelegant. A discussion with costume designer Eiko Ishioka and her assistant, Mary, quickly ruled out any possibility of hiding that big metal ring around his waist. Julie concluded that the audience would just have to embrace the necessity of the setup.

“In fact,” she said, “Peter Parker should embrace it. Have him toss the cables to a crew guy. You know? ‘Hook me up, Joe!’ ” Expose the artifice. This was an approach Julie had taken in dozens of shows, and when the gambit worked, theatre asserted its theatricality, and it felt good—like how life felt when we were tots, regularly shifting back and forth from reality to make-believe in our minds.

And when such a gambit didn’t work? Then it was just a lot of embarrassingly clunky machinery. But we were pretty sure having Peter acknowledge the cables would immunize the scene from awkwardness. Pretty sure. The trick to doing any scene with cables was remembering that the scene was not about the hardware, it was about the emotion. In this case, it was about Peter’s joy, his exhilaration. “Hook me up, Joe!” A shout-out to a crew guy almost said it better than the flying effect itself—Peter was so exuberant he was breaking the fourth wall! We just had to remember this insight when it came time to put it onstage.

And . . . we didn’t.

Moving on, here were two stage directions near the beginning of the script that I wrote in five easy seconds: “Arachne’s weavers make a giant tapestry”; and “The tapestry is destroyed by Athena.” Danny had a notion for how to achieve this, and recruited eight dancer-acrobats from Los Angeles who were unafraid of heights.

With a wistful chuckle, Danny once told me how he and Julie nearly killed each other during their first project together—a 1995 production of Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman. But Julie was loyal and Julie was practical—she stuck to artists she could trust. Danny was now one of her closest confidants, having choreographed The Green Bird in 2000, and then Across the Universe. In that film, the football players careening off each other with bruising grace; the businessmen heading to work with shifting synchrony; the balletic horseplay in the bowling alley—they were all Danny’s brainchildren. One of the original members of the groundbreaking dance troupe MOMIX, he had a rakish, Jewish, and—rare for male choreographers—unmistakably heterosexual vibe. He shared many of the qualities of other longtime Taymor collaborators—talented of course, and also not easily daunted, and—crucially—good-natured.

And now Danny was standing in front of eight thirty-foot-long loops of silk. Eight dancers stood at the ready on a platform. “Arachne’s Theme” blasted over the speakers, the kettledrums thundering. Then, on the downbeat (and it had to be exactly on cue or the whole sequence would get completely fouled up), four dancers leaped onto the looped bottoms of their silks, and—SWOOOSH—swung out directly toward us.

Right as they reached their farthest point of oscillation, the dancers threw open their arms in unison, stretching the silk and fleetingly evoking angels or pale Luna Moths. Simultaneously, a long banner of silk launched from the floor behind the four swinging weavers—WHOOM-CLACK. The banner blasted thirty feet up in a blink, sent up by a couple of fearsome air compressors.

The four swinging weavers were now beginning to swing backward, just as the four remaining weavers leaped onto their loops and swung out toward us. Another banner of silk launched between the two groups of swinging weavers, and meanwhile, the chorale resounding through the soundstage was suggesting to our various sense organs that some heavenly realm was opening up before us.

In front of our eyes, eight giant horizontal silks were being woven between the dancers’ eight vertical silks. With the silks gently fluttering, the result looked like some immense pot holder made by a seven-year-old god. The air was then released from the compressors, and the horizontal silks collapsed toward the ground—CLACK-CLACKETY-CLACK—as if destroyed by a displeased goddess of wisdom. Danny Ezralow—that son of a gun—he did it. He turned two sentences’ worth of stage directions into the first showstopper of the show.

Fired up, Julie began describing to lighting designer Don Holder how the finished tapestry could be used as a projection screen, upon which threads of light could “weave” to form an animated image, as if Arachne was “working her loom.”

In Ovid’s telling of the myth, Arachne’s tapestry cheekily depicted the gods committing embarrassing acts. But Julie didn’t want an animated scene of humans and animals rendered in an “ancient Greek” style. She wanted “an abstract image.” She wanted the threads of light to suggest the image of a sun. It was clean, with a Zen-like appeal.

But privately, I wondered if maybe narratively it wasn’t the best choice. We had to assume that hardly anyone in the audience would come into the theatre knowing the myth of Arachne. Therefore, we had to make sure they got—really got—the idea that the images Arachne created on her loom were so vivid that they seemed—as described by Ovid—to be alive. As I would eventually have to write for an insert in the program, “woven bulls bellowed and leapt, rivers roared, and the water made of thread splashed those who came near her tapestries.” If this concept wasn’t drilled into the audiences’ heads, if the idea wasn’t understood that Arachne was as much a master illusionist as a weaver, then the arrival of illusory supervillains in Act Two—i.e., the musical’s main plot point—would feel random and confusing.

“Julie, also, are we worried about this? The story we’re telling is of a tapestry-weaving contest between Arachne and Athena, but we’re only showing one tapestry.”

Julie looked over her glasses and asked me with the warmest affection twinkling in her eyes: “You have a better idea?”

She knew that I didn’t have a better idea.

“I’m working on it,” I answered, cagily.

Julie shook her head. “I think the audience understands the weaving competition from what the Girl Geek says.”

“If the audience hears it,” I mumbled.

“Well why wouldn’t you hear it?” she pounced, addressing the whole table of designers. “I’m sorry—I think ‘story theatre,’ where you show everything, is a drag. I really think the most important thing is that a girl turns into a spider. That’s all you really need to know—that she’s Arachne, and she’s gonna get mad.”

If it became a problem it would be a discussion for another day, I supposed. Anyway, an easy-enough correction somewhere down the line. Surely.

The week was capped by two days of strenuous discussion in a hotel conference room, the whole team reviewing and re-reviewing every cable, winch, and motor-related aspect of the show. “Fly tracks,” “cable dressing,” “pick points”—really the snack table was all I could focus on. But everyone else was with it. Even producer Martin McCallum turned out to be an engineering wonk, pointing out things like how “the downstage cables have to lift the subfloor, so now you’re doing a cantilever that’s forty feet long.” It was twelve hours of that. For as many as eleven of the twelve hours, the primary speaker was Julie, who trudged through the whole show, thinking out loud and receiving confirmations or clarifications from the rest of the team.

We adjourned with many a technical question yet to be answered, but with producers confident enough to begin looking in earnest for a place to house this spectacle. We planned to be in rehearsals for Turn Off the Dark by May 2009. Just sixteen months away.

•     •     •

There was no way Chicago was happening. The original intention was to have twelve weeks of performances in David Garfinkle’s hometown. But once it became clear just how much reconfiguring a theatre would have to undergo to accommodate the show, the idea of doing an almost-three-month run in Chicago just so it could all be dismantled and reconstructed in New York seemed ludicrous.

“And what’s the purpose of out-of-town tryouts anyway?” we were all asking. Oh, there was a time when artists and producers could tinker with their show in the relatively “safe” environment of a New Haven or D.C. There was a gentleman’s agreement between creators and audience, between producers and media, that no one would consider the out-of-town show as anything other than “a draft.”

But these days? At the end of the summer of 2007, The Little Mermaid mounted an out-of-town tryout in Denver, while Shrek the Musical debuted in Seattle, and thanks to the Internet and its bloggers, the entire industry back in New York, as well as scores of Broadway fans, were chattering about every single detail of the productions. It was guaranteed that Spider-Man—already proving to be a media-magnet—would be treated like a frog in a tenth-grade biology class. And those frogs never turn out well.

And did we even want feedback from an out-of-town audience? Julie kept a nice selection of rants in her rant cellar about “art by poll.” Were we not theatrically savvy enough to figure out what improvements were needed on our own? Wasn’t this mania for focus-grouping everything leading to nothing but bland, dumbed-down fare?

And besides (and this reason was the head-spinner): There wasn’t much we’d be able to change about our show anyway. If our technical elements worked at all, it would be because a mind-numbing number of hours had been spent figuring out how to transition from one technical event to the next. Messing with that sequence in any way would send our whole Rube Goldberg contraption toppling.

Which was all to say that rewriting during the preview period would have to be minimal. The script—structurally speaking—had to be pretty much the same script from the first New York preview to our opening night some fifty performances later.

Were we anxious about this? Nope. Not with that killer reading back in July. If you looked carefully at Martin McCallum’s face, you’d see it twitch a bit when these facts were mentioned, but even Martin recognized we had no alternative.

Given the show’s financial and technical parameters, David Garfinkle and Martin McCallum had a pretty clear idea what kind of New York theatre they were looking for: a big one.

There were only three non-Disney-owned Broadway theatres that could comfortably house Turn Off the Dark and two of them were booked (with Wicked and Shrek). This left the Hilton Theatre. Since first opening in 1998 as the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, the 1,800-seat theatre had been consistently described as a barn. You usually don’t want to perform a Broadway show in a barn. Intimacy is what you’re going for. But if you’re swinging spider-men and other spider-like creatures over the audience’s head, a “barn” suddenly doesn’t sound so bad.

Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein was currently running in the Hilton, but it had gotten poor reviews. It became an open secret among Broadway insiders that Turn Off the Dark was circling Young Frankenstein like a starving vulture. Finally, in January 2009, Young Frankenstein gave up the ghost, and the theatre was ours.

Julie was disappointed. She didn’t want Spider-Man on Broadway. Bono and Edge weren’t married to the idea either. If the show was on Broadway, it was just going to be judged by the same old hidebound Broadway criteria, and this show was different. (“Let’s not even call it a musical,” said Julie to her cocreators. “It’s a ‘circus-rock-and-roll-drama,’ so let’s start calling it that.” And we did. Every chance we got.)

But settling on a theatre meant that the Hilton’s specific dimensions could start getting inserted into the blueprints and plugged into flight-programming equations. Set design meetings could finally begin in earnest. And I started thinking a lot about that quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the same fellow who wrote The Little Prince: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Because if we were merely servants doing one person’s bidding, then we would never get this massive ship built. Julie had inspired us all with her vision of a dream-island not found on any map. So through the winter, spring, and summer of 2008, meetings scheduled to break by dinnertime routinely went well past midnight, the weather and light of Queens shifting outside those warehouse windows of George Tsypin’s third-floor studio.

Martin McCallum said certain cuts to the set had to happen if our budget was going to retain a semblance of sanity. The big snag budget-wise was the flying. Those motors and winches were far too expensive to buy. So they had to be rented. But, oh man, were they expensive to rent. And the extra crew needed to supervise the flying was also boosting the price tag. So we had to trim the budget wherever we could. Julie did not—

Wait, I’m going to start another paragraph here, because this really needs to be stressed—

Julie did not balk at the idea of cutting down production costs. She heard the concern in Martin’s voice, and she leaped into the breach. What was important? What wasn’t? What about those giant beakers in Osborn’s laboratory—did we really need three? No? Great, cut a giant beaker.

We understood this was a business venture, and we understood that some of the stuff was expensive, but if we got rid of too much of the good stuff, we wouldn’t sell as many tickets, right? And what was the real worry? Because it wasn’t as if we couldn’t find some extra funds. As David Garfinkle told Julie and me on several occasions, “If there’s one thing we don’t have to worry about, it’s money.” Heck, there was a waiting list of investors hoping to get a piece of the action. And if it took an extra month or two of performances to recoup those extra funds—so what? What was an extra month or two when you took the long view—the years the show was going to run, the other productions it was going to spawn. “But yes, Martin, we hear you, and look—we just cut a giant beaker!” Just so long as he didn’t make us lose the model subway train with the little working headlight that crossed the stage after the bullying song. Totally unnecessary, that train. But just so cool.

After yet another meeting, Julie and I staggered in the middle of the night to her upstate home, where she collapsed into a chair.

“I feel old,” she reported.

Old. She had just been presiding over fifteen hours of design meetings without a break. I was feeling like one of those small dried fish in a Chinatown barrel of small dried fish, but Julie? She was looking fine. When it came to Art, she had the stamina of a washing machine. She was wearing a ridiculous knit hat from Peru or Tibet, drinking a can of Foster’s, and keeping me up trying to nail down a way to end the show; trying to find a way around our technical obstacles. It was four a.m.

“What is it you want to see?” she asked me, circling back to the question of Arachne’s transformation.

“Well . . .”

But seriously. It was four a.m.

•     •     •

When Marvel sent their notes to Hello Entertainment after the workshop reading in the summer of ’07, they listed three concerns under the heading “Specific Reasons why the Musical, if Unchanged, Will Adversely Affect Marvel’s Brand.” They wanted to make sure that 1) secondary characters (like Arachne) didn’t overshadow primary characters; 2) the show didn’t get too sexy; and under 3) they wrote: “Marvel requires that the technology in all respects be cutting edge.”

Good. No argument from us. In fact, this note seemed to be encouraging Turn Off the Dark’s producers and creators to spend some extra coin. Which is why a contingent of designers, as well as Martin, David, Julie, and I, were on Long Island one Monday in August 2008, in a small office space in an anonymous industrial park near the Westbury LIRR stop. We were in the market for some cutting-edge technology.

In keeping with the skill-set described in the ancient myth, Arachne’s superpower was her ability to create “lifelike” images in order to captivate (literally “hold captive”) her audience. With Arachne’s supernatural artistry, she would deceive the citizens of New York. She would make it appear as if the adversaries Spider-Man had already dispatched had returned. Arachne was hoping the illusory “Sinister Six” would sow the citywide panic that would draw Peter Parker out of his self-imposed retirement.

The best reason for bookwriters to devise such a plot would be so that the production could exploit cutting-edge 3-D technology; to trump the eye candy of Act One with imposing, terrifying holograph-like villains who suddenly appeared and vanished again onstage or—better yet—in the aisles next to delighted and petrified young ticketholders.

In fact, if that 3-D technology wasn’t feasible, then coming up with such a plot would be . . . weird. And now a year after the workshop reading, we were learning that the technology wasn’t . . . maybe all that . . . feasible.

Those ghosts in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion attraction were nearly the effect we were looking for, and the Imagineers cooked that one up back in the sixties. We thought surely there had been advances. And indeed, a fashion show for Diesel in the summer of ’07 presented live models walking a catwalk while manatees and giant sea turtles swam through empty space right next to them.

That. We wanted that. The effect was created with an antique technique known as Pepper’s ghost. But the illusion relied on mirrors, large panes of glass, and projectors. And after hours of set-design meetings it was determined that our whole production would have to be configured solely for the purpose of achieving this optical illusion, when it had already been rigidly configured to achieve the dozens of other effects required in the show.

So in a last-ditch effort to get three-dimensional illusions into Spider-Man, we took a train to Westbury to meet with Gene Dolgoff, 3-D pioneer, and the fellow responsible for those security holograms on credit cards.

Gene wasn’t promising us two-dimensional images that appeared three-dimensional. He was promising actual three-dimensional projections. He patiently explained the technology to us, but we couldn’t be confident that this would actually work in a theatre. Halfway through the tour Julie got a headache from looking at all the blurry imagery. We left Mr. Dolgoff ’s office thinking 3-D was perhaps the way of the future, but the Sinister Six’s future was going to have to be strictly two-dimensional.

So where did that leave us?

We had already imagined that most of the Sinister Six’s apocalyptic hijinks would be presented as “news clips” on George Tsypin’s thirty-foot-tall LED screens. So now we just needed to make it clear to the audience that no one had actually witnessed these horrific acts firsthand. This framing would give us the wiggle room for Arachne to claim later that the Sinister Six and all their scenes of destruction were just illusions.

This plot-contortion seemed like a bit of a stretch. I informally polled the team. Everyone shrugged the “Whaddyagonnado?” shrug, and it was true that there was nothing to be done.

But.

Without the audience really experiencing the illusions as illusions, would the audience truly comprehend the most important plot point in the show? For the first time since beginning work on this Spider-Man thing, a little vein in my brain began to throb—a nagging pin drop of a voice that said, This show won’t be everything we want it to be. I ignored the voice. Told no one else about it. Except . . . and I couldn’t be sure because the voice was so soft, but . . . maybe the voice wasn’t saying, “Want it to be.”

Maybe it was saying, “Need it to be.”

Might Michael Curry have a solution? We would never know—Michael was no longer with the show. Just a week before, Julie happened upon the website for Michael Curry Design Inc. Images swam in front of her, including shots from The Lion King and Julie’s production of The Magic Flute. And all these designs were credited solely to Michael Curry. In the main, the credits were referring to Michael’s contribution to the engineering aspect of the designs, and not Julie’s aesthetic contributions. But Julie found the attribution ambiguous. She found it deceptive. In fact, she found it smacking of theft.

She didn’t take a few breaths. She didn’t count to five. She immediately grabbed the phone and punched Michael’s number. A phone rang in Oregon. Julie’s chthonic weather system hit the West Coast unannounced.

“It was as if I was standing outside of myself, watching myself on the phone,” said Julie, shaken and repentant in the aftermath.

Even the most financially strapped artists choose their projects with a degree of freedom. No competent work ever gets produced with a battered ego, and cash isn’t what makes for a fruitful group venture. It’s a different currency the artist is seeking—trust, respect, the open ear and open mind. Before the end of the week, Hello Entertainment had received a note from Oregon informing them that Michael Curry Design Inc.’s schedule was too full to commit to Spider-Man at this time. Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. But not having Michael Curry would become a problem.

But that was down the line, and at the moment, Julie was more concerned with the question of just who in our inner circle was yapping to the press. This was the autumn of ’08, and the financial markets were in free fall. Cue Michael Riedel over at the New York Post:

In this economy, everybody’s tightening their belts. Everybody, that is, but Julie Taymor. The genius director has never met a budget she didn’t blow right past. Case in point: Spider-Man, whose budget has ballooned to $40 million, making it the most expensive production in theater history. Some of the people involved are starting to blanch at the price tag.

Riedel knew very well that Julie spent almost her entire career working within the constraints of Off-Broadway budgets, or cobbling together productions over in Indonesia out of some muslin and secondhand bamboo. “Never met a budget she didn’t blow right past”? Come on. But it was one of the most toxic acids to be thrown at a director’s reputation: “she’s profligate, and la-dee-da in her profligacy.”

“The musical has a rock score by Bon Jovi—”

Hah. What a tool. It’s Bono, not Bon Jovi, you idiot.

“. . . (Quite a good score, I’m told; the messy book is another matter)—”

Wait—What? Who was telling him the book was “messy”?! Who had even seen the book? Damn it, Riedel, now it was getting personal.

“Where’s all that money going?”

The motors and winches! This wasn’t Spring Awakening. We couldn’t just put twelve chairs on a stage and call it a day. Look at Cirque du Soleil: LOVE cost $175 million! KÀ was $220 million!

“The source adds: ‘[Julie] doesn’t care what it costs. Does not care at all.’ ”

Who was “the source,” damn it? We all wanted to know. David Garfinkle didn’t have any answers, but he promised to root out the mole before we all became paranoid. Meanwhile, Julie had started packing for a two-month trip to Hawaii. She was heading to Lāna’i to shoot her film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, because somehow she managed to find the time that year to also prep for a feature film.

Julie returned from Lāna’i in early 2009 to learn from David and Martin that Spider-Man’s timeline was getting pushed eighteen weeks because of set-building delays. It was our first postponement. There would be others.

The next day at the Tsypin studio in Queens, calendars were out and being amended. Yes, we were at another set-design meeting. The whole gang was there this time. Martin McCallum was getting tetchy about the costs of the show. The proscenium was too expensive, said Martin. It needed to be simplified.

“I did simplify it,” said George, wearily. “It’s as simple as it’s going to be.”

And now, with the afternoon light fading, the discussion turned to the web ring.

Of all the big technical hurdles, the web ring was the biggest of them all. If technical director Fred Gallo and his production team could pull it off, it would be a truly unprecedented engineering feat. It would generate a stack of patents. It would be a coup de théâtre to top everything we had thrown at the audience so far.

The idea was that after Peter leaped off the bridge to save Mary Jane, the audience would suddenly become aware of madness over their heads. Hitherto concealed in an enormous ring-shaped metal truss, a vast funnel-shaped web would begin to unfurl like a whirlpool made of netting. Through the gaps in this rope-and-wire sculpture stretching over rows and rows of seats, the audience would witness the climactic battle between Spider-Man and Arachne.

Here was the problem: Arachne’s web was essentially a net. And for thousands of years, netting has had really only one purpose: to catch things. Fish, trapeze performers, butterflies. So: How do you reliably deploy a massive net without it catching on every stray bolt, prong, or you-name-it that was contained in a truss necessary for the automated deployment of a giant funnel-shaped web? Because a giant web all tangled up twenty feet over the audience would kill the show, just kill it, and kill it right at its climax.

Fred Gallo—with the build and demeanor of Joe Pesci, and the brain of Archimedes—was thinking maybe the solution lay somewhere in a structure known as a “tambour,” which was basically a rolling door made of hinged slats that slid in a groove. Fred explained how a tambour-like structure in the ring truss would enable the net to emerge in a gradual and tidy fashion, averting tangles. “Tambour.” Sounded promising. We had all learned a new word, anyhow.

The two options were to build a scale model of this ring truss for eighty thousand dollars (which might not tell us what we needed to know), or spend a lot more than eighty thousand and build half of the actual piece, and test it in the shop (which still might not tell us what we needed to know). As Fred put it, “We won’t know if it works until we build it.”

The final product was going to cost one million dollars.

So should we just build it? Will it work?

Fred? Was it going to work?

Three years later, associate designer Rob Bissinger swore to me that never again would he be so idealistic. “Never again will I fuse my heart with a project, like we’re Siamese twins, and if one twin dies the other dies. No way. Never again.”

We all sat at that table in George’s studio: The assistant director, the costume designer, Teese Gohl, our production manager, three general managers, our producers and their assistants, and still more designers, and me, and Julie—we all sat there feeling a stake in this loony enterprise.

If you want to build a ship . . . teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

It was the difference between a sail-hoisting, sextant-wielding crew, and galley slaves working the oars to the beat of a dreary drum. In other words, we were collaborators.

So when Fred Gallo shook his head, chuckled, shrugged, and finally said, “I think we can get this ring to work . . .” all of us around that table inhaled, braced in our chairs for what we were about to do, and then . . .

We nodded. We pushed all the chips into the center. We were in. All of us. So okay, Fate—deal the cards.

And no cheating.

6

It’s a Process

Waitaminute. I could be mistaken, but . . . in the middle of the song, does he say . . . ‘shit’?”

Joe Quesada was Marvel Comics’ editor in chief. Securing Joe’s imprimatur mattered. Which is why David Garfinkle and I were in the conference room of Marvel Comics’ Midtown offices in late February 2009. But after about ten minutes, we had run out of things to talk about, and with the conversation becoming awkward, David decided to play Joe one last song—the latest version of crowd-pleaser “Boy Falls From the Sky.”

The final two minutes of this lengthy song are sung over a swirling bed of electric guitar chords increasing in intensity. The words themselves sorta wash over you, which is why it was surprising that Joe asked us when the song ended if “shit” was in the lyrics.

David and I cleared our throats.

“What? No. Uh . . .”

“Maybe. Wait. Oh . . . oh yeah.”

The lads and Julie—all of us, actually—enjoyed the existence of that one profanity in the show. It was that one pebble of grit in an otherwise family-friendly spectacle, but Joe’s voice was full of urgency.

“Peter Parker can’t say that. He just doesn’t. Ever. For all these years we’ve been very careful to make sure Spider-Man never resorts to that kind of language.”

David and I assured Joe that we got what he was saying, and that we’d talk to Bono and Edge about it. And I really did get it, and two years later it would wind up affecting decisions more consequential than what to do with a four-letter word. What Joe unintentionally put in my head was that we had been entrusted with a living artifact; that Spider-Man wasn’t globally popular by accident; that Spider-Man was an icon and that our job was not to be iconoclasts.

David and I left the Marvel offices fretting that the word was the one lasting impression we left with Joe. But the next day, Joe Quesada sent a tweet to thousands of followers:

G’morning, Marvel U! Woke up with Spider-Man Musical songs in my head. Curse you Bono and Edge, why do I love you so?!?!

The tweet was money in the bank. Turn Off the Dark was on a roll. Opening night had finally been officially announced. Group tickets were actually on sale. That same week, U2 released its twelfth studio album, No Line on the Horizon, and Rolling Stone magazine gave it five stars out of five—“their best album since ’91’s Achtung Baby.” And asked about Spider-Man on the red carpet before the Oscars, Evan Rachel Wood not only confirmed she was “definitely going to do it,” but added, in front of the live cameras to millions of viewers, that “the show is incredible.”

And Jim Sturgess? Was he in? Julie was hopeful, but was still waiting to hear back from him. He was busy shooting Peter Weir’s The Way Back, so he wasn’t answering any e-mails.

Then, on March 10, 2009, Evan sent word to Julie that she couldn’t play Mary Jane after all. No explanation why. Maybe Marilyn Manson didn’t want his girlfriend in New York City while he lived in Los Angeles. It didn’t matter. She was out.

So we needed to find some singers, and quick. Because in the auditorium of The TimesCenter in two weeks’ time, a few hundred ticket agents were going to be treated to an hour-long teaser of the show. How aggressively these agents were going to push Turn Off the Dark over all the other Broadway shows vying for attention depended on how carbonated this teaser could get the agents before they headed back into the street.

So a few singers from the 2007 workshop reading were recruited, including T. V. Carpio. But with Jim Sturgess skinning deer on set in Bulgaria and in no hurry to leave, who was going to deliver the big Peter Parker songs?

Knowing Julie was on the lookout for a young, up-and-coming actor to play Peter Parker, T. V. Carpio told Julie the year before to check out Reeve Carney, the lead singer of an L.A.-based band called Carney. When Julie caught a Carney show in New York, she agreed with T. V. that the young man with the unfairly gorgeous face and dreamy tenor voice was destined for great things. But was he dweeby Everyboy Peter Parker? With that long hair, and that bone structure, he was more like royalty. Ah, wait! Julie ran him through a quick audition, and Reeve—with almost no acting experience—was on a plane to Lāna’i to be Prince Ferdinand in Julie’s Tempest playing opposite Helen Mirren, Alan Cumming, and other luminaries. As Julie recalled later, he was the only one who auditioned for the role who convinced her that “he believed in love.”

But Julie still didn’t know if Reeve could pull off Peter Parker. And Reeve, for his part, was devoting himself full-time to his band, working alongside his brother and lead guitarist, Zane, another handsome and lanky Carney. (The lankiness was part of a genetic legacy shared with their great-granduncle, Honeymooners comedian Art Carney.) However, with no other charismatic young singer available on quick notice, Reeve was summoned to New York, and after a day of rehearsal, he was sent with the four other singers to the green room at The TimesCenter to await their moment onstage.

Meanwhile, a room was quickly set up for a photo shoot, so that there would be a couple of pictures of the creators for the Turn Off the Dark website, which was going to launch in a month. Edge, Bono, and Julie posed as if for an album cover—arms crossed, no smiles.

Unexpectedly, they then beckoned me over. God no. I’m not tall, but somehow I’m almost a head taller than my three collaborators. I was in my father-in-law’s old jacket, and my hair that day was late-period Beethoven. But I hooked a thumb into my pocket, and the results on the website a month later were what I expected—I looked Photoshopped into the shots. But the pictures, with pride of place on the site, clearly trumpeted, “These are the four creators. If you love the show, thank these four. And if you don’t, it’s probably the fault of that guy.”

The auditorium was packed. The media had been barred entry, but a blogger or two managed to get in (and, of course, the Post’s Michael Riedel). The guitar riff from “Boy Falls From the Sky” silenced the crowd, and David Garfinkle appeared at a microphone, gamely smiling under the lights. “Today we are thrilled to be presenting you a behind-the-scenes look at Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark!”

After a four-minute sizzle reel of highlights from our Los Angeles flying workshop, Julie proceeded to wow the crowd with pictures of the set and some trippy supervillain costume designs that Eiko Ishioka had dreamed up after finishing her last gig designing the costumes for the fourteen thousand performers at the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony. (The onus fell on Spider-Man’s beleaguered associate costume designer, Mary Peterson, to decipher Eiko’s severely broken English.)

Julie then spoke warmly of Bono and Edge before calling them onto the stage amid hugs and starstruck applause. Edge and Bono swore that without Julie Taymor, they would never have thrown their hats into the ring.

“As far as I’m concerned, Julie is a national treasure,” Bono averred. “We call her our mentor and our dementor. Because we’ve never met anyone more unreasonable than us.” He turned to Edge.

“It’s kind of nice getting bossed around by a chick, isn’t it?”

Edge shrugged daintily. “We like it.”

Our five singers were then introduced, “Rise Above” began to play, and Reeve stepped up to the microphone. Wearing a lot of long hair and jewelry handmade by his mother, he emoted with closed, fluttering eyelids while contorting his body like Joe Cocker. He usually sang with a guitar strapped to him, so he was feeling very exposed, but he was hiding his discomfort well enough. As skinny as the microphone stand, he conjured up one of those 1940s caricatures of young, raw-boned Frank Sinatra. As Riedel would report the following day—he succeeded in “fluttering the hearts of all the ladies in the auditorium.”

In fact, an out-of-character Riedel was all positivity about the event. And he wasn’t alone—the verdict was unanimous among those who wrote about it. At the post-event cocktail party in the Westin a couple of blocks away, you could hear bubbly chatter coming from happy Spider-Man investors.

But along with our two composers, Julie and I were ushered upstairs. In a fluorescent-lit conference room, over some dismal chicken breasts, a dinner meeting ensued with Marvel’s David Maisel and Amy Pascal, the cochairman of Sony Pictures. David and Amy were concerned about the dark and less approachable second act. But Julie deftly pivoted to the subject of publicity. With the enthusiastic backing of Bono and Edge, she pitched her latest idea: a worldwide one-night-only live broadcast of Turn Off the Dark on a thousand movie screens on the musical’s opening night. Amy and David promised to look into it.

Of course, if the date of opening night were to change after a thousand-screen, international opening had already been booked, the headache would be epic. But why would the date of opening night change? Anyway, the important thing was that we all understood that now was the time to capitalize on the excitement this project was generating. Agents were jockeying for private auditions for their clients. Opening night parties, like the one at Sardi’s for Exit the King that month, were buzzing with gossip about the show. Amateur actors from across America were posting unsolicited audition videos on YouTube.

And Lesley Stahl and the 60 Minutes crew were now swinging by SIR Studios to film a few minutes of our last music workshop—part of a segment CBS would be airing the night of our first preview. Bono had been enjoying the rare experience of watching others perform his tunes at this workshop. Nonetheless, he shook the cobwebs out of his throat, took a mike, and performed “Boy Falls From the Sky” while the cameras rolled.

The song had some punishingly high notes, but Bono rose to the occasion, transfixing the film crew as he davened into the microphone, the band behind him urged on by Kimberly Grigsby (our newly hired vocal coach and conductor), who was counting time with snapping wrists and slicing hands, while stomping and undulating on a platform in front of Bono in her bare feet. Lesley Stahl had entered our studio cordial but all business. She left a couple of hours later a gooey-eyed fan.

Meanwhile, just in from Los Angeles, David Campbell was scrutinizing the song’s arrangement with his arms crossed. He was our new orchestrator. The scrawny, tousled-haired fellow had the quickly scribbled appearance of someone out of a Jules Feiffer cartoon. The father of rock star Beck, the obliging and unassuming David Campbell had orchestrated songs on over four hundred gold and platinum albums, but this was David’s first Broadway musical—a fact all of us considered a plus.

“Boy Falls” was our “eleven o’clock number”—a song sung by the protagonist that delivered the emotional climax of the musical (e.g., “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha, or “Memory” from Cats). There was another kind of eleven o’clock number, however, intended simply to ensure the audience would be alert and refreshed for the musical’s final scenes. These numbers (think “Shipoopi” from The Music Man, or “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story) were often memorable precisely for being so balls-out expendable. “Black Widows on the Town” was ours. As Julie acknowledged, the entire scene—being little more than a sexy arachnid tap dance—could very well end up in the landfill. But Julie wanted to give the concept its best shot, and in her mind, the song Bono and Edge penned wasn’t sealing the deal.

Julie burst into the little studio room where Bono and Edge were camped out and demanded they write a new song with furious female energy. Forget the club-sound crap. The composers pushed back. Julie pushed back harder. No question about it—the boys were “getting bossed around by a chick.”

Bono and Edge grouchily sent everyone out of the room, and shut the door. They emerged a couple of hours later with a hard-driving, bizarrely infectious mashup of sampled violin notes, Pixies-inspired punk-surf guitar, and Bono alternating between a bizarre falsetto and a growling Sex Pistols shout, spewing syllables in aggressive bongelese interspersed with “I’m gonna eat ya up!” The new title: “Deeply Furious.” Julie threw her arms around Edge and Bono—huge hugs of gratitude for each of them. No way was this number getting cut now.

We wrapped up the last of the SIR sessions with the band tearing through a new rendition of “Picture This”: guitars sounding like overheating turbines; cymbals getting bashed; Edge, as Norman Osborn’s wife, singing, “Is this looove?!” over and over, with Bono bongelesing increasingly frantic syllables until it was a machine-gun rat-a-tat that finally devolved into the screams of an idealist getting tortured in a machine of his own devising.

“It’s so sad,” concluded Julie. “Love.”

Someone got out the champagne, and we clinked paper cups in Studio 2. And then the whole team took over a Swiss restaurant down the street, with Bono remembering to stand up in the middle of dinner to make a toast. He thanked everybody in the room—the assistants, the engineers—no one was left out. How many toasts had I seen him deliver now? Gracious toasts, amusing toasts, humble toasts, to other people, to the future, to the moment. Instead of a rock star, if he had been born in a nineteenth-century shtetl, he’d have been the badkhn—a Jewish wedding jester—getting the dancing going, working the band, delivering toasts. He would have been just fine in a shtetl. Bono hopped into a town car before dinner ended, accidentally leaving those iconic sunglasses behind on our table. He was always leaving things behind—phones, jackets—he knew this about himself. Julie sighed fondly at the thought of him, then realized, to her chagrin, that he also skipped out on the bill.

•     •     •

The e-mail from Bulgaria wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a blow. Still filming The Way Back—buried in snow and just loving it—Jim Sturgess had written to explain to Julie why his decision to decline the offer to play Peter Parker “has been such a difficult and complicated one.” But it was definitive. He didn’t want his career forever colored by his role as “the Singing Spider-Man.” So now there wasn’t a single actor lined up for our show.

Bernie Telsey was head of one of the largest casting agencies in New York. Having cast Across the Universe for Julie (Jim Sturgess was a unibrowed unknown when Telsey brought him in to audition), Bernie’s Telsey + Company casting agency was now tasked to find thirty-one cast members for Turn Off the Dark: nine “principals,” eight additional actors to play the dozens of other parts, and fourteen dancers.

A couple of Telsey reps hopped a plane to conduct open-call auditions in cities across the country. Back in New York, Julie sat behind a long table with Bernie Telsey, David Garfinkle, Teese, and me. I suppose if there were a better way to conduct auditions, it would have been invented by now. Still, it’s always excruciating for everyone—from the actors with their livelihoods on the line, to the people behind the table, who have to hear the dialogue read so many times they begin to feel real hostility toward the scriptwriter. This includes the scriptwriter.

And by the time the auditioner had been in the room a minute, you could almost guarantee Julie’s mind was already made up. Julie was a snap decider. Not just about auditioners—about everything. Movies, shoes, sandwiches—anything you could have an aesthetic or sense-oriented opinion about, Julie not only had an opinion, but an instant opinion. (According to Julie’s mother, Betty Taymor, Julie didn’t like the wallpaper in her room and told her mother so. When she was three.)

Of course, that was Julie’s job, wasn’t it—a job that had left her buried in a pile of shiny awards: to cultivate a well-defined, compelling aesthetic and make choice after choice based on that aesthetic. And each of those decisions shuts a few doors; ferries the work closer to finality, with only hindsight revealing which decisions were inconsequential, and which ones were a bullet dodged, or a time bomb triggered. With such stakes, some dithering would be understandable. But when two roads diverged in a yellow wood, Julie rarely broke her stride. The snappiest decider I’ve ever known.

Nevertheless, here in the audition room, Julie would—practically without fail—give the auditioner her full attention all the way to the end. She didn’t betray her thoughts. Her rules for herself and the others behind the long table were unspoken but clear. No eating during an audition. No taking notes during an audition, certainly no doodling. No whispering. No looking at your watch or your phone. Smile warmly with the hello, be gracious with the parting thank-you.

Pent-up impatience and disappointment got vented between auditions.

“Bernie, what would make you think this person is right for the show? In any way right? Haven’t these actors been screened first? How many more like this are we gonna see?! Because this is just a huge waste of time!”

And Bernie would shrug, sigh contemplatively, and say, “Well . . . it’s a process.”

Julie’s eyes would then turn skyward. From the throat, something guttural.

The exchange occurred enough times to get predictable.

It was a process.

Julie believed she had made it eminently clear what she was looking for: the charismatic; the authentic; crags, heavy brows, crazy noses. The human masks she’s been sculpting all her life had honest-to-God features. It was better to have that, better to have uniqueness, than generic handsomeness. Don’t show her the blown-dry, the slick, the suburban, the—you know—the musical theatre type.

But Bernie also knew that the voices had to be blendable, the acting had to be competent, first choices were rarely available, and discernment and compromise would yield the results we were hoping for. In other words, it was a process.

The roles of the Geeks were filled with a young and motley foursome, including Mat Devine, lead singer of post-punk band Kill Hannah (whose honest, hilarious reading of Peter Parker nearly nabbed him the lead), and T. V. Carpio, who would play the smartass Girl Geek, Miss Arrow.

Actors who have achieved a certain renown almost never audition for roles. So for Norman Osborn/Green Goblin—a role that could provide a nice star turn for an A-list actor (and a whole second act to relax in the dressing room)—Julie drew up a wish list of actors, and sent it to Bernie. In the meantime, Julie was particularly eager to see Patrick Page read for the part. (“The best Scar we ever had,” said Julie of his performance in The Lion King.)

We were unaware that when Patrick showed up for his Goblin audition, he was in the midst of a months-long breakdown. Overcoming depression long enough to get out of bed and make it to the audition room, Patrick handed the rehearsal pianist some sheet music, stood at the back of the room, fixed a grave stare at the folks behind the long table, and walked very . . . slowly toward us as the relentless chords of Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” began to play: Welcome to my Nightmare . . . Welcome to my breakdown. Patrick Page has a deep bass voice. Huntington Lighthouse–foghorn deep. Combined with this ironic, insidious song, it made for a perverse, intense audition.

However, Alan Cumming—who hadn’t read the script or heard any music—sent word that he would do the part. And just like that, Alan was in. Julie didn’t even know Mr. Cumming had been asked. But this willowy, Scottish-born actor turned in what Anthony Hopkins called a “terrifying” performance in Julie’s Titus, and had just played the scheming Sebastian in her Tempest. If he wasn’t our first choice for the role, he was certainly a serious actor, and definitely a name, so Julie wasn’t complaining.

For our villainess, Telsey + Company had already sifted through over three thousand potential Arachnes: Israeli pop idols, American movie stars, indie rock standard-bearers, Balkan and Ukrainian chanteuses self-promoting on MySpace. So when Natalie Mendoza seemed to jump effortlessly through our hoops, we didn’t trust our eyes and ears at first. Raised in Hong Kong and Australia (with roots in the same Filipino communities as T. V. Carpio), Natalie’s looks were unplaceable, but beguiling. And there was a real Bronze-Age power in her rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (its sinuous psychedelia was a good fit for Arachne).

However, Natalie’s take on Arachne’s solo in “Rise Above” was marred by pop stylings. The little hiccups and faux-bluesy melismata were American Idol’s fault. The TV show’s influence had infected practically every auditioner. From the beginning, Julie, Edge, and Bono had insisted on the “straight tone” for Arachne. Listen to the Bulgarian Women’s Choir—it had to be that, it had to feel ancient.

“That’s why, musically speaking, I think The Lion King worked,” Julie once mused to Edge. “The African music in contrast to the contemporary pop. The mythic set against the mundane of Elton John. Well, not mundane, but—well, you know what I mean.”

“ ‘Mundane’ in the best sense of the word,” suggested Edge.

Kimberly Grigsby had been the music director of Spring Awakening, and so had experience getting the worst pop inclinations out of a performer. A couple of months later, after a few sessions with Kimberly, Natalie Mendoza returned for another audition. The rumors were that she had just come back from the Himalayas, the home of her longtime guru. True or not, she didn’t seem like the same woman we had seen just two months before. Looking demure yet formidable, dressed in a white tunic with a sort of understated diadem throwing off subtle flashes in the light, Natalie now had the aura of someone who grew up in a mythical city east of Nepal and west of the moon. Her singing was straight and pure, her eyes spoke of millennia endured in loneliness and longing. In her voice you could hear the capacity for selfless love and remorseless violence. After three years and three thousand possibilities, we had found Natalie Mendoza, and Natalie Mendoza had found Arachne. She was in.

Meanwhile, the field had been narrowed down to two potential alternatives to Jim Sturgess. Matthew James Thomas came straight from London, where the twenty-one-year-old was most known for his role as “quick-witted singer-songwriter” Jez Tyler in Britannia High (he was still sporting the role’s distracting, forehead-obscuring swoosh of bright blond hair).

The other potential Peter Parker, after the dozens we had screened . . . was Reeve Carney. No question about it—his mere presence in a room generated buzz. “Who is that guy?” more than one tingling actress asked Julie after killing time in the waiting room with Reeve. He had recently begun his suspenders-with-jeans phase, and he was actually getting away with it. Even so, Reeve’s acting chops were worrying. In The Tempest, he was an earnest prince in a movie where close-ups, intimate scenes, and editing could play to Reeve’s strengths. But could he put across angst and comedy in a two-thousand-seat theatre? Peter Parker’s humor was what set the character apart from practically every other superhero. If Peter wasn’t funny, the show was going to be in trouble, and Reeve’s strong suit was definitely not comic timing.

But with the first rehearsal day bearing down fast, we had to make a decision. Because of the physical demands of the role, Wednesday and Saturday matinees were entrusted to Matthew James Thomas, who would get to move to America (he talked endearingly during auditions about the awesomeness of New York). But the new face of Spider-Man would be Reeve Carney.

Soon after Reeve was cast, his band released their first-ever single, “Love Me Chase Me.” In the video, Evan Rachel Wood played Reeve’s lover. They looked good together. Evan two-times him, then kills him, but they still looked good together. Which was excellent, because Evan just notified Julie: She had decided to play Mary Jane after all.

Danny Ezralow had already put the multitude of prospective dancers through a grueling all-day boot camp. (After watching the dancers krump, leap, and tumble for six hours, all the work we non-dancers had been doing in audition rooms suddenly seemed so constipated.) Danny’s list was now winnowed down to a couple dozen dancers.

So now in a Telsey agency audition room, headshots of all the actors and dancers still being considered were taped to a wall. Bernie moved pictures around, discarding some, replacing others, as a consensus began to form. Within an hour, the only photos left on the wall were of those performers who would be in our show. It was June 23, 2009. Turn Off the Dark was cast.

This thing was actually going to happen.

Because of delays getting building permits to renovate the Hilton, the show had just been pushed another five weeks, putting opening night sometime in April 2010. But! Spider-Man was swinging in front of a full moon and shooting a shimmery web on posters now on display outside the Hilton Theatre. Inside the theatre, plaster was raining down as renovations got under way.

And Alan Cumming finally signed his contract.

Holy crap, this thing was actually going to happen.

By the end of July, Danny Ezralow had secured an apartment. His wife and young son uprooted from Los Angeles so they could be with Danny in New York for the next nine months.

“Have you found a place yet, Glen?”

“Shit. No, Danny. I forgot. I’ll get on it.”

I trawled through apartment rental websites and found a groovy little studio in the East Village. I’d be abandoning my wife, who was going to stay upstate all autumn tending to the needs of our three little ones. It’s not what she bargained for. I felt rotten. We had moved out of the city because no one seemed to care that I was in the city when I was in it. And, wouldn’t you know—now that we had left it . . . well, no matter—this was for a good cause. I was going to finally get our finances back in the black. It was just three months. It would be like heading off to sea in a whaling ship. I just needed to make sure I brought back a whale.

I wrote the general managers at Alan Wasser Associates. I would be subletting and it was time for them to send the first month’s rent and security deposit to my landlord. They promised to do so.

A week later, the landlord called me: “So where’s the money?”

“They haven’t sent it yet?”

“Hey!” said the landlord. “I’m letting the apartment go if I don’t see the money this week. I’ve been screwed before by theatre people.”

“Yeah, theatre people are the worst. Well, don’t worry. This is for Spider-Man. We’re good for it. I’ll just give them a call.”

I reached one of the general managers.

“We can’t give you the money.”

“Why not?”

A pause. A sigh.

“Glen . . . I wish I could tell you. But I can’t.”

“?”

I called Erin O over at Hello. She’d know why there was weirdness. She knew everything that went on with the show. It was probably some mix-up with my contract. But Erin didn’t answer her phone at Hello. And, damn it, Danny had put the fear in me—I was going to be homeless if I didn’t secure an apartment soon. I called Erin on her cell phone.

“Hi, yeah, I didn’t answer my phone at Hello because I’ve been let go.”

“?!”

“Yeah. Happened last week.”

“But you’ve been there since the beginning! You and Tony Adams!”

“Exactly. I was Tony’s assistant before I was David’s. And Tony’s not around anymore.”

“Oh man, that sucks. I’m so sorry. So you don’t know what all the weirdness is about.”

“Well . . .” She sighed. “I would just check the newspapers tomorrow.”

“?!?!?”

•     •     •

Should Broadway’s Spidey sense be tingling? Rumors have spread among legiters that the production sked for incoming mega-musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark may be threatened. The extensive work being done to prep for the technically demanding show, both in the shop constructing the physical production and in the theater where Spider-Man is due to bow, is said to have stopped . . . The halt is attributed to cash flow obstacles . . .

—Variety, August 6, 2009

“Julie?” My voice was pitiful.

“Yeah. It’s bad. David is twenty million short.”

“Godalmighty.”

“Yeah.”

“For a moment there, it sounded like you said ‘twenty million.’ ”

“I’m gonna make some calls.”

The one thing we didn’t have to worry about was money the one thing we didn’t have to worry about was money. . . .

There was a twitching on my web this week, and when I crawled out to see what I’d caught, there—all tangled up and weary from the struggle—was Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man. . . . This show is in chaos, plagued not only by financial problems but also by a nasty internal power struggle.

—New York Post, Michael Riedel, August 12, 2009

Riedel was always wrong about something in his articles. But this time I was having a hard time spotting it.

My father-in-law, the pastor: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

A letter from my bank: “Your home loan is forty days in default. Under New York State Law, we are required to send you this notice to inform you that you are at risk of losing your home. . . .”

Son. Of. A. Bitch.

7

Goodbye “Hello,” Hello “Goodbye”

Times Square is a monument to impermanence. Near what would eventually be the site of the Hilton Theatre on Forty-third Street, a juvenile mastodon draped in reddish-brown hair was stalked and then attacked by a saber-toothed cat in the black spruce swamps that covered Midtown. Lifeblood gushing from its punctured neck, the six-ton shaggy beast collapsed just a stone’s throw from where, fourteen thousand years later, A Yankee Circus on Mars would be the Broadway box-office smash of 1905. That show opened in the Hippodrome to a sold-out audience of 5,300. Bessie McCoy played Aurora, and made her entrance on a gold chariot driven by two white horses. There was also a baboon named Coco, as well as four hundred actors-as-cavalry galloping on horses headlong into an eight-thousand-gallon water tank. In 1939 the Hippodrome was demolished, unable to sustain the costs of running a theatre with 5,300 seats.

And seventy years after the Hippodrome was knocked down, and nineteen thousand years after a block of glacial ice one thousand feet high covered all of Times Square, renovation plans were getting drawn up for a Theater District Shake Shack while, simultaneously, renovations at the Hilton Theatre had ground to a spectacular halt.

His optimism eroding by the hour, David Garfinkle could be found in the offices of Hello Entertainment desperately working the phones in an effort to ensure Turn Off the Dark opened before the end of May 2010: before the cut-off for Tony nominations; before the rights from Marvel expired; before this entire beautiful enterprise dissolved like wet toilet paper in his hands.

Separate from the show’s budget, additional millions had been budgeted to convert the Hilton Theatre into a space that could actually hold this circus-rock-and-roll-drama. (And millions more had to sit in a bank to ensure there was a means to restore the theatre to its pre-renovation state once Spider-Man closed, even if Spider-Man wasn’t going to close for fifty years.)

The renovations weren’t merely intended to accommodate the aerial stunts. From installing a new proscenium to altering the angle and arrangement of every row of seats, a sincere attempt had been under way to address some of the long-standing complaints about the barn-like auditorium. The reconfiguration of the space enabled an additional hundred seats to get squeezed into the theatre, and the grosses generated by those seats were earmarked for paying back the renovation loans.

But the renovation schedule was tight. Even with that latest five-week delay, the first day of rehearsal was just around the corner, and David Garfinkle felt he had no choice but to begin renovations without having all of the necessary money secured. He had, in fact, raised less than half of the $37.5 million that the show was capitalized at. Oh, there were handshake deals, there were “understandings,” but nothing to keep, for instance, an investor from unexpectedly walking away the night before crucial paperwork was to be signed. In an instant, Hello Entertainment found itself in a critical six-million-dollar hole with bills for the Hilton renovation pouring through the mail slot.

The Wall Street Crash of ’08 had left Hello vulnerable. There was no film-studio money to fall back on. The Lion King (officially budgeted at eighteen million, but more likely costing closer to thirty million) was funded by Disney. Shrek (costing an under-reported thirty-four million) was financed with DreamWorks money. But unlike these other large-scale, well-branded Broadway shows, private investors exclusively funded Spider-Man. (Though Marvel owned the brand, the company put no money into the show.) The Dow had dropped five thousand points in a period of seven months. Dozens of Broadway projects in development were shelved due to the changed fortunes of potential backers. These other projects, however, hadn’t just signed a lease for the largest theatre on Broadway.

David told Julie he was confident this thing was going to get resolved within a week. But the next day it was reported in the papers that our general managers had released the actors from their contracts—they were free to look for other work. Our entire casting process? A big fat waste of time.

David found enough money to put Alan Cumming on a monthly “retainer” so he didn’t fly the coop. But Evan Rachel Wood was gone. Her agents were reportedly busy trying to get her back into the movies she turned down in order to be in Spider-Man.

•     •     •

Boris Aronson, Tony Award–winning set designer, came up with two rules that revealed a penetrating understanding of theatre:

Rule #1: In every theatrical production, there is a victim.

Rule #2: Don’t be the victim.

For years, being lead producer of Broadway’s most anticipated show seemed a dream come true for David Garfinkle. But, like Big Anthony in charge of Strega Nona’s magic cooking pot, the damn noodles were now threatening to bury him. Riedel was reporting on August 7 that Sony and Marvel (with the approval of Bono and Edge) were going to give David the boot. According to one source, “He’ll be out by the weekend.” Edge and Bono were finding their names associated with a project reeking of “incompetence.” And they didn’t like it. In fact, they were furious. The whole team was.

And Live Nation Entertainment was quickly running out of patience. They owned the Hilton and were intending to sell it. But with the renovations stalled, the inside of the theatre was trashed—it was in no state to impress potential buyers. So now the specter of an unpleasant lawsuit was looming over David Garfinkle’s head. “Once Live Nation starts restoring the theatre,” Rob Bissinger explained to me, “we can pronounce the show dead. Which means the gig is up on Tuesday.”

“Wait—Tuesday the twenty-fifth or Tuesday, September first?”

“Does it even matter? Is David really going to find the money if you give him an extra week?”

Julie and I retreated to her upstate home, where we alternated between bouts of brainstorming and fretting. Julie said there was no way Live Nation would start restoring the theatre on Tuesday, because it would take six months to get anyone else into the space, “and we’ll be up and running by then.” But she didn’t sound all that confident.

David’s strengths were not Tony Adams’s strengths. Putting aside whether this financial shortfall would have even occurred under Tony’s watch, Tony’s ability to charm and persuade were intensely missed at this moment, and it didn’t take long for Julie and Bono to realize David was going to need their help putting the pieces back together. No slouches in the charisma department themselves, and with some glittering names saved in their smartphones, Bono and Julie started making calls, searching for some rich someone who kept twenty million dollars in their petty cash envelope.

But—and this was actually presenting a serious problem—it was August. And August is the worst month of the year to contact billionaires, because that’s when they go someplace remote where they can’t be disturbed, leaving serious financial decisions for September.

Bono left a message with Steve Bing, avid Democrat and inheritor of 500 million dollars. Music producer and philanthropist David Geffen also got a call.

“And that guy—the cofounder of Napster,” Julie reported as she got off the phone with Bono.

I looked on Wikipedia.

“Which one—Shawn Fanning or Sean Parker?”

“He said ‘Sean.’ Or ‘Shawn.’ He said the one that’s friends with Sting.”

But neither of us knew which cofounder of Napster was friends with Sting. And let Bono deal with that—we had to deal with Evan Rachel Wood. Evan told Julie she was still committed to Spider-Man, despite the hundreds of news reports to the contrary. But of course, it wasn’t a hundred reporters reporting, it was essentially one “reporter”—Michael Riedel—with a hundred “journalists” simply regurgitating what he wrote. But Riedel’s antics were now causing some serious mischief. Thanks to his gleefully gloomy articles, potential producing partners were getting the impression that the show was a goner.

“Evan needs to have her people put out a press release,” said Julie. “You should write her and ask her to do that.”

“Don’t you think you should write her?”

“It would mean more coming from you.”

“I hardly know her!”

Julie flashed me her most fetching smile, and that night I was typing out “Dear Evan, . . .” Two days later, Evan’s camp sent out a release. Privately, she cautioned us that she might have to bow out somewhere down the line, but at least to the world-at-large, she was still on board.

Julie was demoralized after attending an August 17 meeting between David Garfinkle and Marvel reps David Maisel and Ike Perlmutter (Marvel’s CEO). Ike seemed to have no interest in the show. He had a long successful history taking advantage of companies tottering on the edge of bankruptcy. Julie worried Ike was looking at David Garfinkle and seeing what a cartoon wolf would see: a tie-wearing lamb chop.

But three days later, grasping just how damaging it would be to the Spider-Man brand if the project collapsed, Marvel strongly indicated to David Garfinkle that they were going to put up the money to save the show. David Maisel and Ike Perlmutter convened another meeting with Garfinkle, Martin McCallum, and Alan Wasser (Turn Off the Dark’s general manager) to discuss how to move forward. The Marvel reps came with a checkbook in their pocket, along with a pen to write out the number “thirty million.”

“Call me as soon as the meeting’s over,” an again-upbeat Julie told David.

Two hours later the meeting was over, but there was no crisp check in David Garfinkle’s hands. The Marvel reps weren’t crazy about the numbers in the Turn Off the Dark ledger, but what really spooked them was the vivid display of high-quality, uncut dysfunction. All of Martin’s and Alan’s supressed pessimism toward the project’s viability came spilling out at the meeting. David Garfinkle, blindsided, stammered his way through damage control. The contrapuntal strains of accusation and counter-accusation filled the air. The Marvel reps closed their checkbook and went home.

What Ike Perlmutter didn’t divulge at either of the two Hello-Marvel meetings was that Disney was buying Marvel. Any day now. For four billion dollars. So while Ike was raking David over the coals, sermonizing about the enormity of thirty million, Ike (who owned thirty-eight percent of Marvel stock) was a week away from receiving a personal payday of $800 million in cash and $590 million in Disney stock.

Julie sent a note to Alan Wasser, Martin McCallum, and David Garfinkle urging them to get their shit together.

Enough looking backward and blaming each other for where we are. What’s done is done. How do we pull this Spider-Man back from the brink???? This family has to come together now.

Danny Ezralow added his two cents in another e-mail: “I don’t care what it takes. We need to have it be known to Marvel and Sony that none of us are flakes. . . .”

Bono found a little money (some of it from a colleague named Michael Cohl). David Garfinkle said it was enough to get workers back in the theatre on Monday (August 31). How much money did Bono find? David said more was coming, but he had just wired the first tranche. A “tranche” is a portion of something. From the French for “slice.” As in “this tranche of pie seems a little small.” Or “David, are you sure more tranches are coming?” Because Monday rolled in. Not a single worker was back in the theatre. Tuesday, ditto, and now the tick-tock of the clock was getting kinda loud.

On Labor Day weekend, 2009, David Garfinkle could be found alone in the Hello Entertainment offices, working the phones, and lifting his legs so that the woman from the cleaning service could vacuum under his desk. And where was Martin McCallum? David informed us that after that mess of a Marvel meeting on the twentieth, Martin took a lifeboat back to Australia.

“Glen,” said Julie, “you need to write him.”

“Well, somebody needs to write him, but maybe it should be you.”

“It would mean more coming from you.”

“Seriously?”

I wrote him a tearjerker of a plea, but Martin never did respond. And though Martin McCallum is listed as a producer in the playbill, he would never again be seen in connection with Spider-Man. But his sanity is still intact, which is no small thing.

Julie was convinced David was on the brink of a nervous breakdown and would wind up in jail before this was all through. He had just secured a five-million-dollar building loan, and he was using it to send a modest number of workers back to the theatre. But he didn’t seem to have any means of raising the rest of the capital, which meant he was just digging a bigger hole for himself.

I called Julie’s high-powered lawyer, Seth Gelblum, the one who told me to “stick with Julie” back in 2005. Surely he possessed some sort of promising news.

“I don’t see it happening,” he said over the phone. “I’m really sorry. We get people who are interested, and then they look at the numbers, and they run away. And I feel worst for you, Glen. . . .”

Though promising deals kept falling through, David had managed to secure . . . a block of tickets for the upcoming U2 concert. The band landed in the Meadowlands with their gargantuan 360° Tour, and on September 24 a van was hired to get some of us from Manhattan to the stadium. The van crawled through downtown traffic as David Garfinkle talked enthusiastically about the reviews and attendance records broken on this U2 tour. He got a tepid response. He talked enthusiastically about the cast of Turn Off the Dark. No response. He fondly recalled the last time we were in a van together heading to a U2 concert. “Tony Adams was in the van that time,” was the only response. It was all so awkward, so pitiful. Under all his perky chitchat about this and that, you could hear in David’s voice “It’s not my fault,” and “I didn’t mean to let you down,” and “Please don’t hate me.” You wanted to commiserate, but you don’t commiserate with “the victim.” The gridlock was so bad, and the social dynamics were so uncomfortable, Teese Gohl finally leaped out of the van and returned to the creeping vehicle minutes later with a couple of six-packs. We still weren’t moving, David was still trying to make small talk, but at least now there was beer.

A week and a half earlier, David Garfinkle had sought to ease the fears of a half-dozen Spider-Man investors by escorting them and their families in a stretch limo to the U2 concert in Chicago. There, backstage at Soldier Field, Edge and Bono posed for pictures and assured the investors that, artistically, the show was on solid ground. The investors were assuaged; David Garfinkle could breathe again, for the moment.

Now Julie was pushing through the crush of eighty thousand people at the Meadowlands and marveling at the drawing power of our two composers. There just had to be some producer, some savior, who understood what a golden opportunity Spider-Man actually was. That we were in this mess felt so unfair. It felt unfair, that is, until U2 featured on their vast cylindrical video screen a tribute to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political prisoner who was just sentenced to imprisonment for three years with hard labor. At best, she faced the prospect of being under house arrest for fourteen of the last eighteen years. And all for fighting for justice on behalf of her people. And U2 had carved out space in their rock concert to educate the crowd about her.

And I couldn’t find a kind word to say to David Garfinkle in a van.

I was ashamed. I made a point to navigate the after-party with colleague David Garfinkle, with friend David Garfinkle, with good-hearted, put-upon David Garfinkle, the man Julie said a year before was such an endearing advocate for the show she wanted to create (unlike Martin McCallum “who was always carping about the budget”). However, when David tried to press his way through a throng of cocktail drinkers to schmooze with Bono, and the singer shot him a look of undisguised scorn, I made sure my body language was clear—“Oh, I just happen to be standing here, I’m not with him.”

Never go to a U2 after-party with “the victim.”

•     •     •

Spider-Man was, to put it mildly, an undertaking. And in Italian, “undertaking” is impresa, from whence we get “impresario.” And that was the better word for what the show needed. Not just an organizer, but a promoter; not just an overseer, but a ringmaster, a rainmaker, a spin doctor—someone who could get control of the spooked horses and steer this teetering stagecoach safely into Dodge.

When Julie met Michael Cohl for the first time, in an early-October meeting, she was a little thrown. Even though every successful producer had his or her own style, deep down you could tell they were all stouthearted, steel-spined, cold-eyed realists. But Michael?

“He’s . . . well, he’s like an old hippie,” reported Julie. “He’s just in this T-shirt, with this bushy beard. Very laid back. He’s like the polar opposite of David.”

In August, like most of those in the multimillionaire tax bracket, Michael Cohl was vacationing with his family. He was on a Spanish beach when his cell phone rang with a call from Bono asking him to come in as a producer on Spider-Man. The pitch was that the job was “just a part-time” thing. Michael Cohl chuckled heartily over that a year later: “Part-time! He actually said that!” The show just needed someone to tidy up the books, and check in now and then. There might be some money in it, and hey—it could be fun.

The pitch appealed to the very things that lured Michael out of bed in the morning. This puckish iced-tea addict (he gave up alcohol years ago) was always receptive to a project that was going to give him “that buzz.” Once a Toronto teenager raised in the thick of the sixties, Michael had remained loyal to his first loves: folk music, leftist politics, and rock and roll. He dropped out of school and test-drove various jobs (including managing an Ottawa strip club) before trying his hand as a concert promoter, booking the seventeen-thousand-seat Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in 1970 for country band Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. The date was such a flop that the twenty-year-old Cohl had to ask the venue’s owner to loan him twelve thousand dollars so he could pay the band. The sign that Michael had found his true calling: This disaster left him undaunted. He continued to book bands, and within two years, he was the in-house promoter for that same Maple Leaf Gardens.

In 1984 he salvaged the Jacksons’ flailing Victory tour, and his experience on that job opened his eyes to a new and potentially lucrative way to put a tour together. Call it “cross-collateralization”—treating a tour as one big market instead of eighty separate markets. In 1989, he had a chance to apply that knowledge while working for his single greatest love: the Rolling Stones. “Best band ever,” he would later insist to Julie, whose loyalty to the Beatles had been intensified by her time on Across the Universe. “Sure. The Beatles were great,” Michael conceded. “But they’re not the Stones.”

Before Michael Cohl became their promoter, the Rolling Stones netted twenty-two million on their Tattoo You tour. The Cohl-managed Steel Wheels tour? It brought in $260 million. (By 2010, he had refined the model—the Stones’ A Bigger Bang tour almost tripled the Steel Wheels total.) The Michael Cohl model for rock tours was born. Other rock groups wanted in, and partnerships with bands such as U2, the Who, and Pink Floyd followed. As Fortune magazine would put it, Michael Cohl was now “The Howard Hughes of Rock and Roll.”

But Michael had also dabbled in Broadway, with producing credits for Spamalot, as well as the notably unsuccessful Lord of the Rings musical. And after taking a cursory look at the Spider-Man accounts, he was ready to take a deeper plunge. Which is why he was now meeting Julie in the PRG conference room, along with Bono, Edge, and the chairman and CEO of PRG, Jere Harris.

The auburn-mustached Jeremiah Harris—though looking about as theatrically bohemian as a mid-level executive for General Motors—had more theatre blood in his veins than all the rest of the Spider-Man gang combined. His great-grandfather was a theatre manager in England, his grandfather was a company manager for preeminent producer/director George Abbott, and his father produced over two hundred Broadway shows. And that was just on his father’s side. Jere would eventually found PRG (Production Resource Group), a global supplier of lights, scenic fabrication, and anything else falling under the category of “entertainment technology.”

When Tony Adams struck out on his own in 2002, Jere offered him space in his PRG office on Ninth Avenue. Hello Entertainment, consisting of just one desk at first, eventually expanded to occupy one side of Jere’s office. So it was a natural development for Jere Harris to become an early investor in Spider-Man, while PRG was contracted to manufacture all of Spider-Man’s set elements.

But Jere didn’t just want to save a show he was heavily invested in. He wanted to save the jobs of his colleagues, friends, and relatives who were either helping build the show or were employed as crew over at the Hilton Theatre. And thus it was agreed upon at this meeting in the PRG conference room that David Garfinkle and Hello Entertainment would cede control to Michael and Jere of Goodbye Entertainment. Yes—a bit pointed, that. “Goodbye”—that’s what the new producing entity was called.

But now congratulations were in order: Michael and Jere had just acquired the finest migraines of their lives.

•     •     •

“Turn Off the Dark.” The Hilton had been dark for three months by the time Michael Cohl’s and Jere Harris’s new roles were officially announced (in a press release also announcing the casting of Reeve Carney as Peter Parker). With the show hemorrhaging money in rent payments, Michael and Jere now needed to raise at least another twenty-four million to cover a budget that was hovering around fifty-two million and ticking ever upward.

The more the producers examined the patient stretched out on the table, the more appalled and rattled they became. With forty stagehands needed to operate the backstage rigging, operating costs were going to be $1.1 million per week (a good $300,000 more than any other musical currently in town). This number meant that even with every single performance sold-out, it could still take over four years to break even. Michael and Jere nevertheless rolled up their sleeves, called for sutures and clamps, and dove elbow-deep into the mangled finances.

•     •     •

“Well, Ben Brantley has just revealed his bias. So unprofessional. Fuck him.”

It was November 16, and Julie Taymor had just read the New York Times’ head theatre critic’s review of the stripped-down revival of Ragtime. Ben Brantley had managed to reference Turn Off the Dark in the review.

“Despite the vulgar shadow cast by the $50 million Spider-Man extravaganza in the making . . .” wrote Brantley, “the trend on Broadway of late has been toward small productions of big musicals . . . that put the emphasis on words and music as guides to human ambiguity.”

Knowing nothing of the script, the music, the direction, or the performances, the lead critic of the newspaper-of-note had already declared our show “vulgar.” Julie and I railed.

“Where does he get off?!”

“Is it any wonder print is dying!”

“He hated The Lion King too,” recalled Julie—her pique so adorably fresh over a review that had come out twelve years earlier.

But Ben Brantley didn’t hate The Lion King. In fact, he spent most of the review ladling out the sort of effusive praise that any producer or creator would kill for. What Julie was still remembering 4,378 days after the review went to print was this sentence: “Ms. Taymor’s strengths have never been in strongly sustained narratives or fully developed characters.” Though Brantley embedded the sentence in a positive paragraph about Julie’s reach for cosmic-scaled themes, it was that sentence that lived in Julie a dozen years later. But Michael Cohl’s call distracted her from her brooding: The money was finally in place.

A week later, however, we were still ten million short. David Garfinkle’s go-to phrase “Almost there” was adopted by Michael. By the end of November, the e-mail from Michael was “Happy Thanksgiving. Almost there.” He hit up a Texas oilman. And two brothers who were entrepreneurs in Mexico. By December 8, the money was “in the bank.”

A month later, the money was now in the bank. Except it wasn’t.

By February 14, 2010, word was that work could resume at the Hilton on Wednesday. But three Wednesdays later, the Hilton was still quiet. However, finally, on March 8—seven months after the money ran out and the Hilton went dark—the theatre stirred with life again. All the funds had been secured, and they were now being judiciously disbursed. Michael Cohl and Jere Harris had performed the greatest act of financial CPR in the history of Broadway. They renegotiated production deals, restructured the production company, and raised (as well as personally shelled out) scads of cash for a conspicuously fallible show during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It was an epic feat. Hercules-mucking-out-the-Augean-stables epic.

But to what end would remain to be seen. That very same day—March 8—Evan Rachel Wood officially ended her involvement with the show. Scheduling snarls, lingering vocal cord issues—whatever Evan’s reasons, Julie didn’t press the point. A month later, Alan Cumming accepted a role on CBS’s The Good Wife. Still intending to be the Green Goblin in Spider-Man, he contended he’d be able to do both roles, perhaps having to skip a performance here and there. After a week of agonizing, Julie instructed the producers to release Alan from his contract (and to stop mailing him his monthly retainer). Every audience deserved the chance to see the first-stringers, she decided. The press would spin it as “more troubles for the troubled show,” but fuck the press.

However, it couldn’t be shrugged off—seven months of obtrusive reporting and chat room mockery had effectively switched out the default descriptor for our show. The “highly-anticipated Spider-Man” was now “the troubled Spider-Man.” It was a stench that would take a lot of scrubbing to get off. Seven months of extra rent payments and restructured deals had sent the budget to a morbidly obese sixty million. And the worst part about the budget was that it wouldn’t be reflected onstage—it was still a thirty-million-dollar show, dragging a thirty-million-dollar bag of waste behind it. Julie—with her alleged disregard for budgets—was now being compared to Greece. To rioting, financial-market-crashing Greece.

And she wouldn’t be able to prove them all wrong—all those jeering prognosticators—until the show opened. Six more months of this ridicule and then we would silence their scoffing. Oh, we’d have the last laugh, all right.

And we wondered if maybe Tony Adams was pulling a cosmic string. Because as Rob Bissinger confirmed—we simply were not ready Tech-wise the previous autumn. With this extra year, the designers and Tech staff had time to work out many of the outstanding issues. Had the original schedule been carried out, great concussing snafus would have caused weeklong delays, possibly in the middle of the rehearsal period, possibly with irreparable consequences. It was actually such an uncomfortable thought nobody dwelled on it.

Nor did Julie dwell (or maybe she dwelled for just a minute) on the fact that over these last six years, the person who had made the most money off of this project was . . . Alan Cumming.

8

Smudge Sticking

So as we scrape up the last remaining residue of faith from our beaten souls . . .

Rob Bissinger’s e-mail to me from mid-March captured the buoyant optimism of the period: “Met with Julie and the production team this morning to go over schedule (Impossible), budget (Still Ridiculous), and next steps. . . .”

Even though November 14 was now the Marvel-approved date for our first preview, and even though it was a full eight months away, Rob Bissinger reported that the tech folk didn’t think we’d make it in time. The funds were released just a little too late. Michael Cohl tacitly acknowledged the reality, but felt it would be easier to negotiate for an extension from Marvel once everything was going full-bore, rather than to try wheedling for one now.

In the meantime, we had a theatre to renovate, flying to program into the computer, Mary Jane auditions, and one more music workshop with the lads before they disappeared for the second leg of their 360° Tour. I could hardly focus on any of that, though, because my finances had hit rock bottom. I attended (for free) a Grapes of Wrath oratorio at Carnegie Hall and commiserated to the point of tears with those miserable Okies. I’d be breastfeeding for nourishment next if I couldn’t find a way to make it to the first Spidey paychecks in December.

The Sear Sound studio sessions at the end of April weren’t as freewheelin’ as the previous music workshops. Some of the songs seemed like they just didn’t want to get translated from Edge’s GarageBand demos to a live band. Edge and Bono had finally replaced the bongelese in “Deeply Furious” with written lyrics. As a nod to the Neil Jordan era, it was about all the shoes Arachne’s spider-henchwomen were putting on their eight legs to hit the town. So now instead of one male singer (Bono) singing nonsense syllables in a perverse falsetto, we had five women singing comprehensible words in unison in a comfortable range. And it just wasn’t working. The lyrics for the chorus were a whole other issue:

Shoe shine chamois

A shoe shoe shoe

Shoe shine chamois

A shoe shoe shoe

I was getting woozy from all the shoes. But that aside—chamois? That’s what was written on the scrap of paper from Edge. The dictionary said it was a piece of soft leather used for polishing things like shoes. Ah—so now I got why it was in the song. Except . . . I still didn’t get why it was in the song. And hang on—in the demo, they were singing “sham-WAH,” which was how the French pronounced the word. But the actual pronunciation in English was “SHA-mee.” The demo was subsequently corrected, except the stress was put on “mee” because even though “SHA-mee” was technically correct, it sounded awful when you sang it. But now Teese was instructing the female singers to sing the word with the correct pronunciation. With confusion blooming, I was deputized to sort it all out. And those are two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Meanwhile, Julie and I had seen the definitive Mary Jane the day before in auditions, and we just needed our two composers to sign off on her. However, so as to give Edge and Bono something to compare our Mary Jane to, we also called in our runner-up, Jenn Damiano. Only nineteen years old, Jenn was already a Broadway theatre veteran. She was cast as the understudy for the lead role of Wendla in Spring Awakening, but was prohibited from performing the part because she was only fifteen, and it required nudity. By the time Jenn was auditioning for Spider-Man, she had already nabbed a Tony nomination for her performance in Next to Normal, in which she played dark-cloud-toting teen daughter Natalie Goodman.

For this audition on April 30, Jenn brushed the hair out of her face with angsty grace and sang “No More” with Reeve Carney. The two looked good together—like they belonged in an “audition-room-themed” photo spread for Italian Vogue. Julie’s snap-deciding mechanism went on the blink. In fact, after the audition, no one except Bono could be definitive about which actress to cast:

“Jenn has that purity we’re looking for. She’s the girl next door.”

“Next door to you, maybe, back in Ireland!” returned Julie. It was hard picturing this pale, Celtic-looking beauty growing up in a broken home in Queens. But since everyone else in the room couldn’t make up their minds, Jenn Damiano became our MJ.

“For what it’s worth,” said Reeve later, “it felt really good singing with her.”

(Bono almost missed the auditions altogether. He showed up late, wearing a black blazer and, jarringly, a tie. He apologized, said he got “held up with stuff.” Two weeks later, surfing the Daily Kos website, I was struck by one particular behind-the-scenes pic by White House photographer Pete Souza. It was of Bono, in black tie and blazer, getting a big smile out of Barack Obama in the Oval Office. The date of the photo: April 30. “Held up with stuff,” he said. The mind reels.)

•     •     •

Dangling from the high ceiling of the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square were two different flying rigs. It was nine a.m., July 19—the first day of aerial training. A dozen and a half Spider-Man company members were going to spend the rest of the summer figuring out how to shift their weight while suspended by one or two pick-points. They were going to get comfortable with heights. None of these performers were going to see a script for another three weeks. But, it was beginning.

Danny Ezralow supervised the training that morning, and then headed up to 890 Broadway to begin choreographing his eight male dancers. He tackled the “Boy Falls From the Sky” sequence first. It promised to be the climactic moment of the show if the audience bought into the concept: spider-men appearing one by one and moving in a sort of “superhero tai chi” behind Peter Parker as he strode with increasing determination through the empty streets of Manhattan and sang about the return of his powers.

If the audience didn’t buy into it, we were so dead. It would be eight masked, Spandex-clad interpretive dancers behind a guy who was singing while jogging on a treadmill. Danny made his male dancers strip down to their shorts, because, damn it, the choreography in the show was another front in a war. Danny and his recruits were going to figure out how to defend the show from becoming the neutered, cheesy embarrassment Turn Off the Dark was always at the risk of becoming. “Boy Falls From the Sky” needed to be about skin and sinews; it needed to be about bruised muscles flexing, torsos twisting.

Danny also began work on the sadistic “Bullying by Numbers,” and the martially severe “Pull the Trigger,” and before the end of the first week, the stage manager’s daily report was describing friction rashes, banged heads, shoulder pains, and intercostal strains in the back. Normal stuff. Dancers generally shrugged off these knocks with the stoicism of pro footballers. Which was fortunate, because Danny was having them fling themselves in the air as if blown up by IEDs, crawl military-style on their elbows, and spring to their feet via an eye-catching but grueling maneuver called a “kip-up.”

And after a week, the dancers still had no idea what the show actually was. So Julie and I visited the dance studio one day and spun the whole tale for them. “Anyone confused by any of the plot points? No? Great.” Rob Bissinger, however, found a moment with Julie and me in the lobby of the theatre.

“You know how we’ve just spent the last year trying to get investors for our show?”

Yeah?

“Well,” Rob explained, “I was the guy taking these potential investors step by step through the show. I would do a little show-and-tell with our model of the set.”

Okay. . . .

“So,” continued Rob, “I’ve told the story of the show, like, a hundred times. And it’s a great story. It’s really great. But . . . it’s weird, but . . . there’s this place, in the middle of Act Two . . . and every time I got to it . . . something . . . just didn’t make sense. . . .”

This could have been the beginning of a long conversation. It could have launched a serious and thorough examination of just what plot points were jamming the gears in Rob’s presentations. But instead? I may have raised an eyebrow. Julie may have offered a thoughtful “Hm.” But the conversation lasted only another thirty seconds. And once Rob was out of earshot, we shrugged it off. “He should have called us last year if there was something he didn’t get. Right, Glen?”

“Right.” Nothing to worry about.

Besides, I had more pressing matters to tend to. I needed to get an apartment. (Danny and his family were now beginning their second year in their Spider-Man–bankrolled downtown pad, after last year’s Turn Off the Dark financial crisis left them stranded in New York City.) I found an apartment just a couple of blocks from Julie’s digs, and Alan Wasser Associates wired a $6,800 deposit to my new landlord. I sent the landlord an e-mail to let him know my plans. I could barely contain my excitement.

I tried calling you, but your voice mailbox was full. I’ll be in and out for the next week, and then I’ll be here pretty much full time! Hope you’re well. Best, Glen.

When I was typing “Hope you’re well,” the landlord was, in fact, dead.

So, no, not well. He collapsed suddenly in his apartment, cause unknown. Two of his distraught sisters tracked me down via Facebook.

“That’s just . . . Jesus, I’m so sorry. So should I wait a week before moving in?”

“No, dear, you can’t move in. He’s dead.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry. Um . . . so that $6,800 that was wired—”

“There’s nothing in his bank account. I’m sorry but that money’s gone.”

“Gone?! But it was only wired last week! He spent all that money? All $6,800?”

There was weeping on the other end of the phone.

I knew I should be letting it go. But the Spider-Man investors, what about them? $6,800. . . .

I didn’t think I was a superstitious person. But I was beginning to think Spider-Man was carrying some very weird juju. Alan Wasser Associates, disburser of monies, thought so too. So Danny Ezralow and I decided a little sage-smoke from a smudge stick wouldn’t hurt. Danny had already risked setting off the smoke alarms ceremoniously smudging 890 Broadway, and we had a date to do the same at the Hilton. Or rather, at the Foxwoods. Live Nation had contracted with the Foxwoods Resort Casino to license the theatre’s name, so down came the photographs of Conrad Hilton in the vestibule, while the VIP lounge got a makeover in order to (sorta) update its 1990s suburban ambience.

All the seats in the auditorium were out, and new carpeting was laid down. Though dozens of workers and their supervisors had been camped out on the site, Julie (whose sensitivity to visual details was seeming more and more like a genetic mutation) was the first to notice that the carpeting was two different shades. Turned out there was a shipping error. Well, it was too late now—the seats were due to be installed and the timetable was tight, and in the dim light no one would notice. Except Julie.

So were we prepared? Who knew. Weaseling out of responsibility for the WMD debacle, Donald Rumsfeld talked of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. But—and this pertained to theatre as much as to wars in Iraq—what he should have mentioned but didn’t was a fourth category: the unknown knowns. According to Slovene philosopher SlavojŽižek, unknown knowns are the things that we know, or that we should know, but maintain willful ignorance about, because we’d rather not acknowledge them.

For instance, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’s first preview was November 14. At least that was the date promised in the press release blasted out that week. However, we had our own secret work schedule that put the first preview on November 6. Not only would starting previews a week earlier mean an extra week of revenue, it would also surprise the world—it would show them that this endeavor wasn’t a lumbering, ill-managed affair. That would wipe the smirk off the smirkers’ faces.

But (spoiler alert): We did not manage to have a first preview on November 6. Nor could we get it together to start previews on November 14. The miserable truth was that after one of Broadway’s longest Techs ever, we actually had to cancel two weeks’ worth of previews and raise the curtain for the first time on November 28. The smirkers were thereby able to retain their smirks, and garnish them liberally with sniggers. And back in March the tech staff had already calculated with uncanny precision that we were going to come up two weeks short. An unknown known. And those concerns of Rob Bissinger’s about the middle of the second act that we didn’t want to investigate? Another unknown known. How many other unknown knowns were lurking in our future? We didn’t know.

•     •     •

August 8, 2010. The first day of rehearsal. Wow. Yes. Finally. At the New 42nd Street Studios (sited conveniently next door to the Foxwoods), we were going to spend the next four weeks. With scripts still warm from the Xerox machine stacked enticingly on a table, Michael Cohl, Jere Harris, and David Garfinkle went around the room wearing grins made up of two-parts excitement and one-part anxiety. Some quick speeches were made as Michael Cohl’s son Jacob, our documentarian, recorded it with his camera crew. And actually, we weren’t all gathered together for this milestone. Unlike the first rehearsal of nearly any other new Broadway musical, our composers were thousands of miles away. U2 was touring until early October, and we’d be well into Tech before Bono and Edge would be available to participate in Spider-Man rehearsals. But with the songs done, and the orchestrations in David Campbell’s hands, no one imagined the boys would have that much to do in New York.

Turn Off the Dark contained thirty-seven scenes. Thirteen of the scenes wouldn’t get rehearsed that month. The opening number featured the floor lifting up into a giant ramp. So we had to skip it. The myth of Arachne with its massive loom—forget it. The death of Uncle Ben required a coordinated team of puppeteers throwing shadows up on a large screen. Any time spent trying to approximate that kind of scene in a rehearsal room, said Julie, was time wasted. Few if any Broadway musicals left more than a third of their scenes to be totally worked out during Tech, when ideally you only wanted to be concentrating on integrating sound and lights and working the transitions from scene to scene. But, as Julie shrugged, “It’s the nature of the beast.”

Watching Julie direct scenes like the “Queens Rowhouses” was like watching her sculpt. She shaped each moment with painstaking precision. Aunt May needed to stretch her clasped hands out a little farther—“Peter, you had one of your little clashes, didn’t you—” to better connote her concern for her troubled nephew. MJ needed to bow her head ever so slightly—“Just leave me alone!”—for the character’s despair to read to an audience. The result was a series of ideographs that made the scene look like dioramas in a Museum of the Living Comic Book. And if the actors felt a little constricted—a little limited in their ability to make emotional connections with their fellow actors—they were too polite, or had too much faith in Julie’s vision, to mention it. For now.

In contrast, Julie kept the blocking in the scenes between her two leads to a minimum. This was partly because Julie wanted Peter and Mary Jane to come across more naturalistically. But she also knew that Reeve Carney and Jenn Damiano were uncomfortable with choreography. Even though Danny wanted to add some simple movements, Julie thought the risk was just too high of her two stars feeling ridiculous during, say, an intensely poignant song. She was quite protective of her actors that way.

In fact, as Reeve got more and more confident in rehearsal, it was hard not to notice Julie’s fondness for her protégé growing. “Soo much better than Jim Sturgess for this part,” marveled Julie. Reeve, the gorgeous rock singer, was also humble to a fault and refreshingly free of cynicism. To Julie, he was Peter Parker, as she had been insisting for years that it was Peter Parker’s lack of arrogance that made the character so special.

“Reeve, I just love you!” Julie blurted out one day after Reeve fumbled with particular charm through an early scene with Jenn. Julie didn’t notice Jenn brooding in the hall afterward. Julie really was like a mother figure to the younger members of the cast, and of course they were seeking her love and approval. Matthew James Thomas was also looking moody in that hallway. He was eager to develop and showcase his own edgier take on Peter Parker, but Julie was adamant that we should be grooming only one actor for stardom, and that was Reeve. She said Matthew would just have to cobble together whatever rehearsal time he could find between then and opening night.

And so the weeks passed. The company was in good spirits, the feeling of camaraderie high. Julie spent rehearsals shuttling between the actors’ rehearsal room and the dance studio next door, where Danny was busy putting the finishing touches on his choreography . . . before deciding to scrap half of everything and starting over again. That he hadn’t locked down any of the dances yet was making the dancers a little impatient. But, for the moment, just a little.

And every now and then, Julie would check in on the progress being made at the Foxwoods Theatre. By the end of August, nearly all the set pieces had been installed, and the enormous ring truss—looking like a section of a Six Flags roller coaster—was suspended high over the seats. Soon they’d be testing the deployment of the web net.

One day at the theatre, Scott Rogers detailed his grand vision to me for the Spidey-Goblin fight at the end of Act One. And either I wasn’t hearing correctly, or Scott was high.

He had just been grousing about the defeatist, sclerotic theatre world he’d been working in these last months. He had just acknowledged that it took hoouurs to program into the computer a rudimentary little arc for Spider-Man to swing in. And now Scott was telling me he was going to choreograph a fight in the air that included Spider-Man jumping over the Green Goblin from the first balcony, and landing in one of the auditorium’s narrow aisles, just inches away from a seated audience member.

“Really?”

“Yeah! About here. Row G. And then he’ll leap up and smack right into Goblin. And then they’ll have this tussle in the air as the Goblin’s flying around over the audience, trying to knock Spider-Man loose. Which he finally does, and Spider-Man falls, but about halfway to the ground, he shoots two webs—THWIPP—and they hit the Goblin, so Spider-Man stops falling, and now he’s dangling below the Goblin—”

“Really?”

“So then the Goblin starts accelerating over the audience to dislodge this guy. Oh—I forgot the first part—Spider-Man jumps onto Green Goblin’s back while Goblin’s flying, and he rides the Goblin like a surfboard. . . .”

“Really?”

Scott was describing this scene as the programming process was continuing in front of us: A sandbag about the size of a large punching bag was being used as a human proxy. The bag was hoisted up with the hope that it would arc gracefully over the seats and then loop around the stage and finally land on a little platform behind the proscenium. CRASH, straight into the proscenium it went. Scott called in an adjustment to the programmer. Up went the sandbag. CRASH, into the proscenium. Another tweak, another trial, another error, and so it went until it was time for the crew to take their next break.

If, by our first preview, our Act One climax was anything other than a swinging sandbag, it would be a miracle.

By August 27, we had rehearsed all the Act One scenes that we could rehearse. And all the dances had been roughly choreographed. So, with all the actors and dancers assembled, we staged a barebones “stumble-through” of the act in the large rehearsal room. The female dancers surprised themselves with how stirring and eerie their newly learned Bulgarian harmonies sounded as they portrayed Arachne’s weavers. Peter Parker’s first encounter with the bullies at Queens High started effectively comic but soon turned brutal as the dancers—high-spiritedly executing Danny Ezralow’s rough-and-tumble choreography—terrorized Reeve, who was defensively crouching when he wasn’t being carried aloft like a human sacrifice. In the aftermath, Reeve gathered his scattered books and sang, with spirit broken, “Don’t talk / Just walk / Going nuts / Hate my guts . . .”

Watching from a corner, I suddenly heard what sounded like sniffles. I looked over, concerned that our cast was coming down with colds. But no—several of the actors and dancers had . . . tears in their eyes. They were . . . moved? Now it was two scenes later, and bright smiles were on all their faces. Reeve was singing “Bouncing Off the Walls,” convincingly playing a fellow jacked up on his new spider powers and goofing around, with our four Geeks singing backup and dancing like unfettered idiots.

And then, just a couple scenes later, Uncle Ben was dead—run down by a carjacker—and Reeve was singing with bitter disillusionment the first stanza of “Rise Above.” The cast’s tears flowed again. And so it went—the entire act hurtling us from manic highs to heart-shredding lows before resolving into sweet catharses.

As people could sense today, something alchemical was going on. Your directing and designing aside—your understanding of theatre has enabled you to create a profoundly effective story. Yeah, I wrote more of the words in the script, but the beat-to-beat narrative—that was totally your vision. . . . And it seems to work on the audience on a physiological level . . .

Because I had to write her that night. I had to let Julie know that I had her back. We saw confirmation that our aspirations for this piece, birthed all those years ago, were still intact. Without the benefit of any expensive spectacle, the stumble-through delivered real laughs, authentic tears, and awe. We had come this far and she was going to know that her collaborator was also her grateful pupil and also her most ardent defender. So I closed with a thick slathering: “Just wanted to say what a gift—what a mind-cracking, heart-swelling gift—it’s been having these front-row tickets to you . . .”

She wrote back just this: “I wish you could see my eyes.”

One year later, my gushing e-mail was quoted in the New York Times because it was included in the initial disclosures that were submitted by Julie Taymor, the plaintiff, in Taymor, et al. v. 8 Legged Productions, LLC, et al.

That second “et al.” referred to me. In other words, I was being sued for treachery, while I got to sound to the news-reading public like a world-class suck-up.

If you’re trying to decide if it sounds better for the press to call you a “traitor” or a “toadie,” things have clearly not gone according to plan.

—from My List of Lessons Learned

•     •     •

A nerve-wracking promotional event was scheduled for September 10. Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos was going to host Ms. Taymor, Bono, and Edge, and then the segment was going to culminate with Reeve Carney singing “Boy Falls From the Sky” live from the Hudson Theatre. After doling out glimpses of the show to a few dozen or a few hundred people at a time, we were about to flash an audience of five million.

Julie had already proclaimed that there was no way she was taking “shit” out of “Boy Falls From the Sky.” It was the acid test—either Turn Off the Dark got bowdlerized into a shopping-mall holiday show, or our artistic integrity remained intact. She was serious. So now we were less than twenty-four hours away from the prospect of Reeve singing “shit” on a cheery morning television program, with the subsequent media frenzy (“Sh*tstorm for Broadway’s Spider-Man!”) all but guaranteed. All of our work, and one word was going to tank it all.

After a short, spirited debate with Michael Cohl, it was agreed that as a temporary measure, the word-in-question would be altered to “trash.” Reeve was informed the night before the performance, and so long as months’ worth of muscle memory didn’t kick in during the live performance and change “trash” back into “shit,” we’d be just fine.

The next morning George Stephanopoulos got Edge and Bono to tell the abbreviated history of the project via video feed, Julie shared some costume designs, Reeve and his band launched into “Boy Falls From the Sky,” and “trash” was sung, accompanied by a freakishly loud sigh of relief from somewhere in the audience.

Within hours, the whole thing was up on YouTube. The comments section was depressing. We clearly still had our work cut out for us when it came to persuading the fanboys that our show was legit. So Julie and I went over to the PRG offices directly after the event to discuss the latest advertising campaign proposals with Michael Cohl and Jere Harris. Bono was being patched through on the speakerphone. “Very blue cheese,” was what Bono called the proposed radio spot. He didn’t want to be associated with something so square. Julie not only thought the spot was awful, she seemed really agitated about it. Michael Cohl, trying to keep things relaxed, promised we’d come up with something good.

“We’ll put Glen on it. Glen’ll save the day,” laughed Michael as he clapped me on the back.

Bono seconded the sentiment, and was launching into another possible angle for the radio spot when Julie muttered something and abruptly got up from the table.

“Great. Then you’re on your own,” she said.

She was out of there. Out of the conference room, out of the offices, headed for the elevators.

Michael looked at me with a “What just happened?” face. Bono, unaware that Julie had scarpered, was still spinning radio ad ideas. Jere silently mouthed, “Did something set her off?” Michael shrugged, and mouthed a “What should we do?!” I mouthed a “Should I go after her?” We were behaving like actors in a silent movie because Bono was in the middle of a monologue on the speakerphone and it was best he didn’t know that everything had just gone weird. But now Bono was waiting for a response to his proposal and hearing only silence. “Guys? . . . Hello?”

I knew what set her off. It was the implication that I was the one doing all the creative wordsmithing for the show. Julie, after all, was the one making most of the suggestions about how to fix the ad campaign. Feeling unappreciated, uncredited, she lost it. I dashed out of the office to try to catch her. I found her pacing, still waiting for an elevator. As soon as she saw me, she vented and then vented some more.

And as I listened to her, I realized what set her off wasn’t even what really set her off. This display was happening only hours after she was on television, revealing details of her unfinished show in front of millions. It was easy to forget how that sort of thing puts you in a profoundly vulnerable state. Surely I was watching biochemistry on display—any amount of adrenaline, vasopressin, and norepinephrine had gotten released that morning, and the fight-or-flight chemicals were still flooding her system. I mean, surely.

And no doubt an extra dash of jitters was due to the fact that Julie’s Tempest was receiving its world premiere in Venice the next day. She was heading to the airport in literally a couple of hours. In fact, she was so anxious to leave for Italy that one part of her brain probably just seized command and instructed her body to leave the advertising meeting before the meeting was even over.

Michael Cohl showed up just as an elevator arrived. With the elevator door held open, he commiserated, he quipped, he pacified, and, finally, coaxed Julie back into the conference room. “Julie’s back from the bathroom,” he told Bono, still waiting on speakerphone. And some good marketing ideas actually came out of that meeting.

(Venice, however, was not an unequivocal success, and Julie would return from the weekend unsure whether the mixed notices were a harbinger of things to come for her movie. The trip had done her confidence no favors as we headed into Tech.)

•     •     •

Back at the Foxwoods, it wasn’t just sandbags swinging anymore—Scott Rogers or one of his assistants was now making the trips into the air. But one of the challenges Scott hadn’t factored in when transitioning from movies to theatre was that in the Foxwoods he had to finish the move. In a film, an aerial designer only had to figure out one portion of a sequence at a time. You could then stitch together five, ten, or fifty shots into one seemingly continuous aerial sequence.

“But in the theatre,” Scott explained, “the whole thing’s gotta hang together. And that makes everything just a hell of a lot more difficult.”

I looked up as an aerialist swung over our heads. Waitaminute . . .

“Scott, where’s the thingy?”

“The what?”

“The thing! The big ring thing that contains the big web net. Where’d it go?”

“Yeah, they took it down.”

“Why? When are they putting it back up?”

“They’re not. It’s done. It didn’t work.”

“But. Dude . . . if they’re not putting it b—What do you mean it didn’t work?”

“It was pretty clear as soon as they put it up that the net wasn’t gonna come out like they wanted. And the whole ring was gonna get in the way of the cables anyway. The flying wouldn’t have worked with that thing hanging there.”

So apparently a week before, while we were all in rehearsal, steel-cutting buzz saws went to work, slicing the ring truss into sections so it could then be hauled away to some big dump somewhere. A ring of money one million dollars in diameter, taken apart tranche by tranche.

“But . . . [brain sputtering] . . . what are we gonna do for our ending?! For, you know, the web?

“Well . . .” If Scott Rogers actually chewed tobacco and it’s not just my faulty memory of him, then in this pause, he spat brown juice into a little cup. He then proceeded to say, “They better come up with something.”

It turned out the “something” was a stage-wide spool of black lightweight mesh stored in a niche downstage of the footlights, and concealed by an automated lid. But it hadn’t been tested yet, so no one knew if it was going to work.

September 17, three weeks after our deliriously good stumble-through of Act One, we had another go at it. This time, our show was vapid, juvenile, and as emotionally engaging as damp wood. The next morning, on my way to rehearsal, I saw Julie waiting on the subway platform. On the train ride up to Times Square we rehashed the read-through from the day before, getting analytical. Julie, suddenly looking exhausted, stared out in front of her.

“Or maybe . . . ,” she said with a sigh, “maybe the whole idea of doing a Spider-Man musical is just ridiculous.”

And there we go. It was what I had said to her five years earlier, and now it was my turn to say, “I don’t think so. No.” I looked up. And right there in front of me was a woman painted the colors of a baboon. It was Rafiki. The entire subway car was plastered with images from The Lion King, emblazoned with the tagline from Disney’s new ad campaign—IMAGINATION UNTAMED!

Imagination untamed.

Really, what wasn’t ridiculous on a stage? A milkman sings about tradition, a young man gives a young woman a dead seagull, and a woman who looks and sounds almost nothing like a real baboon is speaking and behaving as if everyone knows she’s a baboon. And she’s pointing to miles and miles of grassland even though there’s actually nothing but a wooden floor in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. But we buy it. Art does its voodoo, and we buy it. Except for all the times that we don’t.

“Julie.” I fixed my eyes on her eyes. “Julie.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not ridiculous.”

All of it was ridiculous. Just three days earlier, I had to stop in my tracks on my way through the Times Square throng. A sizable billboard for Turn Off the Dark was now up on the corner of Forty-fifth and Broadway. A graphic of Spider-Man, swinging in front of the moon, with only four names framing him: Julie Taymor, Bono, Edge, and Glen Berger. I gawped. Tourists jostled by me. Down the block, the cowboy was strumming his guitar in his underpants. The Black Hebrew Israelites were preaching their brimstone and inanities. A group of teens were eating sandwiches in the TKTS line. I knew this moment was coming, but I was expecting a fun little ego boost, not existential bewilderment. Was there any of me in that name? What was a name? A sound or some squiggles keeping at bay the fact that we’re bare, forked animals burdened with some extra brain parts. It’s a fact you can glimpse when you wake up at four in the morning and can’t remember your name. Or when you get your name on a billboard in Times Square. Or in those moments before death. I’m going to die. Maybe not now, but I will. I. Will. Die.

Later that day, I was walking with Julie on Forty-second Street. She saw the billboard in the distance. She was excited, because in the middle of the “Sinistereo” animation sequence, one of our supervillains, Kraven the Hunter, was going to crash through a facsimile of that very billboard while riding an elephant.

“Can you imagine Kraven busting through that?!” Julie shouted. Then her face suddenly darkened. “Where’s my name?!”

An unfortunately positioned shadow from a nearby building was blacking out her name on the “Book by” line. Mine was spared.

“Yep. Every day at this time,” I needled her, “tourists are gonna think it’s just ‘Book by Glen Berger.’ ”

She harrumphed with a grin, and we walked on toward the subway.

Julie had no idea—it would have been beyond her comprehension if someone from the future showed up and told her—just what indignities were still in store for her name and its placement in the credits of Turn Off the Dark.

And Arachne scuttles by in the celestial shadows . . . Arachne—so confident, so exalted, then laid so low. Our patron goddess. She watches over us mortal artists, and she compassionately turns the crank—winding up the merciless-to-be-merciful machine built to teach humility . . .

Its motors and winches begin to whirr . . .

9

The God Mike

I was backstage, crouched and facing a corner, shining my cell phone onto the floor. Nothing. I usually had better luck than this. Now I was on hands and knees squinting in the dark, because that’s what I do on the first day of Tech. It’s a tradition.

While a play—any play—is playing out in front of its audience, other unscripted dramas are transpiring on that stage, containing actual births, peril, live sex acts, and corpses. Everyone’s oblivious to it because, of course, the participants are bugs. On the first day of Tech, I like finding one of these little creatures. I like knowing there are actual lives sharing space and time with the fake ones. Perspective, you know. For obvious reasons, a spider would’ve been nice that day, but I’d have taken a dead pill bug by this point. I decided to give it three more minutes.

Writer on hands and knees. Pull back to reveal:

An enormous auditorium, dark but for the illumination of little desk lamps and lots of computer screens. At a table, house left, the actors were gathered. On the table were dozens of little kits consisting of a microphone, a radio transmitter, and a battery pack. The name of a specific actor was written on each kit. Not only did each microphone fit on each actor’s head a certain way, but each radio also had its own frequency, so that the sound operator could tweak the volume and EQ during the show. The actors were just instructed to attach the microphones to their heads for the first time. We were about to tech the opening scene.

Wooden boards had been laid over entire rows of seats. At one of these makeshift tables, there was a glowing bank of computers and a black phone with a handset. This was where eight-time Tony Award–nominated lighting designer Don Holder and several assistants were ensconced. Most everyone else these days used headsets, but Don was old school. He’d have that anachronistic phone on his ear for most of the next ten weeks, looking dyspeptic, like one of those 1975 police detectives methodically calling his list of leads. Of all the people Julie considered geniuses, she asserted it the most to me about Don Holder. Don’s loyalty to Julie was genuine and deep: She believed in him enough to hire him for The Lion King, which he credited for transforming his career.

On the other end of Don’s phone was a lighting operator who was manning a computer somewhere high up in the theatre. Don’s phone also connected to the house-right balcony, where stage manager C. Randall White, sitting with a computer and headset, would be running the moment-to-moment execution of all the flying cues. Unlike other Broadway shows, this one was so complex that another head stage manager was required (Kat Purvis), to coordinate all the movement of the various set pieces.

A few rows down from Don Holder’s base camp, near the very center of the auditorium, there was a table for Teese Gohl to work on various music mixes and to confer with David Campbell over his musical arrangements. And costume designer Eiko Ishioka was taking notes next to him. Next to her were the assistant director, the associate director, and Danny Ezralow—all poised with laptops and iPads. And at the center of this table, in the center of the auditorium, like the termite queen, was Julie. Resting on the table in front of her was “the God Mike”—a wireless microphone that enabled a voice to be amplified throughout the auditorium. Sometimes Danny got to use the God Mike. Otherwise, it was the exclusive property of Julie.

There wasn’t shouting in the auditorium, there wasn’t bustle—there were a lot of low-voiced consultations. The banks of computers; the headsets; the scattered paper filled with graphs and technical jargon; the palpable vibe of competent folk focused on the narrow bandwidth of stuff that only they knew how to do—it made the whole scene feel like Mission Control, Houston. It was the vibe of a team that knew—as with any NASA endeavor—that anything less than success was a fireball.

Julie and Danny positioned the cast in what would be a tableau of black-trench-coated citizens. The cast began chanting, sounding quite deliberately like something out of Carl Orff ’s Carmina Burana. The floor lifted, revealing Jenn Damiano as Mary Jane “dangling” from a rope underneath the floor. As eyes adjusted, one noticed that the backdrop depicted one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, painted at a dramatic angle. And running toward her (and us), in slow motion, was Spider-Man, who appeared just as the heroic-sounding theme to “Boy Falls From the Sky” kicked in on the rehearsal piano.

“Hold, please.”

In addition to Julie with her God Mike, the other person with the authority to send his voice resounding through the auditorium was stage manager Randall White.

Something was wrong.

Julie had Don adjust the intensity of the lighting while Danny honed the choreography of the actors onstage, but something very wrong was not being addressed. And it was simply this: Spider-Man. Running toward Mary Jane.

I suppose I had imagined close-ups, and quick cuts between Mary Jane and Spider-Man. Dramatic angles. In other words, movie editing. Danny Ezralow had Chris Tierney try a sliding motion of a sort to enhance the slow-motion running effect. Chris did it well. But he looked like a mime. A mime miming “A day at the Olympic speed-skating trials.” Could we not use a strobe? Or something? Was I the only one who thought he looked like a mime? Anyone else seeing a mime?

This was our opening. It was a minute long. The somewhat terrifying Orff-esque chanting—which sounded like an angry mob demanding blood—was either daring or pretentious. The rising floor was cool. The reveal of Mary Jane was visually and narratively satisfying. But then the spectacle of Spider-Man—not swinging, not leaping, but running (and not running, but performing a theatrical interpretation of “running”)—managed to pound the message deep and irrevocably into my consciousness for the first time: This show was never going to be The Lion King.

Our original treatment—the one Avi Arad at Marvel rejected back in 2005—opened with the myth of Arachne. With the loom and the weavers and the transformation of a girl into a spider, it would’ve delivered all the opening wow we needed. But Avi felt this choice put an undue spotlight on Arachne. “Why aren’t you presenting Spider-Man at the top?” Fine. We pitched a new treatment to Marvel in 2005 with an opening that contained a half-dozen spider-men battling a half-dozen villains all over the auditorium. That treatment was approved in 2006.

The thing is, Julie had nothing specific in mind for that “Spider-Man opening extravaganza.” And over the years, the vision for the opening scene was pared down and down to what we were now teching. Dramaturgical logic dictated the choice. As the audience would eventually learn when they saw this scene repeated halfway through Act Two, Peter Parker didn’t have his powers anymore. So, logically, the actor couldn’t do any Spider-Man stuff at the top of the show. Run he must. Mime he must.

Narratively speaking, there was no arguing with that. But “pulling out the stops” was Julie’s strategy for the opening of The Lion King, and it’s one of the great coups de théâtre in the history of Broadway. People cry during the opening of The Lion King.

But that just wasn’t gonna happen here. Not this time. Next musical.

The heavy “Iris Wall” descended, because it was time to tech the loom. The wall was actually two large half-walls with a wedge cut out of each, enabling a diamond-shaped hole to be formed when the walls were spaced a certain distance apart. Behind the walls, while the Geek scene played, the loom swing was being installed and the “weavers” were being hooked up for their big swinging entrance. Julie had always imagined the first four weavers would immediately begin swinging out toward the audience as soon as the Iris Wall opened up. But now stage manager Randall was informing Julie that he couldn’t allow it. Julie was ready to argue the point until Randall explained that each weaver was being held in place by a cord. Should one of the cords accidentally release while the wall was still in place, that dancer would begin to swing helplessly toward the wall, ultimately slamming into it at a speed approaching fifty miles per hour. In other words, that dancer? Could die.

Okay. Can’t argue with that.

Making these sorts of determinations was one of Randall White’s key jobs on the show. The previous year, he was one of the main stage managers overseeing This Is It, Michael Jackson’s mega-concert tour that got canceled when one morning, Michael Jackson never woke up. With close-cropped hair and little room in his day job for joking around, Randall seemed tightly wound. But fair enough—stage-managing was a big responsibility. Nobody wanted his job. We were told privately that on several occasions, Randall used the 10-minute breaks to head out to 43rd Street and scream out his frustrations, startled pigeons be damned. It was disconcerting to hear this. Randall had his shit together like no one I've ever met. He was experienced. If he was screaming to the heavens, maybe more of us should have been as well.

So the Iris Wall parted, and we watched the seven weavers, standing in their long swings made of silk, slowly being pulled backward amid fog, eerie lighting, and mysterious, intensifying music. It didn’t look so bad, really. However—“Hold, please”—there was an issue with the automatic cord release. I was starting to get the feeling we were going to hear “Hold, please” a lot.

Issues with the loom delayed us. Then finding the right lighting for the Queens High School scene took time. “Don, remember what I said about ‘pink’—that’s getting too close to pink!” Julie hated pink. It also seemed as if she could discern gradations of red on the electromagnetic spectrum that no one else could. Humans are “trichromats,” meaning we have three types of cone cells in our eyes. However, it has been surmised that, because of the XX chromosome, some women may possess a fourth variant cone cell, situated between the standard red and green cones. This would make them—like birds—“tetrachromats.” These hypothetical tetrachromats would have the ability to distinguish between two colors a trichromat would call identical.

To date, only a few female candidates for tetrachromacy have been identified. I didn’t tell Julie my suspicions. And I’m not saying she is a tetrachromat. But it sure would explain several of those extra hours in Tech, when Julie had hues finessed to a fare-thee-well. But then again, a writer will fuss over a single word, to the exasperation of a choreographer who will make endless refinements to a dance step, deliberating between differences an engineer can’t even perceive. In other words, an obsession over subtleties may just be an attribute of expertise, rather than evidence of being a mutant. Still, a scientist should check her out.

After four days, we were getting through forty-two seconds of the show for every hour of Tech.

•     •     •

Brandon Rubendall was one of the dancers. He also played The Lizard. But he excelled as one of the flying spider-men. In fact, he was the one who executed “The Big Jump,” perhaps the show’s signature moment. With Brandon kneeling, the whole back of the floor swiftly rose, elevating him until he was at the top of a twenty-foot-high ramp, raked at a forty-five-degree angle. The lights in the floor then snapped on, revealing the ramp to actually be a skyscraper as seen at a dramatic angle. With the aid of two cables pick-pointed to his hips, Brandon leaped forward, did a back gainer, and landed in a crouch at the very lip of the stage, just inches from the audience sitting in the front row. (The first time this move was performed for Julie, Scott Rogers sat her in one of these prime seats. Fearing Brandon was going to land on top of her, she shrieked like a little girl. It was hard not to.) Upon landing, Brandon stood up and waited for the ramp behind him to lower to a twenty-degree angle. The cables then whipped him upstage as he executed a backward somersault. Landing on all fours, he then began crawling as if he were scuttling down the side of a building.

In the three hours before Tech each day, Scott Rogers and Jaque Paquin programmed and refined the flights in the show. And on the morning of September 26, they were practicing this newly programmed Big Jump with Brandon. The ramp rose. Brandon performed the back gainer. He stood, the ramp lowered, and the cables sent him hurtling upstage. Except . . . the ramp hadn’t yet lowered all the way to its twenty-degree angle. The timing of the cue was just a bit off. Perhaps the ramp was only five degrees off its target, but those five degrees were the difference between being deposited onto the ramp, and being slammed into the ramp.

The force of the landing broke Brandon’s toe, and caused some hairline fracturing in the rest of the foot. By the middle of Tech that day Brandon was cheerily hobbling about on crutches, outfitted in a massive cast already half-covered in Sharpie signatures and drawings of Spider-Man. He was going to be out for several weeks. Randall implemented new protocols, with the temptation no doubt rising again to let loose a primal scream from the sidewalk.

That same week, while Tech continued its glacial progress downstairs, Danny and assistant choreographer Cherice reworked the “D.I.Y. World” number with the dancers in the upstairs rehearsal room. Looking for new steps, Danny encouraged the dancers to improvise, and Gerald Avery—whose inventiveness had already inspired one of the number’s main moves—attempted a flip. He landed on his head. He was out cold. Gerald was taken away on a stretcher that night to a waiting ambulance, his neck immobilized by a brace just in case more undetected damage was done. There had been no culprit but the creative impulse. Nevertheless, “caution” was becoming the new watchword. Even those not dancing or flying were becoming aware that there were potential pitfalls to being an actor in this show.

Literally.

The pit didn’t make such an impression two years ago in George Tsypin’s studio, when little paper figurines stood near the six-inch-deep pit. In real life, the fifteen-foot-deep pit was starting to freak us out. Designed as a platform on top of a large scissor lift, it took up the space the orchestra would have occupied. (The musicians were consigned to two rooms in the back of the basement.) So this sizable amount of square footage was simply part of the stage most of the time. But it was also a “pit lift” that could deliver large props from the basement below. A two-foot-wide “passerelle” had been constructed between the audience and the front of the pit, so that an actor could cross from one side of the stage to the other when the pit was down.

We had now begun to tech the short Geek interlude before the wrestling match. In order for the wrestling ring to be loaded onto the pit lift, the pit needed to remain down for almost two minutes while the Geeks pretended they weren’t delivering lines on the edge of a chasm. We watched T. V. Carpio and Mat Devine cross paths on the passerelle, and suddenly that two-foot width seemed lunatic. Place a foot wrong and you were falling fifteen feet onto unforgiving basement concrete. And this was how it was going to be every night? With adrenaline flowing during the heat of a performance, no one would ever stumble? With eight shows a week, we would have done a hundred shows before we were halfway into our first year. With even just a one percent chance of someone falling, it meant odds were there would be a fall by April. But maybe that was overstating the risk. How about a minuscule .1 percent chance? That still left us with an actor falling into the pit before the end of our third year.

Julie was distressed. How did this feature slip under her radar? Not only was it dangerous, it looked dangerous. Surely it was going to distract an audience from our story. Other shows have utilized a sort-of lid that would automatically slide across the emptiness while the pit was down. But for whatever engineering reasons, the sliding lid wasn’t an option for Turn Off the Dark. None of the actors were crazy about this setup, and some, like Isabel Keating, who played Aunt May, were quite perturbed. And it did no one’s nerves any favors the day the pit lift began to rise from the basement.

“HOLD, HOLD, HOLD,” Randall exclaimed over the mike.

The lift stopped just in time. A member of the crew had been standing in the basement, leaning his head into the lift to check on something, when the hydraulics were suddenly activated. The lift began to rise. A few more seconds and the crew-member’s head would have been a nut in a nutcracker. More protocols were put in place. More curses were choked back. Then tech resumed.

It was now October 5. None of the scenes had been perfected. They were just being sketched in. We had gotten through thirty-seven minutes of the show in fifteen days. We were getting twenty-one seconds closer to the curtain call with every hour of Tech.

•     •     •

“You’ll keep the show open at least a year, won’t you? No matter what? So that it can find its audience?”

Julie exacted this promise after threading her arm through Michael Cohl’s, while Danny and I accompanied them on a stroll to a Times Square Italian joint during the Tech dinner break. Michael gave her his word. “Absolutely. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to take a year,” he said, and then shrugged. “But then again, maybe it will.”

It had already become a ritual that month. The four of us—producer, choreographer, director, co-bookwriter—would plunge, full of bonhomie, into the Midtown crowd to spend the dinner hour together, chatting about Tech, with Julie and Michael talking airily about all the future projects they would be doing together. Michael only got involved with things that fired him up, whether that meant producing a documentary on folksinging gadfly Phil Ochs or fighting to expand government health care in Canada. The profit margin? For Michael, it was in the mix, but it almost never took precedence. Julie had been looking for just that sort of producer her entire career.

So at the end of dinner, the check arrived. Each night one of the foursome paid for the rest of us. Whose night it was to pay was rigorously enforced. It meant for every four nights, I had three nights of free meals, and one night where I had no choice but to blow through my entire per diem for the week. The staff, the crew, the cast—they were all receiving weekly salaries. The “creatives,” on the other hand, don’t get paid until performances begin.

I had gone over seven months now with hardly any income because I had been working exclusively on Spider-Man. And every week I sent most of my per diem back to my family, as if I were a migrant worker working the orchard circuit. My shirts were getting holes in them but I didn’t have the funds to replace them. It was driving Julie to distraction, and one day she slinked up to me, jabbed her hand into one of the holes, and yanked down until half my shirt was in shreds. But I kept wearing the shirt anyway.

“But promise me when we open,” said Julie, “when you’re rich—”

“I’ll buy a raft of shirts, I promise.”

I was going to make a million dollars off of Spider-Man.

“Oh, even more than that,” assured confident colleagues. Was it possible that I was actually going to be out of debt before the end of the year? That seemed . . . just . . . preposterous. But Julie swore it was going to happen.

In the meantime, lunches and breakfasts were out of the question. I borrowed an awl from a stagehand to put another hole in my belt. Julie was losing weight too. She was simply forgetting to eat, to go outside even. There were too many details to work out during breaks: The inflatable Bonesaw McGraw kept leaking. The walls of Peter’s bedroom were too heavy for the puppeteers. And then there was the bed.

After Uncle Ben died in his arms, Reeve was supposed to stagger in a daze toward his bed and sing “Rise Above.” How would the bed get there? It was a remote-controlled bed with concealed wheels and motored by a friction drive mechanism. It could putter to the precise spot you needed it.

So as Reeve sang in an outpouring of bitterness and grief, the bed trundled onstage.

When the ones who run the firehouse . . .

The bed stopped short, and then inexplicably wheeled stage left.

Are the ones that start the fires . . .

Reeve was singing directly to the memory of Uncle Ben, groping for answers to a senseless death. The bed, meanwhile, was making a three-point turn. Reeve would have really liked to sit on that bed, but it was heading downstage now, on a diagonal. Reeve followed it, as he honored his murdered uncle:

And you said rise above!

Open your eyes up! . . .

The bed finally looked like it was parked. So, still singing, Reeve began to sit, but there was no bed underneath him, because it had just lurched backward. Julie grabbed the God Mike.

“Can we try this again, please?”

A solemn piano vamp accompanied Reeve walking downstage with heavy tread.

When the ones who run the firehouse—

The bed meanwhile inched forward. Then zipped forward, missing its mark. I could hear Julie mutter, “What the—? Who’s controlling this?”

And you said rise above! . . .

The bed backed up a little. And then a little more. Reeve was spiking the high notes with lacerating regret. Julie eyed the bed.

Open your—

The bed zoomed forward.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake—!”

“Hold, please.”

Julie asked Rob Bissinger what the deal was. Rob reported: “There might be something wrong with the remote control. But we suspect it’s the wheels. They’re having a hard time with the crevices in the floor.”

The bed required the sort of solution NASA engineers devised for the Mars Rover to get over rubble. The bed was sent to the shop. Money would be spent.

I had a dream one night that week that Tech was going so slowly, we were beginning to witness creatures evolving onstage, as if we had shifted into a geologic time frame. There were days, however, when we were positive the show was going to be a mega-smash because everything once in our heads was now happening right there onstage. Look! The buildings were lit as if it were dawn in heaven. And now the floors were rising, and Brandon Rubendall’s replacement—Kevin Aubin—was set to do the Big Jump.

The drums kicked in, the guitars howled, and Kevin launched into the air. After he landed, the tilted skyscrapers straightened, the lights bathed the set in violets and reds, and Kevin was sent backward toward the fully lowered ramp.

“WHOO!” shouted Julie. Meanwhile, right behind her, Stan Lee was one big grin. That’s right—Stan Lee himself. About to turn eighty-eight, he showed up the evening of October 6 in his leather jacket and aviator glasses, looking more hale and with-it than any octogenarian had a right to be.

And now he was watching the stage turn to strange sumptuous purples as Kevin Aubin was lifted straight up twenty feet and swung off stage right, with skyscrapers gliding toward the center of the stage before leaning in a variety of unexpected angles. Another Spider-Man zipped across on a cable. And all the while, the entire Upstage Cityscape Backdrop (actually one huge dial) turned around in circles to give us all vertigo. It was all just so cool.

“WHOO!” exclaimed a bunch of us.

Blinding reds shifted to trippy sepias as still another Spider-Man swooped stage left to stage right near the front of the stage.

The aerialist got a nice long “WHOOOO!” from Julie.

“. . . And hold.”

While we were whooing it in the orchestra seats, Randall was in his box sweating bullets. Losing years off his life. Strategizing just how he or anyone was going to make it through this whole number without stopping. Without dying.

We did make it through other sequences that night, including several featuring Chris Tierney, who was assigned the swinging Spider-Man role known as “the hero flyer” because it had the most difficult aerial parts.

“I’ve trained a lot of people on the wires over the years, but I’ve never seen someone take to it as naturally as Chris,” marveled Scott Rogers. Chris Tierney had a photograph of himself as a toddler in a Spider-Man costume. It was a dream for him to swing around the theatre, and you could tell by that extra little panache he put into his moves. Yes, we only got through two minutes of stage time that night. (We were conditioned by now to not expect more than that.) But when Chris Tierney swung over our heads at fifty miles per hour, we were all seven-year-olds again, especially eighty-seven-year-old Stan Lee. The “circus” part of our “circus-rock-and-roll-drama” was still on track.

An hour later, in the lobby, Stan Lee was signing the scripts of several starry-eyed actors and dancers, slapping backs, slinging jokes, posing for pictures, and proclaiming for Jake Cohl’s cameras that the show was going to be the most magnificent thing ever. He gave Julie several hugs—“You’re a genius, and I love you,” he said—and then headed out to the limo waiting for him. Did any fanboy want to pick a fight now? We had Stan the Man himself, on camera, giving the show his blessing. If that didn’t inoculate us from the doubts of the doubters, what would?

And yet. These confidence-boosting days alternated with other days. Days where the distance between our ideal and our reality was so vast it was difficult to fathom. Just a few days after Stan Lee’s visit, we had come to the scene where Patrick Page (as Norman Osborn) was supposed to step into a massive DNA something-something contraption, and then emerge through lights and smoke sixty seconds later as the Green Goblin in all his hideous, startling DayGlo glory.

But that didn’t happen. Sixty seconds wasn’t nearly enough time for the quick-change. So we watched Patrick cradling his dead wife, delivering a Shakespearean revenge-tragedy monologue, but meanwhile looking like a guy who took off his shirt and then had a little incident while grilling some steaks.

And there was nothing we could do about it. Come opening night, we were going to be a laughingstock. Julie turned in her seat and looked at me with a strange expression. Then she said, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking and feeling, “Just watching it all disappear down the dreamhole, huh?”

I didn’t say anything. Did she really just intuit the thoughts jackknifing through my head? And did she really just suggest she was thinking them too? That all our aspirations, all our work, were going to be for naught? I don’t know how deep she buried her fears after that day. But she would never say anything like that out loud again.

She tasked the costume department to come up with a solution. Fingers were crossed. And we couldn’t sink too far down in despair anyway because now we were working on the Spider-Man–Goblin climactic battle. And everything Scott Rogers described back in August? His whacked-out plan? We were watching it happen above our heads. Thirty hidden motors were controlling the speed, height, and trajectory of these two dancers wrestling and winging through the air. And it was amazing.

Michael Cohl laughed. “There’s the climax of the show, right there. And we’ve put it at the end of Act One!”

Hah, hah—yeah, it was quite a spectacle. But of course, it wasn’t the climax of the show—we trump it at the end of Act Two with an immense funnel-shaped web that descends from the—oh. Right.

We didn’t have that anymore.

Back at my apartment that night, I thought about what Michael said. Five and a half years earlier, I landed this musical bookwriting gig by writing the very scene we teched tonight—the scene that culminated in the Spidey-Goblin aerial battle. I wrote it as a lark. Took me a night. I of course had no idea at the time how much money and hardware and ingenuity and effort would go into actually rendering the thing. And when I wrote it, I had no notion where it would go in the show. It was a scene that opened with the Goblin singing a takeoff of Rodgers & Hart’s “Manhattan”—“I’ll take Manhattan / And then I’ll flatten / All of Queens . . .”—and ended with the weight of the Steinway dragging Goblin off the side of the building to his death.

The piano was in the scene because in May 2005, instead of going to sleep thinking about baseball or sex, I went to sleep every night fantasizing how not even Fox News could spin President Bush’s assassination as something heroic if it was due to a large piano falling on top of him. Up for this Spider-Man gig the same month, grasping for some musical-theatre-appropriate method for the Goblin to murder the citizens on the street down below, I remembered my nightly sleep aid. And that was why a piano was in the Chrysler Building scene.

So . . . should Michael’s casual comment get some consideration? Could you put the Spider-Man–Goblin Chrysler Building scene and aerial fight at the end of the show? I spent three minutes that night gaming it out. It would mean the Goblin doesn’t die at the end of Act One. Oh. Well that would mean there wouldn’t be a web-fight between Spider-Man and Arachne at the end of the show because Arachne wouldn’t be the main villain of Act Two. So, of course not—you can’t move the Goblin fight. Good. Glad we settled that. I went to sleep that night thinking about sex and baseball.

•     •     •

The last time we had a group sales presentation, it was back in 2009, a few months before David Garfinkle found nothing but lint and mouse droppings in his coffers. Any excitement and goodwill we kindled with those agents at that sneak preview got dampened a year ago. So now, on October 19, a number of sales agents and ticket brokers were filing into the Foxwoods to get wooed anew. A presentation was going to cut into precious Tech time, but we didn’t have a choice—we couldn’t sneeze at the folks who were wondering just how much energy they should put into selling Spider-Man tickets.

The program began with Kevin Aubin performing the Big Jump. Four sales agents sitting in the front row shrieked in fear and delight. So far, so good. Kevin sprung backward, and . . . eesh . . . he landed pretty hard on that ramp. But he seemed okay—he was now scuttling down the ramp, and . . . oh God, was that a grimace flickering across his face? The presentation continued. The sales agents seemed impressed with the stunts. They filed out of the theatre at the end of the demonstration chatting chirpily. Maybe there wasn’t quite the same level of enthusiasm as the 2009 showcase with Bono and Edge. But at least none of them guessed that Kevin Aubin broke both of his wrists right in front of them.

A fluke. The timing of the cue got off again. And maybe the scramble that morning to prep the stage for the presentation upped the odds that something like this would happen. Kevin was sanguine about it—“just one of those things.” Nonetheless, the burden of safeguarding this show was now really weighing heavily on Randall. But he couldn’t quit—no one else could possibly take over his job. Everyone was sick about it—particularly Scott Rogers, and also Jaque Paquin, who had seen his share of accidents in his twenty years at Cirque du Soleil but especially couldn’t stand the “stupid” ones—the ones that got repeated. More safeguards were instituted—this time they were built into the computer program itself. There was no way this screwup was happening again. No way.

Would the incident get leaked? A few days went by. Nothing in the press. Looked like the coast was clear. I didn’t even want to contemplate the sort of hay Riedel would’ve made out of this.

So Tech plodded on at its surreal pace. We were getting through less than three minutes of the show per day. It didn’t feel like we were making theatre so much as stop-action animation. A giant human-spider dove from the mezzanine and hurtled over our heads as we tried to carry on conversations in the murk. Over and over again giant spiders swooped. We had been in this cavern in the near-darkness for thirty-three days. It felt like we were all trapped in a coal mine, on acid.

•     •     •

Months earlier it was decided that the last scene of the show needed to be set to music. As per Julie’s instructions, orchestrator David Campbell based his arrangement on trip-hop group Portishead’s musical style, attempting to replicate their heroin-fogged, spy-jazz sound. And of all the artistic risks we were taking in the show, going for quasi-operatic recitative in the mode of Portishead between a spider-lady and a superhero as the two leaped about on a net just might have been the riskiest.

The dialogue-ish lyrics sounded shoehorned into the choppy melody lines. Worse, it just didn’t sound like something Edge and Bono would ever write. However, Edge and Bono were finally done with Leg 3 of their tour. They began swinging by the theatre, and I sat down with Edge one day in the upstairs rehearsal room to give him the lowdown on the final scene.

“It’s a fight to the death, but it’s also a mating dance. It should feel intense between Peter and Arachne. Like they belong together. And yet, at the end of it, Peter demands to know where Mary Jane is.”

Edge suggested: “It’s like calling out someone else’s name during rough sex.”

Yes. That was it exactly. “So can you think of a song from U2’s past that could be a model for the scene? Something that sounds like fight music?”

Edge thought for a moment, and then mentioned “Exit” from their 1987 mega-platinum The Joshua Tree. We listened to it together. About a minute and a half before the end of the song, there’s a fantastic guitar solo—raw and relentless. It was just what we were looking for. I took the song to Julie, who was in her orchestra seat waiting for more lights to get programmed.

She stuck in some earbuds. She was into it. She tried some words over the guitar solo: “Love me or kill me! / Love me or kill me!”

Her eyes were shut. She was really concentrating. She turned to me and did that thing people do when they’re wearing headphones—she started shouting, unaware that she didn’t need to shout.

“THIS IS GREAT!!”

Now she was singing louder in the middle of the hushed auditorium, oblivious to how loud she was getting—“LOVE ME OR KILL ME!”

Everyone could hear her now; a director yelling what, after thirty-six days of Tech, sounded like a reasonable request. But she was actually singing Arachne’s soul-sick plea to Peter. It was Arachne’s entire story boiled down to five words.

It was decided that David Campbell’s scoring would be retained for the first half of the scene, but the next minute and a half should be wild U2-sounding rock, with three voices wailing—Arachne’s, Peter’s, and Mary Jane’s.

So the next day, in the small upstairs rehearsal room, a couple of guitarists, a drummer, and a keyboardist were plugging in. These were serious studio musicians—guys who had been playing songs from this show since the 2007 workshop. Bono and Edge had to come up with a song in the next hour. Julie was busy with Tech downstairs, but she had given them their orders: Come up with something as fierce as that solo in “Exit.” So when Bono said to the musicians, “I want something like ‘Cars.’ Do you guys know ‘Cars’?”—eyes squinted and eyebrows cocked.

“ ‘Cars’? You mean . . . Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’?”

Yeah, they knew it. It was a New Wave hit from 1980. It made famous use of the Polymoog synthesizer. Few songs in the universe sound more “1980.” It had that stiff, staccato sort of groove that made it fun to do the robot dance to. If you were eleven years old. Nonetheless, Bono started humming the groove. And keyboardist Billy Jay Stein, looking amused (he tended to look amused), started playing the theme. Bono kept humming, but now he was putting his throat into it. Repeating the groove slowly. Moving his body just a bit. And something in the room shifted. You could feel it. As if, watching and listening to Bono, we all suddenly heard something in “Cars” we had never heard before.

Sex.

Guitarist Matt Beck began to take up the groove. Now Bono was humming another musical phrase over the groove. Edge had his guitar out, and something new and wilder was emerging. And the room was getting loud. Conductor Kimberly Grigsby was smiling in disbelief. She glanced my way—Are you digging what’s happening here? Musical alchemy was what was happening. “Most incredible hour,” Kimberly said afterward, nerves still tingling. Onstage this was going to be a very righteous tune. And yet . . . it wasn’t.

This “Love Me or Kill Me” session was the culmination of all the music—all the multivaried soundscapes—Bono and Edge had generated for the show in the last five years. All the infectious grooves, hummable hooks, moving anthems. And the audiences that began arriving a month later just couldn’t hear it. There were issues—orchestration issues and profound mechanical issues, and mysterious hard-to-nail-down issues that banjaxed the composers’ efforts; killed this enterprise’s whole sonic dimension. And the first inklings of the issues only came to light when the full orchestra was finally assembled and the music was played through sound designer Jonathan Deans’s speaker system in a full auditorium.

The result: Despite demos exhibiting a wide and unpredictable palette, Ben Brantley of the Times said nothing at all about the music when he wrote his review in February. Nothing except that it “blurs into a sustained electronic twang of varying volume, increasing and decreasing in intensity, like a persistent headache.” Not great material to pull for a marquee quote. Except maybe “Intensity! Like!”

Anyway, that was in the future, which was not for us to know. It was the present that we had to deal with. And the present included a new Michael Riedel New York Post article. He broke a story on October 28 with the headline “ ‘Spider-Man’ Safety Scare: Actor breaks both wrists in failed stunt.” I scanned through it that morning with a good idea where all this was heading:

. . . The most expensive and technically complex show ever produced on a Broadway stage. It may also turn out to be the most dangerous . . .

. . . blood-curdling accident . . .

. . . stunt went horribly awry . . .

This was the day it started. The day the heat lamps got turned on. They would take a while to warm up, but eventually they would be glowing something crazy. Within a week, news not only of Kevin Aubin’s wrists, but also Brandon Rubendall’s foot, was out. News would beget news, which would beget scrutiny, which would beget news. The Foxwoods was going to become a fishbowl. Containing a bunch of increasingly stressed-out fish.

10

We’re Not Ready

Reading comic books as a ten-year-old, I thought J. Jonah Jameson was a bit of a stretch. Why would someone be so monomaniacally determined to bring a man down? Especially when it was obvious that Spider-Man had nothing but good intentions? I enjoyed the character of J. J., sure; he made for an amusing, extra source of stress in Peter Parker’s life. But was he really a plausible human being?

I eventually grew up and figured out there was no such thing as an implausible human being. So of course our good-intentioned Spider-Man show had its own Jameson. He was gunning for us, and finally I had to stop asking why and just figure, fine. Fine.

And at first Michael Riedel’s articles were just a nuisance, like a gnat flitting around your face while you’re trying to have a conversation. But as November progressed, as his articles started getting more sadistic, he was less gnat and more mosquito, taking sips of blood and leaving behind a wheal that itched like hell. By the end of 2010, when his articles were doing some serious damage, he wasn’t just a blood-sucking mosquito; he was a parasite-carrying blood-sucking mosquito depositing the larvae of an elephantiasis-causing filarial worm under the skin of our show.

Not to put Riedel in a negative light or anything.

After all, Michael Riedel was avidly read—he had found his niche in the Broadway ecosystem, and good for him. Plenty of shows shrugged off Riedel’s “reportage.” Other shows were weakened by his disclosures, and when those shows closed, a Broadway theatre became available again, and a new show moved in. It was, as Mufasa would say, “the circle of life.” Only occasionally did someone actually take a swing at Michael (like director David Leveaux, who became a folk hero when he slugged the guy at the Angus McIndoe Restaurant on Forty-fourth after a particularly annoying 2004 article).

Riedel’s first article covering Kevin Aubin’s accident was at least accompanied by some paragraphs making the aerial work sound pretty exciting. His next article a few days later spilled the news that the show was indeed postponing the first preview by two weeks, and moving opening night from December 21 to January 11. He reported that the “bone-breaking Spectacle of Insanity” was “headed off the rails,” predicting “Taymor and her band of flying daredevils are going to have to ratchet down the special effects so that nobody gets killed.”

Patrick Healy couldn’t bear to be scooped, particularly by Riedel. Having covered Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary and now contributing to the Arts Beat at the New York Times as their theater reporter, Healy had begun to step up his coverage of the show. So it was Healy who broke the news that a couple dozen stunts still weren’t ready to be performed in front of safety inspectors from the New York State Department of Labor.

Blogs and Internet zines linked to the Healy and Riedel reports, and chatter about the show increased exponentially. All of which would have been terrific publicity-wise, except certain words about the show—words like “dangerous” and “troubled”—were blooming like an outbreak of red tide.

To release some tension from all this exposure, Julie and Danny had taken to beating up our giant Bonesaw McGraw in the lobby, calling the inflatable dummy “Michael Riedel.” Less innocuously, patience was getting thinner and tempers were starting to flare inside the auditorium as Tech continued. With more and more frequency, curt demands and out-and-out browbeating were being directed toward the staff, particularly Randall White. Dancers were getting scolded for not incorporating the latest revisions. The crew was getting muttered about for appearing to lack the aptitude to handle such a show. Say each person in that theatre spotted Julie and Danny a hundred “Goodwill Points.” The director and choreographer had now begun to expend those points. At this rate, the points would be used up sometime around January 11. So long as we opened on the eleventh, we’d be okay, and this shift in tone was merely digging the heels into the horse’s side for the homestretch. So I didn’t say anything. I didn’t try to change anyone’s behavior—not Danny’s, not Riedel’s, not anyone’s. But that old earnest Bing Crosby song kept playing in my head, and it’s so uncomplicated it breaks my heart: “Never treat others with scorn / We’re only here ’cause we’re born.”

•     •     •

Oprah Winfrey was in the theatre. Bono would be bringing several people into the theatre that month, and one never knew who it was going to be next. But Teese Gohl, music supervisor, wasn’t looking impressed. In fact, today, with the full orchestra in the Foxwoods for the first time, Teese was looking highly unamused. Getting the EQ right in this theatre was proving a challenge, not least because the orchestra had been packed into two rooms in the basement in the back of the theatre. The music from those two rooms was translated into electricity, which then traveled via thick-ass cables hundreds of yards up stairs, around corners, past offices and dressing rooms, until it was eventually dispersed as music through speakers hung throughout the auditorium.

Who knew what would get lost in the translation. “Jonathan Deans is a rock star,” said one starstruck young sound engineer to me who was seeking our sound designer’s autograph. Jonathan’s work on shows like Cirque du Soleil’s LOVE was renowned. So we weren’t worrying. But—and few of us knew this yet—Jonathan himself was worrying. Our biggest and most crucial speakers had been hung right behind two large immovable set pieces. This arrangement would end up turning all the music in the show to mud. Months later Michael Cohl would blame Jonathan Deans’s Britishness for this acoustical cock-up.

“He was too damn polite! He should have been raising hell!”

For what it was worth, what Oprah Winfrey heard that day blew her away. As Tech continued that day, Bono and Oprah sat together and watched on Julie’s iPad video clips of scenes already staged. Bono had seen these clips before, but he seemed just as thrilled with them as ever. And, of course, if Bono’s enthusiasm infected Oprah—television-hosting, magazine-owning, public-opinion-shaping Oprah—all the better. Bono’s a shrewd fellow.

Shrewd enough, in fact, not to show Oprah the second act opening—an introduction to six supervillains staged as a sort of fashion show. It was entitled “The Ugly Pageant.” And, eesh, was it ever. When Edge laid down a fun, fuzz-guitar, pop-punk trifle for the Ugly Pageant five years before called “Spider-Man Rising,” Julie wasn’t so hot on it. But when Dwayne Clark put on a Jamaican accent for his 2009 audition, Julie’s eyes lit up. Could he, perhaps, try “Spider-Man Rising” as a Rastaman? Putting a reggae spin on “Spider-Man Rising” finally made the song acceptable to Julie’s ears.

So a year and a half later, Dwayne was now onstage as a Jamaican busker, decked out in dah dreads.

“But what’s that?” Julie squinted.

The thing he was toting on his chest was not what she had asked for. She wanted our busker to play the bucket drums. The props department simply needed to drill some holes in a couple of plastic buckets, put some string through them so the man could wear them from his neck, and for twenty bucks’ worth of materials we’d be good to go.

But what was delivered—with its reinforced harness and welded metal—looked like the thousand-dollar custom-made thing that it was. In the props department’s defense, they couldn’t believe that Julie Taymor really wanted actual plastic paint buckets in a show as hyperdesigned as this one, where even Peter Parker’s camera was a large, forced-perspective object beautifully rendered in grayscale.

Eventually, Dwayne was provided plastic bucket drums. But it turned out reggae loses some of its integrity when it’s sung next to dancers in brightly colored “citizen” costumes that included a nun, an underwear salesman, and a beauty pageant winner named “Miss MetroCard,” while elaborately costumed supervillains such as Carnage and Kraven the Hunter slashed and stomped down a fashion show runway. It turned out, in fact, that in such a context, your Rastaman was going to seem less like Bob Marley, and more like Jar Jar Binks.

In addition, there were ungainly and unsightly puppets (that Michael Curry definitely didn’t design). The Geeks’ dialogue couldn’t be heard over the din of the music. And whenever the verses of “Spider-Man Rising” were sung by the whole company, the arrangement and the bright costumes combined to make the song sound like something composed for a morning-television show for toddlers. The only time I’ve ever used the phrase “a hot mess” is right here, in this very sentence, and I’m using it to describe our Act Two opening as it existed in mid-November 2010. Two weeks before our first preview.

•     •     •

But of course, it wouldn’t be Tech if every possible problem didn’t rear its head. Turn Off the Dark was going to be a massive hit. There were problems. They’d be solved. Maybe not by November 28—we had given up on that idea. But by the beginning of January—by the time the critics started to attend—we’d have it all sorted out.

We did, however, need an ending for our show on November 28 and, as of November 12, we no longer had one. The “Plan B” for our web net got scotched because the material kept ripping when actors started climbing on it. So we had two weeks to come up with a “Plan C.”

And there were still more than a dozen aerial moves that had to be approved by the safety inspectors from the Department of Labor. If they didn’t allow us to land Spider-Man in the aisles, Scott Rogers would have to reprogram half of the Spider-Man–Goblin battle, and we would be so screwed. And our two now-very-public injuries were prompting extra stringency from the inspectors.

There have always been injuries on Broadway. Even Mary Martin in Peter Pan broke her arm when she was accidentally flown into a brick wall. The star of Wicked—Idina Menzel—fell through a trapdoor the night before her final performance and cracked a rib. Before a performance of The Little Mermaid, actor Adrian Bailey fell through a trapdoor and sustained a broken back and a shattered pelvis. But were the injuries on other shows an endless source of hyperventilation in the media? The feeling inside the Foxwoods was that we were getting a bum deal, and if this narrative about a reckless show wound up pressuring the inspectors to castrate our best aerial bits, we were going to lose millions at the box office. And what did Riedel have to say about that? Of the show, he crowed, “I’ve got my foot on its neck, and I’m having too much fun to take it off.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I wrote an anonymous, snarky comment to append to the end of his New York Post column, and I got such a taste for anonymous commenting, I began trawling the Internet, scrawling comments on every blog I could find, pushing back against this incessant, ill-informed negativity. After I found a gang of commenters putting the boot in our show as if they were a bunch of hooligans out of A Clockwork Orange, I (incognito) let ’em have it.

And if it’s good? If it’s entertaining? Will your heads literally explode? Don’t you realize this could be the moment—right now, right here on this blog!—when the Internet started to change? When it suddenly occurred to people to See THEN Judge?

That silenced them. No, actually they mocked me, and without mercy. That didn’t stop my anonymous tirades. After all, each of us had to find his or her own method for releasing stress.

Danny Ezralow wished Reeve and Jenn Damiano would relieve their stress together. You know. Together. Julie agreed. Danny and Julie both believed that the scenes between our two leads were lacking chemistry, and it was bringing the show down. I didn’t notice anything particularly inert, and anyway I wasn’t so sure “chemistry” would improve anything. Maybe I should just be rewriting some lines?

“No, no, the lines are fine,” Julie said. “There just isn’t any attraction between them.”

“Well, it’s not like you can force attraction,” I said.

Julie and Danny weren’t so sure. Wasn’t there some way to get them dating? Even a one-night stand might do the trick.

“Guys—you’re not serious.”

Danny said he’d have a birds-and-bees talk with Reeve, while Julie agreed to consider a “between-us-women” chat with Jenn. This is a weird profession. There was still no discernible spark between them a week later, and keeping vigil for any sign of progress felt uncomfortably similar to those tense days when people hoped Ling-Ling would make a move on Hsing-Hsing in the giant panda enclosure at the National Zoo.

•     •     •

We were putting in eighteen-hour days. But it beat working. I mean, really. As Tom Stoppard’s character Henry Carr in Travesties puts it: “For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.”

When the actors weren’t onstage, they were killing time in the orchestra seats, messing with their smartphones or gossiping with their castmates. Geek Mat Devine was sending me pitches for merch to sell in the Foxwoods gift shop that he wanted me to run by Michael Cohl. Fellow Geek Jonathan Schwartz was studying how to beat the stock market. And meanwhile, I had another life somewhere north, but the whaling ship was still at sea, and we couldn’t sail home until we found that whale.

When the opening was pushed twenty days, all the ticketholders and ticket agents and press agents and marketing folk were unhappy with the news. But who cared. It was that one other person I was concerned about. The wife. By the middle of November, I had left her alone for a quarter of a year with three children, three adorable children as relentless as three woodpeckers searching for grubs by pecking at the back of your head. I also left her with a decrepit dog whose incontinence was getting worse. And not just any incontinence. Fecal incontinence. On phone calls home, I stopped asking, “How was your day?”

On November 18 I got the call: The dog had taken a turn for the worse. I skipped rehearsal and took the bus upstate. The kids were already at school. The dog was lying on a blanket near the kitchen. She was unable to get up, but she wagged her tail excitedly when she saw me after such a long absence. She licked my hand. I went to the sink for some water, and when I turned back, her mouth was open and unmoving. She was staring out into space with unblinking eyes. A minute later, her eyes were green. Her fur was still as soft as ever, but her mouth was frozen, and she was growing stiffer by the moment. My wife and I were newlyweds when she convinced me to get a puppy. She was now quickly stitching a makeshift bag on the sewing machine, so I could carry Crumby to the car.

Crumby.

Into the trunk with you.

I grabbed some overdue bills from the huge pile on the desk. I took the corpse to the animal hospital with cremation instructions, then hit the bus back to New York City, heading directly to the private, wainscoted room in the Lambs Club on Forty-fourth, where Patrick Healy of the Times was conducting an exclusive and up-to-now elusive interview with Edge, Bono, Julie, and me. Bono ordered martinis for the table before dinner, and canny Mr. Healy sat back without touching his glass and let the drinks go to work on the rest of us. Before we were midway through the meal, Julie-the-lightweight was letting out that—just ten days before our first preview—we still hadn’t figured out how we were going to make the ending of our show work. She went on to say she hoped those who bought tickets to previews would “get to enjoy the art of making theatre, as well as the magic of it.” This was another way of saying, “Boy, do we have some ragged moments for you.” Bono, meanwhile, was name-dropping Rilke, William Blake, and the Ramones in the same sentence. Edge didn’t say very much, and I followed his lead and quietly ate my fish. A free dinner was a free dinner.

Patrick Healy followed us back to the Foxwoods to watch Tech. A couple of journalists from Time magazine were also there. And the 60 Minutes crew was getting a little more footage for Lesley Stahl’s report, which was finally airing next week after eighteen months in the making. All these reporters were observing a process that felt kinda private and kinda boring. As if you had invited some folks you met in the elevator to watch you shave.

I suddenly noticed an elderly fellow seated in the gloom behind me. “Hey, Michael,” I whispered. “Who’s the geezer in Row G?” Michael Cohl rolled his eyes.

“Bono brought him in. It’s Murdoch.”

Michael Cohl was smiling, but he was also fidgeting as if he were breaking out in hives. Michael has bankrolled a documentary about blacklisted union-championing folksinger Pete Seeger (The Power of Song). He has produced films covering the antiwar activism of John Lennon (LENNONYC) and Harry Belafonte (Sing Your Song). And now Rupert Murdoch, the man who has done more to advance the Conservative cause than Saint Reagan himself, was in the Foxwoods Theatre. We had all made silent vows: the “what-I-would-say-to-that-man-if-I-ever-came-face-to-face-with-him” vows. And they all went out the window. Michael Cohl was a realist. And Bono was a realist, which is why he brought Rupert in for a peek at Tech. If there was any chance this media magnate might put his weight behind our show, then by all means we were going to make sure he knew the pretzel rods on the production manager’s desk were his for the taking.

The actors were released at nine thirty that night. An hour later the crew had called it a day. The evening production meeting wrapped at midnight. And now everyone had gone home except Julie and me. And only then, in the abandoned theatre, the ghost light glowing bravely from the middle of the stage, did it occur to Julie that the lads were leaving for Australia early in the morning. We probably wouldn’t be seeing Edge and Bono again until opening night.

“And Bono didn’t even say goodbye!” Julie said, absolutely indignant, as she stomped out the door onto Forty-third Street, where a clutch of people was crowded around a town car. And in the middle of that excited gaggle—

“Bono?”

He was signing autographs. And all of Julie’s indignation melted into a head-shaking smile.

“Hey! Get in!” he beckoned to us. “I’ll drive you home!”

Julie and I hopped into the backseat. Bono instructed his driver to head south. He was in the front passenger seat, eager to play some new U2 demos for us. They had been working with a new producer—RedOne (Nadir Khayat, from Morocco)—who won a Grammy a few months earlier for his work with Lady Gaga. The first song wasn’t loud enough. Bono cranked it up.

“It’s very plastic!” he shouted over the music. “Great for the clubs!”

As Bono grooved to the synths in the front, Julie grimaced my way, a) because the music was really not her cup of tea, and b) because Bono spent his days that month working on this, working on songs with his bandmates, instead of hanging out in the Foxwoods with us. What exactly she’d have had Bono and Edge doing most of the time wasn’t clear. And the next day she’d be saying she was actually glad they were in Australia—their critiques of an unfinished show were becoming a distraction. Nevertheless, they were our collaborators, and it felt a little less of a burden, a little less lonely an endeavor when they were around.

The car dropped Julie off at her door. She gave Bono a kiss, and in that kiss there was nothing but love. And it was the last time that would be true. It was the last time they would ever see each other free of the freight that would get heaped onto the relationship. I was dropped off four blocks farther south. And the very first week I was freed from work on Turn Off the Dark, I picked up Crumby’s ashes from the vet.

It was the following June.

•     •     •

Some people already know this about collaboration, but it bears repeating: If you want to keep the wheels humming smoothly, do not assert or even vaguely imply in your memoir that your artistic partner has a small penis. Especially if your artistic partner is a rock star.

Keith Richards’s book Life had recently hit the shelves, with a few sentences devoted to “Mick’s tiny todger.” Now a meeting Michael Cohl set up between the Stones to discuss plans for their next album was on ice.

“Glen, this Spider-Man musical has to be a success. Because working with rock stars acting like ten-year-olds—I can’t take it anymore.”

Practically grabbing my lapels, Michael Cohl was making this plea to me a week before our first preview. But Danny Ezralow and I had it covered. Danny had already made some inquiries with the general managers, and there were a few dollars in the budget for a “Success Blessing.” (It was apparently a common-enough Broadway line item.) A “Ritual Maven” and her assistant would swing by the theatre during the dinner break on November 20 to clear out all the lingering bad juju that the smudge sticks hadn’t dealt with.

A smattering of actors, dancers, and assistants showed up. Not Julie, of course. “Oh, give me a break,” she said over the dinner that she dragged me to the night of the Ritual Maven. Her disdain for “this new-age crap” was as deep as the sea.

“Where were you?!” asked Danny afterward.

“I had to go to dinner with Julie. She said if we really wanted to do a proper ritual—”

“Yeah yeah,” Danny said, “she and her Indonesian shamans again. Whatever.”

The Ritual Maven wound up identifying the floor of the pit as the place containing the most ominous negative energy. The space got an extra chant. And she gifted us lots of little colored beads to keep in our pockets for extra luck.

The next day during Tech, the hydraulics beneath the floor were mistakenly activated, pushing up against two of the towering, deathly expensive LED screen legs. The sickening crunching sound was of LED legs getting more and more bent before the hydraulics were finally turned off.

“Some ‘success blessing,’ ” snorted Julie. “It couldn’t even last a day without something like this happening.” Score one for the Cynics. But wait! Miracle of miracles! The integrity of the LED legs was still intact, allowing the legs to be mended, with the remaining damage all-but-unnoticeable to an audience. Score one for the True Believers. So the score was one to one. It would be a close game through Christmas.

•     •     •

The press was going to get its well-deserved comeuppance on the twenty-eighth of November. We were finally going to return fire on years’ worth of hit pieces. We were going to reveal our show in all its spider glory. The scenario we envisioned was not unlike a scene deep in Act Two: A pissed-off Arachne descends from the astral plane and strides into J. Jonah Jameson’s office disguised in widow’s weeds, demanding Jameson beg in his newspaper for Spider-Man’s return. When Jameson refuses, and disparages “this broad” slinking around in his office, Arachne rips off her tight-fitting gown, and eight enormous, startling, black spider legs spring out, thereby cowing the bumptious newspaper publisher into submission.

Only . . . that scene was on our Why-Michael-Curry-is-sorely-missed list. How exactly do you stuff eight enormous spider legs into a tight-fitting gown? The only answer in the offing was to make the gown ridiculously huge, and to make the legs kinda puny, and out of cheap-looking foam. The result was that the legs didn’t “spring out” so much as “uncrumple a little.” And otherwise, Arachne was wearing nothing but an embarrassingly revealing undergarment.

And on November 26, that’s where we were. That’s where we were in that scene, and that’s where we were vis-à-vis our plan to cow the media into submission in two days’ time. Since Act One had never been run from beginning to end on the stage, November 26 was our day to finally try to do so. With technical glitches leading to dozens of “hold please”s, it took the whole day to get through it. But the captive bolt pistol to our foreheads wasn’t that. It was that the show was unrecognizable from anything we had seen in rehearsal; from anything we had ever imagined our show to be. The threats to Peter Parker, to Mary Jane, to the citizens of New York, seemed pathetic. Laughable. Nothing was felt—not Uncle Ben’s death, not Peter’s anguish, nothing. In other words, the show was camp.

For years we knew camp was a threat, and we were going to avoid it. But we stepped in it anyway. And the first preview was in forty-eight hours. It was like waking up to discover you’ve drifted into the wrong lane and now traffic was coming straight at you, and there was no time, no time.

We were still going to swerve as best we could. I determined (it didn’t take a genius) that our camp troubles emanated from the Goblin playing a green piano on the Chrysler Building. There was only one scene (a Daily Bugle scene) separating Osborn’s emergence from the transformer, and the appearance of the Green Goblin tickling the ivories. It was therefore paramount that the Daily Bugle scene drive home the idea that the Goblin had done unspeakable things. Otherwise—with the piano playing, the flamboyant costume—the Goblin wasn’t going to come off as a violent maniac whose brief evocation of Liberace made him all the more frightening. No. He would just come off as Liberace. Which would be bad. I rewrote the Daily Bugle scene that night, determined to make it as serious as the show could bear. I would make the audience feel sick to their stomachs. I’d evoke 9/11 if I had to. I would make the five-year-olds cry if that’s what it took to get the camp out of the show.

The dress rehearsal the next day was canceled. We ran the new Bugle scene (the actors had just one day to memorize their new lines), and we teched more scenes that needed teching. Consequently, it had come to pass that on the morning of our first preview, we had never run the whole show in one go. In fact, we hadn’t seen more than half of the show on any given day. In fact, we had never gotten through more than fifteen minutes of the show without having to stop for something.

So now there were just two hours of rehearsal left. And we had one excruciating decision to make, and it had to do with the web net. The web descending from the ceiling—that was scrapped months before. The web unspooling from the front of the stage—that too was a bust. So a new plan was devised. It was makeshift, but it was all we had. A mess of netting would get lugged onto the pit lift while it was down. Crew members would hook it onto cables, and those cables would haul it up into the air to make an upstage wall of netting for Peter Parker to scuttle upon. However. At present, the scene was not allowed to be in the show because the crew had never teched the setting-up of the web net in real time.

So here was the question that no one could answer with any certainty: With just two hours of Tech left, did we have enough time to tech the web net? Because we could spend the time teching the scene without the net for that night, and we would at least have a crudely dramatized final scene for our show.

If, however, we decided to gamble, if we tried to tech the web net, but we ran out of time, then what it would mean was this: The entire audience that night of 1,930 people—an audience packed with bloggers itching to broadcast their reports far and wide; an audience filled with opinion-influencing celebrities, as well as hardworking, full-price-ticket-paying folk—would sit through almost an entire show only to be suddenly informed that the last ten minutes didn’t exist.

The pros and cons were hashed out again as time ticked down. The stage managers lobbied strongly against attempting the tech of the web net: If we rushed it, who knew what would come of it.

“Let’s just do it,” Julie said suddenly. And everyone manned their stations—we were going to roll the dice after all. The net took up a lot of space on the pit floor, and just finding the corners of the net to clip the cables to was going to be difficult, especially because it needed to happen in the dark. The task was made more difficult by the fact that, in addition to the stage crew, Natalie Mendoza—in enormous spider legs—would also be on the pit lift getting dressed by dressers. There were also props assistants on the lift prepping the spider legs. There was also Jenn Damiano, who will have just been lowered from the Brooklyn Bridge and would be getting unclipped by a stage manager. There was also a Spider-Man who will have just tumbled in slow motion into the pit. He’d be getting unclipped. There would also be Reeve Carney, lying on the pit lift floor in his Spider-Man costume, waiting to be delivered by the lift. It was basically going to be that crowded stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, with a couple of superheroes and a giant spider thrown in.

So two hours flew by. It was five minutes before Tech was going to be called for the day—five minutes before the actors were released until the seven o’clock call. And the net still hadn’t been hoisted. Suddenly the top of the net appeared from the hole in the stage. It got caught on some protrusion, but it got unstuck and kept rising and rising. Moments later, Natalie was lifted by cables out of the pit and traveled in the air from one side of the stage to the other. The rest of the scene had already been teched. And that meant we had a whole show for tonight.

We had thirty seconds to spare.

And not that night, and not the next day. But. The day after that, we would learn that rushing through those two hours of Tech might have screwed us. Might have truly and royally screwed us.

•     •     •

Michael Cohl, Julie, Danny, and I were walking back to the theatre after the dinner break, sifting our memories for tales of disastrous first previews of shows that eventually went on to success. Michael related how the first preview of Les Misérables in London was over four hours long. We were certain our show that night—with a gruesome number of delays—would be a minimum of four hours. So it already felt like our show had entered an exclusive pantheon—Les Miz and us!

“How long can the show be tonight? Are there union rules? Can we go past midnight?”

“Would we serve midnight snacks to the audience if it came to that?”

“Someone could do a White Castle run. Buy two thousand sliders—”

“That, and free drinks and maybe they won’t burn the theatre down. . . .”

We reached the theatre and there was already a line of people around the block. Just one year earlier, the theatre was shuttered, with Michael Cohl trying to get his head around the Spider-Man account books. Now the Foxwoods’s lobby was about to be packed with more people than the theatre had seen for years.

And we weren’t ready.

Looking at the long line of eager people, I couldn’t help feeling like Bernie Madoff the day before his Ponzi scheme unraveled. These good people didn’t know what they had bought a ticket to. But then again, neither did I. The Department of Labor had signed off on all the aerial moves. Spider-Man could land in the aisles. With a little bit of luck, we’d be able to string some scenes together, deliver some of the beautiful moments, and the audience would see a spectacle like nothing they’d seen before.

Backstage, just before curtain, the company gathered in a circle. While waiting for the circle to form, I checked the floor again, and instantly found a daddy longlegs. And in such stupidly plain sight I thought I was hallucinating at first. Good—I was going to dwell on that guy tonight if things went weird. Michael read a note sent by our absent composers in Australia. Julie delivered some words. The usual things that got said got said. I wasn’t really listening to any of it. I was staring at the curtain, trying not to worry about the two thousand people on the other side of it. And failing.

And then the huddle broke with whoops and cheers, and as we headed to seats and stations:

“Break a leg.”

“Break a leg.”

“Break a leg.”

“Break a leg.”

The origin of this ninety-year-old expression is obscure, but it’s most likely something to do with the idea that wishing someone good luck is bad luck, so you wish them bad luck instead. Which feels Jewish. Or Russian. Or human. Theatre is a superstitious profession because success seems to depend on inspiration, planning, competence, and blind stupid chance. It’s why ancient agriculture had all those gods. Other superstitious activities: golf, horse racing . . .

Anyway, it was time to take our seats.

•     •     •

“I’m hellishly excited,” Michael Cohl said to the audience. He was in his usual T-shirt and shaggy beard. He was standing in front of the curtain, his unceremonious vibe instantly disarming. He got the audience laughing as he described the devices installed in the theatre designed to snatch any cameras or video-recording cell phones out of the hands of the offenders. He read an actual statement from the Department of Labor cautioning audience members: “Please don’t hitch a ride on any of the actors.”

And then the lights dimmed. Down in the backstage depths, Kimberly Grigsby punched her hands on the downbeat, a blast of horns splatted out of the speakers, searchlights swept over the audience, and there was no going back. The show had just gone public.

The opening number went off without a hitch, and segued smoothly into the Geeks scene, which went right into the myth of Arachne scene, which then went straight into the Queens High School scene. And yeah, the Geeks let adrenaline get the better of them, and the loom’s horizontals didn’t function perfectly, but we had already gotten through more of the show in one go than ever before.

At the beginning of “Bouncing Off the Walls,” there was a glitchy moment. In order for Reeve to fall onto his bed from the ceiling, cables stretching from the back of the auditorium must first “come to tension.” One of these cables, however, escaped the grip of a crewperson, and it draped on top of a few dozen audience members. But it happened fast, and it was in the dark, which meant that many of the audience members feeling something suddenly draped on them had no idea what was going on. I comforted myself with the thought that there was only a twenty percent chance—twenty percent tops—that someone would sue.

The Queens Rowhouses—which had never given us trouble before—got stuck, but the delay wasn’t a head-buried-in-one’s-hands moment. No, the first of those moments came at the end of “Rise Above.” The number itself had just taken the show to a higher emotional plane—you could feel the audience ready to give themselves over to the spell of the show, and we were ready to seal the deal—the Big Jump and the rest of “Spider-Man’s Debut” was just seconds away, when—

“Hold please.”

Natalie was supposed to ascend into the flies after her last verse in “Rise Above.” Instead, she stayed suspended in midair. After a minute, all of the show’s momentum had gone pffft. After two minutes, the quiet in the auditorium felt like the quiet in a library. After three minutes, I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, as if I were in the last minutes of a yoga class. After four minutes, the auditorium didn’t sound like a library anymore. It sounded exactly like an auditorium full of people enduring an indefinite delay while looking at a spider-lady suspended in the air. Murmurs. Some titters and other bubbly noises. After five minutes, Randall went on the God Mike. “Give it up for Natalie Mendoza, for hanging in there!” Surprisingly boisterous applause. Natalie acknowledged the applause with a subtle nod and smile. The applause subsided until silence reigned again, punctuated with murmurs and some coughing. After six minutes, I was digging fingernails into my skin. After seven minutes, I seriously began to worry that this weirdness was going to trigger an acid flashback in me. And after eight minutes, I felt on the verge of a spiritual epiphany, but it was disrupted by the sudden resumption of music, and Natalie ascending into the flies.

The show continued, with the first act lurching from impressive moments to more showstopping delays. Finally, we reached the last scene of the act. Patrick Page appeared at the piano, singing “I’ll Take Manhattan.” He made up some more lyrics while members of the crew untangled cables onstage.

Finally the scene resumed. The aerial fight between Goblin and Spider-Man ensued, and it went off without a hitch. The crowd thrilled to every second of it. We were going to have a head of steam going into intermission because there was only one last sequence, and it had never failed us. So we all watched a masked Spider-Man fly in with Jenn in his arms and deposit her onstage. A couple lines of script stolen shamelessly from the movie were delivered:

“But who are you?” a breathless and infatuated Mary Jane asked the masked man.

“You know who I am,” the superhero said with quiet intensity, sounding for all the world like he was going to reveal his true identity to the girl he secretly loved.

“I do?”

Pregnant pause, and then—“I’m your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man!”

Then Spider-Man “shot a web.” Act One would end with a coda of soaring music as Spider-Man flew over the audience toward the balcony. Only, inexplicably, Spider-Man stopped with a jolt in mid-flight. The music had ended, but Spider-Man was still hanging impotently over the heads of the audience. And, maddeningly, it wasn’t even a technical foul-up. Everything was in perfect working order. There is, however, a small yellow box with a big red button on it. It’s called an E-Stop, “E” for “Emergency.” A handful of these E-Stops were positioned backstage. Pressing the button shuts down the whole system. It was a last-resort safety measure. And someone backstage had accidentally leaned against the button. So instead of sending the audience out for intermission, we treated them to the emasculating spectacle of Spider-Man dangling helplessly over the front rows of the auditorium.

A minute went by. Three members of the crew appeared on the edge of the stage and tried to grab on to Spider-Man’s feet so that they could unhook him, but he was just out of reach. One of the crew members retrieved a stick from backstage, but the prodding only sent Spider-Man swinging farther out of range. Many in the audience were laughing. I stole a glance at Julie, who was shaking her head slowly from side to side. I meditated on that daddy longlegs, who was somewhere near that stage, going about his daddy longlegs errands, oblivious to the comedy and the misery.

Four stops in the first act. “Could’ve been worse,” several of us agreed over an intermission drink. But, oh man, that last stop stung. Without the image of the dangling Spider-Man fresh in the audience’s minds, the chatter now surrounding us in the lobby surely wouldn’t have had that slightly mocking edge in it.

Act Two was going to be a crapshoot. I grabbed another drink as the lights blinked. And miraculously, we got midway through the act before the audience heard Randall’s voice again.

“Aaand hold.”

The audience was giving off the vibe of folks who would take this fifth stop in stride. So when a woman suddenly shouted, “I don’t know about the rest of you—,” I stupidly expected the rest of the sentence to be a positive expression of support for our show, but she continued, “but I feel like a guinea pig tonight!”

The audience had been waiting in silence, so there wasn’t a single sound wave standing in the way of these new agitations in the air. The angry woman’s words traveled unimpeded across the orchestra, up to the mezzanine, and all the way to the cheap seats. The lousy acoustics of the theatre must have been momentarily transformed, because every single syllable rang clear as a bell. As Michael Riedel would report a few days later (because of course it got reported), the heckler was a woman named Denise Chastain, who explained, “I was like the frog in the boiling water. The slow simmer just got to me, and, by the second act, I just lost it.” Several audience members responded to this heckler with boos, eventually drowning her out. (Only later would we learn that alternate Spider-Man Matthew James Thomas—five shows away from his first performance and sitting in the audience—was the person who actually initiated the booing.)

Eventually the issue onstage was resolved, and the show slogged on. It took a painful number of minutes to get that damn web net out of the pit, but it eventually emerged, and anyway, it wasn’t me onstage describing how “this is where a big net comes up,” which was the actual backup plan had we failed to tech the web net in time.

And when the show finally ended, we did not feel despair. Michael Cohl, Julie, Jere—practically everyone involved with the show—confirmed that they were feeling how I too was feeling.

Pumped.

We got through the whole show. And we did it in under three and a half hours! (“Take that, Les Misérables!”) After a Tech that moved at worm-speed, the fact that we got through the whole show in one evening that night was nothing short of miraculous. We had six more weeks of previews to get this show to where we wanted it to go. No problem.

The producers hosted a party for the entire company afterward. Lots of food, an open bar, high spirits, relief, and amazement that we got through it. Earlier that night, 60 Minutes aired their Turn Off the Dark sneak preview, with Lesley Stahl and her team delivering a big puffy advertisement for our show, complete with exciting clips and effusive descriptions of a must-see theatrical event. At the party, Michael Cohl reported with a grin that between seven p.m. and midnight—partly on the strength of the 60 Minutes piece—Spider-Man sold $700,000’s worth of tickets.

The worst was over. It would only get better from here.

It would only get better . . .

11

Breakdowns

Spectacular, innovative and interesting things are happening at Broadway’s newly renamed Foxwoods Theatre . . . Taymor is very close to a finished product that could become the event of the season . . . You can see the money on the stage and it will take your breath away.

—Broadway Critic Blog, reporting on the first preview

An epic flop, as the $65 million show’s high-tech gadgetry went completely awry amid a dull score and baffling script.

—Michael Riedel, reporting on the same first preview

The entire cast got a day off after the first preview. The next day, they all assembled on the carpeted floor of the mezzanine foyer for a relaxed little powwow with Julie. She told the cast with a laugh that she was clear about the show’s plot, but “whether you all follow the story or not—we don’t have a clue!”

Julie acknowledged that for too many people at our first preview, the question of Arachne and her illusions was a head-scratcher. Though Arachne explained more than once in the show that the “return of the Sinister Six” was “all an illusion,” Julie admitted that, “when Arachne is flying, it’s harder to hear the words somehow. Half the people are looking at how spectacular she looks and not necessarily listening to what she’s saying.”

After several actors—with deference—offered their two cents, Patrick Page said he had an “intuitive sense that this character who has inspired awe is now somehow in Act Two becoming . . . trivialized.”

This got Julie’s back up. “Why? Why is it trivial?”

Taking pains to not appear like he was overstepping his bounds as an actor, Patrick tried to explain. Julie clearly wanted feedback, but she was also beginning to bristle. If she allowed too much debate, if the actors started piling on, confidence in the whole show would erode, and that would be dangerous. It was time to shut this down.

“I believe in it as a concept,” she said. The tone in her voice brooked no dissent, and anyway it was time to let the actors go—there was a preview in a few hours. I found Natalie Mendoza in her dressing room a few minutes later and was excited to tell her about some of the ways we were going to upgrade her character. We were going to add a spoken section in the “Think Again” number.

“And it’ll be underscored by a sort of Tuvan throat singing—”

“I’m sorry,” Natalie interrupted. She said it all sounded thrilling, but she was still a little woozy from two days before.

“Oh?”

“I got a concussion that night.”

“What?!”

“In the pit, while I was getting in my legs for the final scene, something hard, like metal, hit me in the back of the head.”

I was dumbstruck.

“It was dark, so I couldn’t see what it was. And I was trapped in my legs—I couldn’t move . . .”

Replaying the events, it was eventually determined that a carabiner on one of the cables hastily thrown into the pit had conked her. If Tech that afternoon hadn’t been so rushed might this accident had been prevented? Perhaps. But without rushing it, there wouldn’t have been an ending to the show that night. Natalie had gone to the cast party that evening. No one yet—not even Natalie—realized this was an incident to take seriously.

So she performed her second show that evening, but the next morning Natalie reported back from her doctor: She could sustain permanent damage if she continued to perform before she fully recuperated. So, until further notice . . . no shows.

The third preview was that night, with another two thousand people in the audience.

“Who’s Natalie’s understudy?” Julie asked, unnerved.

“America,” came the answer from stage management.

“No she isn’t,” said Julie firmly. “Not the first understudy.”

“Well it says right here on the cast list . . .”

America Olivo was one of six “swings” in the cast—actors or dancers who prepared for several roles, but only appeared onstage if a role needed to be filled that evening. America had been receiving aerial training the last four months, but certainly not as intensively as, say, Natalie Mendoza. Her vocal training with Kimberly was spotty. Had anyone even run lines with her recently? Had she ever gotten more than ten minutes of one-on-one with Julie? No and no. Heck, Julie barely even remembered America’s audition and wasn’t all too sure she ever signed off on making America our alternate Arachne. It didn’t matter—we had a show in eight hours, and stage manager Kat Purvis informed us that if America didn’t get familiarized with a half-dozen scenes and aerial moves by six p.m., we wouldn’t have a show that night.

Any plans to knock some of the things off the lengthy Tech list were nixed. It was all hands on deck to get America up to speed. And where was this happening? Forty-second Street. Seventy-seven years after the film 42nd Street was released, and nine years after a hit Broadway adaptation was performed on this very stage at the Foxwoods.

Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. . . . Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!

—Julian Marsh, 42nd Street

No one needed America to come back a star. Coming back in one piece without having made a total hash of the evening was good enough for us. And America—with a Natural History Museum Butterfly Pavilion in her stomach—got through it better than anyone dared hope. She was our heroine that night. But how long would Natalie be out? The rumor was that she was on her way to Los Angeles to convalesce.

“Los Angeles!? So . . . probably won’t be back for tomorrow’s show, eh, Julie?”

“Glen, we’re cursed.”

“Ah look, another Michael Riedel column. That’s sure to cheer us up.”

As any musical-theater fan knows, the script, by director Julie Taymor and someone called Glen Berger, is a shambles. Some investors fret that all the special effects in the world can’t mask an incoherent plot, lame jokes and dull characters. As a result, . . . backers are starting to press lead producer Michael Cohl to bring in a seasoned Broadway hand to help sort out the mess.

Shit, shit, shit.

Their concern is that Taymor has her hands full directing and doesn’t have time to rewrite. Nobody thinks Berger’s up to the job. The guy’s biggest credit is a play that 14 people saw, Underneath the Lintel.

I interrupted my reading in order to say the words “that motherfucker” about a dozen times, each time trying out a different inflection. They all felt good. “Fourteen people.” Underneath the Lintel has had, in fact, two hundred productions. Not performances. Productions. All over the world. It’s been translated into eight languages. Hundreds of thousands have seen that little play. I shouted at my computer screen, informing it of my twelve Emmy nominations, and of the two Emmy statuettes that were sitting on my shelf back home. With spittle flying, I rattled off my résumé to the inanimate object in front of me, making sure to mention how I was head writer for five years on a television show seen every week by three million people. Then I blew out my throat to reiterate the number “THREE MILLION.” I pointed out that it took The Lion King in New York six years to reach three million audience members, and then I consulted my computer’s dictionary to bone up on the difference between libel and slander before characterizing the New York Post columnist as a libelous motherfucker at about one hundred decibels. The characterization sounded even better at 130 decibels I decided. And then I resumed reading.

“On Spider-Man, he’s basically another one of Taymor’s puppets.”

I flipped the bird at my computer screen and added some grunting for effect. And yet . . . was I? Nah. That’s crazy. I put it out of my head. Or I thought I did. But soon enough I’d be put to the test. And that one word would be right there in my brain, waiting for me. “Puppet.” I was nobody’s puppet. And if I needed to prove it . . . I’d prove it.

America’s third performance that Friday did not go well. She missed lines and she botched some of the music. Julie found America in her dressing room afterward.

And Julie closed the door behind her . . .

If anyone backstage was wondering what Julie was going to say to America, they didn’t have to wonder long. Thunder from a chthonic weather system rumbled through doors, through walls, through floors. Maybe Julie wanted to put the fear of God into America so it wouldn’t happen again. Or maybe Julie was just justly pissed. Or maybe America was a suddenly convenient outlet for an epic-week’s worth of pent-up stress. Or pent-up anger that America wasn’t Natalie Mendoza. And where was Natalie?! No one even knew what coast she was on.

Though America’s confidence was now shot after getting worked over with her director’s iron combs, she was still Arachne until further notice. Teese, however, was given surreptitious orders by Julie to start working with T. V. Carpio and assess whether she’d be able to take over as Arachne. Julie left the next morning for the West Coast because The Tempest was premiering in Los Angeles. Other people leaving: Scott Rogers and Jaque Paquin, both of whom had been working on the final Spider-Man–Arachne fight.

“This fucking show!” Scott was heard saying as he stormed out of the theatre that afternoon, after yet another scuffle with heel-draggers and naysayers. He wrote the next day, promising to “be back next week to finish the fight (pun intended).”

“Zis fúckeeng show!” were Jaque’s last words, or words to that effect. Jaque was ready to quit for good, but Danny stopped him before he left. He lent his ear and let Jaque vent in the orchestra seats until he promised to return in one week’s time, after tending to his ailing mother in Canada.

What had pushed these two men to the edge? The near-impossible task assigned to them: Create an aerial event out of our pathetic makeshift web net that could serve as a whiz-bang climax for the show. If Scott and Jaque were to have any hope of accomplishing this chore, they were going to need a maximum amount of stage time and the full cooperation of all available personnel. And they didn’t get it. It was why our sound designer stomped out for a spell after the first preview.

Tony Adams used to tell his staff that one of the most important roles of a producer was to carefully cultivate the most productive environment possible for the artists. But Tony was still dead, Julie was halfway to California, and Michael Cohl was only just beginning to realize that maybe this show’s shortcomings weren’t limited to its ledger book; that maybe Turn Off the Dark still had a few massive headaches lined up for him.

With every preview performance, there were signs that certain persistent glitches had been eradicated. But every preview performance also delivered new and hitherto unimaginable snafus: puppets getting stuck in the flies when it was time for them to descend; or Reeve being unable to unhook the cables from his harness in time to perform the rest of the “Bouncing Off the Walls” number; or the doors of the transformer module losing power and trapping Patrick Page inside like a scene out of This Is Spinal Tap.

Michael Cohl said it was a Murphy’s Law waiting game—we wouldn’t know everything that could go wrong until everything did go wrong. Like flushing grouse out of the tall grass, every performance was going to bring a few more problems out into the open, and only then would we be able to shoot them down. And just how many grouse were in the grass? And were there any giant, man-eating grouse lying in wait that we should be worrying about?

I e-mailed new scenes to Natalie, but she reported that her memory was foggy. She was falling into “deep coma-like sleep states” throughout the day. Along with neck and head pain, she was suffering from light sensitivity and waves of nausea.

“From a thumb-sized carabiner hitting the back of her neck!?” squeaked Danny Ezralow.

Danny in particular just couldn’t get his head around the idea that Natalie was out of commission. Whenever there was a lull in our conversation, he replayed those moments in the pit again, as if he were trying to poke holes in the Warren Commission Report. And who could blame him? After an exhaustive two-year search for a performer who could actually handle this demanding role—the idea that our Arachne would wind up performing only twice before being out of the show “indefinitely” seemed so preposterous, so unfair.

And that was the word from Natalie and her doctor now. “Indefinitely.” So America gamely went on each night in front of another sold-out audience. But although a fine performer, she wasn’t the Arachne that Julie had always envisioned. The situation made it that much more difficult for Julie, me, or anyone to get an accurate assessment of just what we had on that stage. So Julie continued to rehearse scene-clarifying rewrites, but her heart didn’t seem to be in it. Not today, at least, December 10. Reviews just came out nationwide for The Tempest. And they were almost universally horrible. You couldn’t call them “mixed.”

“They really don’t like it,” she said, shell-shocked, as she read another review.

The film, which cost twenty million dollars to make, would go on to gross . . . $300,000. Julie had no illusions that a Shakespeare film was going to clean up at the box office, but still . . .

I watched Julie—we all did—for any effect the film’s reception might have on her. There’s a little gauge inside every artist, with its needle pointing somewhere between self-doubt and self-confidence. For an artist to produce their best work, that needle can’t be in the red zone on either end. If Julie’s needle inched too close to full-on self-doubt, what then? How would she start behaving? No one knew—few of us had ever been around her during a critical drubbing. There was certainly something more austere in her demeanor. Nothing resembling that relaxed, expansive presence I encountered the first time I met her, when she was riding a long unbroken wave of acclaim. Now there was a grim focus—the bearing of someone walking determinedly home against a strong, cold wind.

And December 2010 was supposed to be her month. The Met was remounting her highly popular Magic Flute, The Tempest was going to open to lovely reviews, and then, on December 21, Turn Off the Dark was going to have its triumphant opening. Instead, The Tempest was a bust, and Spider-Man wasn’t opening until January 11. And actually, now it was looking likely that we wouldn’t be opening on January 11. The feeling shared by Michael, Jere, and Julie was that it would be moronic to spend all this energy on the show and then fumble the ball on the one-yard line by opening the show prematurely.

And we were on the one-yard line, weren’t we? Many at the Foxwoods thought so. But if you spent ten minutes googling Spider-Man + musical + review, you’d get a different picture. Two thousand people had been attending the show every night. The Internet was piling up with public opinion, and word about the show was spreading all over New York. It was as if the Foxwoods had the flu, and after every performance the building sneezed, sending two thousand new viral agents out into the city.

Suddenly everyone and their grandmother was a dramaturge. Every day in my inbox I got letters like: “A friend of mine who is an investor on Broadway saw your show this past Tuesday. He asked for your information so he could give you his thoughts.” Everyone thought they understood how to structure a story, how to develop character, how to adapt source material. And the maddening thing was: Practically all of them made valid points. Several blog reports began with: “If anyone from Spider-Man is reading this . . .” And the co-bookwriter was in fact reading these things. George Tsypin was obsessed with them too. And he was developing grave concerns based on what he was reading. Julie, on the other hand, refused to read any of the blogs.

“It would just muddy my thinking. So I’m not going to read the bad ones or the good ones,” she said to me.

Um . . . what good ones?

December 15: Julie’s birthday. And like a gift-wrapped birthday present, Natalie Mendoza showed up at the Foxwoods. She was ready to be a spider-woman again. And she had new questions for me about Arachne’s story line. I biked over to the Forbidden Planet comic-book store off Union Square a couple of days later to flip through compendiums and confirm what I told Natalie—that one comic-book issue had Spider-Man pursued by a spider-wasp villainess from the astral plane, so our own story wasn’t as far-fetched as the bloggers would have it. I emerged from the shop fifteen minutes later, feeling inspired. The feeling lasted five seconds: My bike was gone.

I reported back to George Tsypin about some new ideas.

“Glen, all of this sounds exciting. When you are at the end of the line, desperate, broke, and your bike is stolen, great creative things happen.”

Spoken like a true Russian. I was reminded of my favorite Russian proverb: “Life is better than a bowl of raspberries, half full of worms.” And this week that seemed about right. Because a bowl of raspberries only a quarter full of worms was looking pretty good. Especially after the e-mail I received from the wife later that day, in which I got a good flaying for being so thoroughly AWOL from the lives of our children. Other than coming home for Thanksgiving Day, and one other time to watch the dog die, I had been ensconced in the city since August. In my response:

You’re right. I’ve been a lousy dad. And I know I’m not John Adams at the Continental Congress. I’m not even on a whaling ship. But if the second act isn’t fixed, my name will be attached to the biggest theatrical flop in the history of America.

I neglected to mention in my letter home that the producers just settled on February 7. We were now opening February 7.

•     •     •

It was December 20. We were in the middle of Act Two. I couldn’t bear to watch the show in the auditorium so I was watching it on the monitor in the stage manager’s office downstairs. And maybe it was the monitor, or maybe it was my mood. But Act Two was sure seeming . . . oppressive. I wandered to the men’s room, and as I got there I saw a mother escort her boy from the bathroom back toward the theatre. The look on that boy’s face changed my life.

The boy didn’t look eager to go back into the auditorium. In fact, he had the look of a boy who had come to the theatre that evening full of excitement, and minute by minute we were letting him down. He wasn’t feeling the buoyant feelings he usually associated with the nimble-minded, upbeat superhero he adored. Where was that Spider-Man? Why did the world seem so dark? Maybe his face wasn’t actually saying any of those things. Maybe he just had a stomachache (why did he need the bathroom in the middle of the second act?). But it didn’t matter. I saw what I saw. I drifted back to the stage manager’s office convinced we were failing all the children coming to see our show. Our problems couldn’t be fixed with a few clarifying lines. Our problems were deeper. They were systemic.

Julie was in the stage manager’s office when I got back. She wanted me to send a few e-mails regarding the next day’s rehearsal schedule. My head was still with that boy—we have more work ahead of us than anyone realizes. I heard applause and glanced at the monitor—we were deep into Act Two now, and Reeve had just finished “Boy Falls From the Sky.” Because we were in the stage manager’s office, we could hear Randall call cue after cue from the calling booth high up in the house-right balcony. He sounded just like an air traffic controller. The floor was rising to repeat the Brooklyn Bridge tableau that opened the show. Chris Tierney began his miming slow-motion run. I looked down at my computer again in order to—

“OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.”

Someone in the room was shouting. Meanwhile, words were spilling out of Randall as if a plane were going down, and from Julie’s mouth a wail, “NOOOOO!”

And I looked down to see Julie collapsed on the floor, and I looked up at the monitor and the bridge was empty, and the show seemed to have ground to a halt, and Kat Purvis was ashen as she rushed out of the office with the rest of the assistant stage managers.

Chris Tierney had just fallen off the bridge. A thirty-foot drop onto the concrete floor of the pit.

•     •     •

One of the guys on the crew—we’ll call him Sam. He had a three-step routine worked out for this point in the show. At a precise moment in the middle of “Boy Falls From the Sky,” Sam heads to the back of the stage, where Chris Tierney’s safety line sits coiled on the floor. It’s dark back there, so Step One for Sam is to fish around in his pocket and pull out a little flashlight that he can wear on his forehead like a headband. Once that’s done, Step Two is to take one of the ends of this safety cable and clip it to a ring embedded in the floor. By the time Sam accomplishes Step Two, Chris Tierney (who was dancing as one of the spider-men in the “Boy Falls” number) has shown up at the back of the stage. Sam clips the other end of the safety cable to the back of Chris’s harness. That’s Step Three. The floor rises, and Chris Tierney—in Spider-Man costume—runs in slow motion toward the front edge of the floor, which is now a good fifteen feet higher than it was a few seconds before. As at the top of the show, the Goblin Cut Out (the set piece blocking one of our sound designer’s speakers) “slices” the rope, sending Jenn Damiano “falling” into the pit. Chris lunges forward, making to leap after her. The precisely measured safety cable—hooked to the floor on one end and to Chris’s harness on the other end—goes taut. Thus Chris is able to freeze in pre-leap, as if he’s an image in a comic-book panel.

So this was how things were supposed to go, and it was how they went in the twenty or so performances before now. What was different about tonight? When Sam went to the back of the stage, he fished around in his pocket for the little flashlight. And have you ever fished around in a pocket, unable to find the thing that you absolutely know is in your pocket? That happened to Sam this evening. So it took him just that much longer to pull the flashlight out and affix it to his head. That was Step One. By the time he bent down to pick up one end of the cable, Chris Tierney was there for him. And as was the routine, when Chris Tierney shows up, the end of the cable is clipped to the harness. That’s Step Three. All three steps completed, Sam’s job was done. The floor rose. And Chris began his slow run toward the front edge of the stage.

As soon as Chris went into his leap, he could feel the slack behind him and he knew what had happened. Or rather, what hadn’t happened—Step Two. He tried to grab the edge of the stage, but he had too much forward momentum. (“If you don’t go for it, it just doesn’t play,” he had said more than once.) He began plummeting, headfirst, with Jenn Damiano’s recorded scream (treated with reverb and a dash of distortion), accompanying his fall as if a live person were reacting in horror in real time to what was happening. And of course, the audience (including that unhappy boy who had just returned from the bathroom) was unsure if this was all just part of the show.

Chris had maybe a half-second in the air to react and, in that time, this professional dancer twisted his body as much as he could because he knew if he landed on his head, he was a dead man. Natalie Mendoza was in the pit, having just gotten into the spider-legged twisty belt for the final scene. A body plunged right in front of her, with the untethered cable trailing behind him. A boy falling from the sky.

He landed on his back.

There were stage managers and those with emergency training racing to the scene; cast members in the backstage hallway standing stricken against the wall, fear on their faces, tears held back and tears not held back; Julie bolting past them, half-certain Chris wouldn’t survive this, if he wasn’t already dead. Had there been a vote earlier in the day for “favorite company member,” Chris could have taken first place. Julie had cast Chris once before—he played a rambunctious Princetonian in the “With a Little Help from My Friends” number in Across the Universe. Danny had introduced Julie to Chris after working with him several times in the past. Good, raucous times. Maybe it was in Italy that Danny had once seen Chris fall a dozen feet from a lamppost he had been climbing, only to see him immediately spring back up on his feet. Chris was a very cool cat, and he tended to treat his nine lives with a boyish indifference. Now Danny was watching EMTs slice through the fake muscles in the Spider-Man suit. And now, with grave caution, they were slipping a brace around Chris’s neck. And wouldn’t you know it. All this sickening business was going on within the exact square feet of space that was identified to Danny by that laughable Ritual Maven as containing the darkest energy in the entire building.

A curt announcement had already been made through the speakers in the auditorium—“That’s our show this evening, thank you for coming.” Two thousand people milled out of the theatre, confused and rattled. A hundred lingered outside the stage doors on Forty-third Street. Within an hour, one audience member had uploaded video to YouTube, having captured the entirety of Chris’s fall on their phone. Were they recording the whole show? Did they just happen to turn on the camera a minute before the accident? Mystifying. At any rate, word was out, and the clip was being played over and over on the local news. By eleven a.m., camera crews from local and national news stations were beginning to stake out spots outside the theatre doors.

Inside, Chris was being wheeled to a waiting ambulance to rush him to Bellevue. Incredibly, he never lost consciousness. He had a fractured skull, a punctured lung, internal bleeding, four broken ribs, and three cracked vertebrae. But he was talking. And he could wiggle his toes. And thus, mixed with the sobs backstage, the anger, the heaving hearts, and the bewilderment, there was also that evening intense relief. (“In all my years of dancing,” Chris would say good-naturedly later, “I didn’t get injured once. I knew all that good karma couldn’t last forever.”)

While Chris went into surgery to get a handful of screws put in his vertebrae, an inner circle of producers and creative-team members remained at the theatre, commiserating solemnly and getting updates from the hospital until we got the “all clear” at midnight that we could go home. We were ushered down a corridor in the dark toward an unlit side entrance. It was the only egress unguarded by the news crews, who were stationed outside the other entrances of the Foxwoods like the Greeks at the gates of Troy. Our security detail opened the doors, and we made a dash for the waiting SUV as a herd of reporters rushed toward us and cameras snapped like we were Mafiosi who had just been arraigned.

The next morning, December 21—the day that Turn Off the Dark was going to have its triumphant opening once upon a time—Julie, Danny, and I visited Chris in his hospital room, having first made it through three security checkpoints. One tabloid reporter tried to join us, pretending to be Chris’s relative. Julie told her to take a hike, and the reporter threatened to “bury her.” More reporters were idling a few yards away, like fish that knew where the best chum got tossed. Chris, meanwhile, had just gotten off the phone with Bono and Edge, and was looking astonishingly upbeat.

“I don’t feel angry at all. It’s just one of those things. I can’t wait to come back.”

“Really?”

“Are you kidding?! Of course. Julie, you know I don’t blame you, right?”

Forgiveness. You could see the guilt that had been draped on Julie like a lead cloak suddenly drop away as Chris assured her how much he loved her, how much the show had already “saved his life.”

“He is Spider-Man,” Julie said ardently as she left the hospital. She meant it. She repeated it an hour later to the entire cast, which had assembled in the auditorium for a meeting. Outside the theatre were camera crews. They had been there since eight a.m., and would be camping out until midnight. The next two shows had been canceled. Riedel reported that Assemblyman Rory Lancman, who chaired the workplace safety subcommittee, had “sent producers a stern letter today, saying he’s considering holding hearings into the problems with Spider-Man.” Investigators from the state Department of Labor, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the FDNY had already been in the theatre that morning, interviewing members of the Tech staff and the producers.

Now everyone in the whole company had assembled. Everyone, that is, except Natalie Mendoza. Seared into her brain was the image of Chris Tierney crashing to the floor in front of her. She’d had enough of this show. T. V. was going to be the new Arachne.

Michael Cohl addressed the company, stressing how seriously he took the issue of safety. “You, I don’t trust,” growled Michael Mulheren (our Jameson and the Equity deputy for the cast). Scott Rogers stood in front of the cast and broke into tears. Not calling attention to himself, assistant director Dodd Loomis was seated off to the side, doubled over with shuddering grief. Reeve looked like he wasn’t even in the room. For the next month he’d be there in body but not in spirit.

After more actors unloaded on Michael Cohl, Julie, and Danny, or expressed words of grief or love, Patrick Page stood up and reminded everyone that the previous day was the winter solstice. The darkest day of the year. And in a rare conjunction, last night, during the show? The moon was erased by a total lunar eclipse.

“The ‘dark’ in Turn Off the Dark has never seemed more appropriate. But from this day forward, daylight slowly returns to the Earth . . .”

The cast embraced, then went their separate ways, passing by our poster of Spider-Man swinging in front of a luminous full moon. They also passed by several dozen reporters.

And the media bombardment was just beginning. First, the theatre community unleashed its outrage. Alice Ripley, who won a Tony playing Jenn Damiano’s mother in Next to Normal, tweeted, “Does someone have to die?” And original Rent cast member Adam Pascal posted on Facebook that “they should put Julie Taymor in jail for assault!”

In print, online, on television—everyone seemed ready to tie Julie to the stake. Of course, no one was more outraged by the recent events than pure-souled Michael Riedel, who by this point would have happily given up covering any other Broadway show.

An old video clip was unearthed by the local news (it eventually went viral) in which Julie said, “I don’t think that anything that’s really creative can be done without danger and risk.”

The quote seemed damning, but of course it was out of context. She was speaking in the way all artists speak about “danger” and “risk”—hyperbolically. Sure, artists like to act like they’re astronauts or marines. But danger and risk for an artist means putting your work in front of an audience with the possibility of falling flat on your face. And—just to be clear—not even actually falling on your face. But Julie’s comment was being spun in the news as if she had just admitted she was Josef Mengele.

Patrick Page played Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. He had two butane tanks strapped to his back, hoses running down his arm, a stun gun to ignite the gas, and two-foot flames flaring out from him. “And things happen,” Patrick shrugged to the press. “There were so many times I hit myself with that stun gun and shocked myself. But hey, you know, it didn’t make the newspapers.”

Spider-Man was making the newspapers. We on the inside could only imagine the toll it was taking on Julie, who was already exhausted by the last three months of storm and stress. And it was all so meta. Here we had based our second act partly on the 1967 issue “Spider-Man No More!” in which Peter Parker is so beseiged by the press (led by a demagoguing Jameson) that he has a breakdown and gives up being Spider-Man.

“The terrible thing is,” said Peter about Jameson in this issue, “he actually believes what he says! He sincerely thinks I am a threat to society!”

Something set Julie off the next afternoon during Tech. And suddenly our director was out the theatre doors. She was gone. I dialed her number. She didn’t answer.

In “Spider-Man No More!” as Peter walked down the street—beads of sweat on his anguished face—Stan Lee had words blare around him:

“MENACE!”

“EGOMANIAC!”

“PUBLIC ENEMY!”

“FRAUD!”

“MENTALLY DISTURBED!”

I called Julie again. I could hear traffic noises on the other end of the line.

“Julie?”

Breathing, with trembling in it.

“Julie? Where are you?”

“I don’t know where I am. I don’t know.”

Flurries were swirling thickly as dusk descended. I grabbed Danny. “C’mon. We’ve gotta find her.”

Only a few blocks away from the theatre, we spotted her. And our hearts wept—she looked miserable, huddled against the cold, leaning against a building. Danny and I threw each other a glance. Julie clearly didn’t realize just what building she was huddled against. It was the New York Times Building, reporters filing in and out the doors just feet away from her. Before Patrick Healy was the next reporter to walk past her, we ushered her into a nearby robata grill to get some tea into her and shake our heads in wonderment. We’re just trying to put on a play. . . .

Julie returned to the theatre, where George Tsypin had an idea for her. The web net failed to be deployed at several previews that month, resulting in a thoroughly perplexing finale for our audience. And two days before, Jaque’s mother died. So our grieving aerial rigger—already unutterably distraught at word of Chris Tierney’s accident—wouldn’t be coming back to the Foxwoods to work on the web-net fight until after the holidays. George—armed with this news—proposed to Julie that we just forget the web net. Give Arachne and Peter a spectacular fight in the house instead, like the Spidey-Goblin fight at the end of Act One.

Julie couldn’t believe her ears. In her mind, this whole web-net fiasco was George’s fault, and now he had the temerity to suggest we just cut it? She stopped listening to George. In that minute, and for the next three months. She was done with him.

Turn Off the Dark was always meant to be a spectacle, but the spectacle was supposed to be confined to the stage. Now it was becoming one of those cultural events that blazed across the mediasphere like a grease fire. The cover of The New Yorker in a couple of weeks would depict an entire hospital ward filled with convalescing spider-men. An invitation to a Lincoln Center gala during the holidays had engraved at the bottom NO DISCUSSION OF SPIDER-MAN ALLOWED. Julie, perversely, had gotten her wish. She never wanted Turn Off the Dark to be thought of as a Broadway musical, and now it wasn’t. It was being talked about instead as if it were some giant art installation ensconced in Times Square for who knew how long—like one of those Christo projects where half a city gets wrapped in fabric. A Broadway show hadn’t sucked up this much oxygen in a generation or more.

And Julie needed to get the hell away from it all for a week or her nerves were going to snap. On Christmas Eve, she jetted out of the country, intending to recharge at her Mexican hideaway.

I stayed behind and struck up conversations in the Foxwoods lobby with assorted folk on the creative team. Julie never liked that bourgeois lobby, with its faux-marbled Greek columns. She wanted it defaced with graffiti art—anything to make it feel less “Middle America.” What she got instead, in late December, were tidy holiday wreaths decorating the railings.

And it was there in that evergreen-bedecked lobby—while Julie was away—that dry tinder ignited. As a Boxing Day snowstorm dumped twenty inches on the New York streets, the air in the Foxwoods lobby was becoming infused with the unmistakable fumes . . . of conspiracy.

12

Plotting

In a suburban Chinese restaurant outside Philly, a cookie blew my mind. On the twenty-sixth of December, as I enjoyed one of the forty-eight hours I was allotted to spend with the family, I grabbed one of the seven fortune cookies brought to the table. I cracked it open, only to read: CLEAR WRITING ARISES FROM CLEAR THINKING.

Was I being punked by the universe? It didn’t matter. I was holding a wise cookie, and I needed to listen to it. I needed to pull myself out of my ass. The face of that boy coming out of the Foxwoods bathroom came back to me. An offhand comment Teese Gohl made about the second act a couple of days ago started doing laps in my brain. The words of my cookie continued to admonish me all the way home from the restaurant. By the end of the night, I knew what had to be done. And it wouldn’t be difficult. It was mostly a cut. And if we executed this cut, the show would be saved. Or maybe not “saved.” But we would have bought ourselves some time. This hot air balloon was dipping into shark-infested waters. We needed to start throwing stuff overboard. We needed to buy some time.

The next afternoon, my phone rang. It was Bono, calling from Ireland. He and Edge had been literally ten thousand miles away from New York the last month, but they had been keeping tabs. I knew he and Edge were making weekly calls to Julie. What neither Julie nor I knew was that they had also been sending a trusted cadre of artistic consultants to the Foxwoods to be their eyes and ears.

“And the consensus—”

“Before you say any more, Bono—let me tell you what I think.”

I told him the audience always chattered excitedly during intermission, eager to return to their seats. I told him that despite opening the second act with the “Ugly Pageant”—which the audience was receiving with the same pleasure one received from a wedgie—the audience was still with us with only a half hour of the show remaining. But then we would lose them—and you could see it happening. It was like watching the slowly drifting odor from the tail of Pepé Le Pew reach their noses.

There were five short scenes right in a row. One of the scenes included “Deeply Furious,” known on the Internet as “The Shoe Song” (and usually accompanied somewhere in its description with a “wtf!?”). The five scenes were a total of ten minutes of stage time that felt like thirty. There was a way to cut it without mangling the narrative. In fact, the story became clearer. With the cut, we’d come out the other side with only fifteen minutes to go before our actors were taking their bows. Fifteen minutes. Not enough time for the audience to bail on us, especially once Scott Rogers teched a more exciting ending. By all rights, we shouldn’t have been able to fix so much of what ailed the show so easily. But Bono agreed that this cut would satisfy almost all of the concerns of his secret agents.

“But, Glen, doesn’t Julie have a list of changes?”

“I don’t know if they’re gonna do the trick. We really are in trouble.”

“Well nevertheless, for sake of clarity, we’ll call her fixes ‘Plan B,’ ” Bono said. “Which might be worth trying first. But this cut, ‘Plan A’—I think that’s probably where we’ll have to go.”

Bono said he’d give Julie a call down in Mexico and at least prepare the ground for a frank discussion once he and Edge returned to New York. He reported later that night that his two-hour-long conversation with her was more arduous than he was expecting. “She’s very defensive about Arachne.” He decided not to broach Plan A, “as she needs some rest and I didn’t want to blow her vacation.”

My phone rang. It was Julie.

“He doesn’t get it.” Fresh off her chat with Bono, she was letting me know that our composer’s month in Australia had warped his perspective.

“Well . . .” I managed before trailing off.

“What.”

Timid, stuttering—why do I get this way?—I put forward the details of Plan A. She treated it like a clay pigeon—BLAM!—it was a bad idea; I didn’t know what I was talking about; I shouldn’t let those blogs wig me out—she had been saying for weeks that I shouldn’t be reading them.

Then she launched into a defense of Peter’s “arc.” I had heard it before, Lord knows. They were the same words we had been using with each other for years. But it sounded different to me now. Now it sounded like a lot of abstractions that hardly anyone in the audience would ever apprehend, and it wouldn’t matter a damn if they did. It suddenly seemed as if Julie and I were two railway cars that had crisscrossed the country linked together, but now the last three weeks had removed the pin that connected us. We still saw the show the same way—we hadn’t drifted apart . . . yet. But perhaps it was only momentum still keeping us together.

I crafted a lengthy letter to Julie, going beat by beat through my proposals for the second act. “Let’s have a thoughtful conversation about it when we have some time,” I wrote. And I reminded her that this wasn’t some schmo writing her, it was her partner, her cowriter, her friend. I closed with a “Love you” and hit SEND.

She’d certainly mull it over for a few hours, maybe even take a day, and I was sure she’d have concerns, and she’d probably challenge some of the—oh, she was calling me already.

“No.”

Damn it—forgot about that snap-decision-making mechanism of hers.

“But—”

“If all of you think the cut is such a great idea, you can do it without me, because that isn’t a cut, it’s a mastectomy.”

A mastectomy. On some level, every artist thinks of their creations as extensions of themselves, but I wasn’t prepared for how invasive this surgical procedure I was suggesting would feel to her. But fine. Call it a mastectomy, Julie. A mastectomy is sometimes the difference between life and death.

But I didn’t push the point with Julie. Instead I wrote Danny, hoping he’d help me persuade her. And I wrote George Tsypin. Julie had said George would never go for Plan A because it would cut out one of the more gorgeous stage-pictures in the show. But she misjudged him. George wrote back to me, “This change is a matter of life or death for the show.”

I crept up the back stairs of the theatre to the top-floor office of the production managers, who were busy putting together the January rehearsal schedule and despairing, because it was becoming clear to them that implementing Julie’s list of changes before the critics started arriving was impossible. (On January 15, we would be switching to a full performance schedule, leaving precious little time for rehearsing.) I apprised them of Plan A. They were into it. Not only did they believe it would improve the show (everyone’s a dramaturge), it was doable. It freed up hours of crucial Tech time.

Julie had been out of New York five days. I was being a total sneak. But I got over it. I had discovered a theatreful of anxious coworkers. Actors stopped me as I headed out of rehearsal rooms, designers stopped me in the lobby, stage managers stopped me backstage. And I had more than one conversation at the urinals. All of them wanted to respectfully offer me their perspective on the show, their casualness barely hiding a desperate hope that the creative team was cooking up something that would keep the show running, because they believed in the show and, more to the point, their jobs were on the line. Julie and Michael Cohl (who was decompressing down in Florida) were returning to the theatre January 3, along with Bono and Edge. The expectation from seemingly everyone in the Foxwoods was that substantial revisions would be announced then. I told them nothing. I didn’t want to start any rumors. I really didn’t want to cause trouble. Lord knows I didn’t want to undermine Julie’s authority.

“I know in my bones you can do this,” Bono wrote from Ireland. “If you can sell [Edge and me] on a way forward that we three can sell Julie . . . [we] will defend your instincts. We understand your ass is on the line here as much, or more than ours.”

My ass was grateful for the recognition.

“We all adore Julie—the whole creative team,” I wrote back. “So surely there’s a way for accord to come.”

Julie, meanwhile, was trying and failing to find a respite from the show. From Mexico, she sent me an e-mail late one night as if she were the Green Goblin—the Goblin’s disdain for the hoi polloi making him a useful persona for venting frustrations.

Don’t you get it Boy!? The audience just wants high-flying stunts and fun! Forget the story we want to tell. They ain’t interested. SO if just makin it shorter is your way of solving the problem maybe you right . . . Who are we foolin with SPIRITUALITY, MERCY, COMPASSION, TRANSFORMATION, RESURRECTION, ILLUMINATION AND SHIT?

Tongue-in-cheek, of course. She signed it, “Love J.” And you could hear it all in the phone call still later that night: the frustration with “commercial” expectations; the struggle to get her head around various dramaturgical proposals; and also the love. You could hear that too. We’ll be fine. Come January 4, the whole creative team would meet. We’d find consensus, and we’d be just fine.

•     •     •

Thirty-eight years before the first preview of Turn Off the Dark—thirty-eight years to the day—a Broadway show opened at the newly built Uris Theatre. The 1972 show was Via Galactica, starring Raul Julia, and I had never heard of it, but in the January 1, 2011, edition of the New York Times there was a remarkable editorial written by the daughter of two of Via Galactica’s creators. I was home for twenty-four hours to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the family, and I sat in bed that next morning experiencing the curious sensation of reading a New York Times editorial addressed exclusively to me.

Investors in the production knew Via Galactica was going to be the most expensive musical ever staged. . . . But in my house, growing up, it meant many other things: Regret. Heartache. Disappointment. Failure. . . . I was 12 when my parents’ musical opened and closed. After a decade in the works, it lasted a fleeting seven performances.

I glanced at my children jumping on my bed. They were thrilled daddy was home from Turn Off the Dark, if just for a day. “As early as I can remember,” continued Jennifer George’s melancholy editorial, “Via Galactica was in the air.” Queasy, riveted, I read on. I read how actors were flown in the air, except for all the times that the rigging failed. How “Raul once got stuck in the spaceship and hung helplessly over the orchestra for 20 minutes until stagehands extricated him.” How “a production that had seemed like a sure thing . . . went over budget.” How “there were delays, . . . injuries.” How, at the climax of the show, the protagonist “had to choose: stay in the place he knows . . . or go with [an alien woman] to the stars,” which was, in essence, the second act climax of Turn Off the Dark.

Is there really nothing new under the sun?!

If the article had run on nearly any other day, my young ones wouldn’t have been nestled next to me as I read how, years after the play closed, Ms. George’s father “would still talk about things he would have done differently. Via, as he called it, would send him walking to the refrigerator late at night, reliving it in his mind.” The family was never the same after the show closed.

It was as if I were getting a personal visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future. Picturing myself sighing in front of an open refrigerator in a tatty bathrobe—that was far too easy to imagine. I already had the bathrobe and the refrigerator—all I needed was the Broadway flop. Christ in heaven, that wasn’t the future I wanted for myself or for my children.

“May everyone connected with [the show] have an old age with no regrets.”

In Ms. George’s blessing, she had laid out the stakes for me, and they were stark. Any hope for any future serenity rested on what happened in the next two weeks. Furlough over, I caught the bus back to Manhattan.

•     •     •

The evening of January 3, Edge and Bono gave me a ring. Could I meet at Edge’s downtown apartment for a chat? Julie didn’t arrive in New York until later that night, so it was just the three of us. It was the first time I had been in a room with Bono and Edge without Julie. It felt wrong. But after five years of collaboration, surely the cowriter of a show could be in a room with the composers without a chaperone. And it was just a little chat about the state of the script. Nothing was said that hadn’t already been said to Julie. Nevertheless, were we going to tell Julie about this meeting? No. Because, unreasonably or not, Julie wouldn’t like the fact of it. And the last thing we wanted to do at this sensitive juncture was breed distrust. Of course, if she ever found out that we’d met, it would breed even more distrust. So in the name of trust, we were surreptitious. And dysfunction was born.

•     •     •

Julie, Michael Cohl, and I were in the VIP room the next afternoon. Michael arranged for this casual meeting—just the three of us—so he could hear the latest plans from his cowriters. He was hoping somewhere in these minutes we could have a civilized airing of Plan A. Talk first, however, was of Chris Tierney, who was in the Good Morning America studio that morning with some of his colleagues taking questions from George Stephanopoulos. Chris looked implausibly good—chiseled, relaxed, and still free of animus. Under his clothes he was wearing a torso brace covered with stenciled images (of Spider-Man, of course), but on camera there was nothing suggesting that his life-threatening fall was only two weeks ago. If the show was running in May, Chris would be swinging all over the theatre again.

Which brought us to the nub of the meeting: if. We had twenty million in advance ticket sales through April. Not bad at all. But did those sales reflect how our actual show was being received? No. Most of those sales were generated before word of mouth—good or bad—could make an impact. There was also a certain percentage of ticket buyers who wanted to see the show for the same reason some people watch NASCAR. Riedel quoted one audience member as saying, “You want everyone to be safe—but it would have been awesome to watch if something had happened.” We were not going to be generating any more accidents. I mean—geez—we better not. In short, Turn Off the Dark was floating on top of a publicity bubble at that moment, but it was a bubble, and bubbles pop.

“Sorry, but speculating on ticket sales,” Julie counseled me, “isn’t your bailiwick.” She was right. And she used the word “bailiwick,” bless her. So I switched gears and, with some gentle prodding from Michael, described again—with my inevitable stuttering and downcast eyes—Plan A and the rationale behind it. Julie said she really didn’t want to hear the idea ever again. I was prepared for that. I had a Plan C up my sleeve—a compromise between A and B that kept “Deeply Furious,” but made some smaller cuts and adjustments that combed out a lot of the matted dog hair in the second act. Julie had valued colleagues not involved in Turn Off the Dark who were tentative about delivering unvarnished opinions directly to her. Based on the notes that had trickled back to me, they would approve of Plan C, so I dove into an outline of the—

“Glen, you’re not making any sense.”

“Oh. Okay, I’ll start again—because I think that the—”

“Stop. Just stop.”

Fuck. I tripped the wire. Now words were blasting back at me with the heat of a furnace. She said if I kept introducing new ideas, she wouldn’t be able to keep working with me. She said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

“You don’t trust me as a writer?”

“Not right now I don’t,” she said shaking her head. “Not right now.”

She shrugged with a rueful smile to let that sink in. The subtext was “You were always meant to be ‘the words guy.’ Leave the story to me.” And when I opened my mouth to push back—(could this really be the first time I had ever pushed back?)—I was met with the fury of a hurricane making landfall. It was finally me—after over five years of watching from a safe distance as her weather systems turned folks into debris—it was my turn. I looked at her face. There was no sign that we were chums. No sign that she even recognized me. And I didn’t see the woman I knew either, as I peered through the bolts of crackling flame coming straight at me; as I dodged her black cloud of sharp-taloned crows, her fang-bearing hounds made of hellfire, her . . .

In the original schedule David Garfinkle drew up in 2006, we were going to have seventy-two preview performances of Turn Off the Dark in Chicago, and then we were going to have several weeks to make changes before moving to New York to deliver another thirty-five preview performances. So what would be happening at this moment if we hadn’t performed these last thirty previews under the klieg lights of New York City? If we didn’t have an opening night bearing down on us? If, instead, we were less than halfway through a run of out-of-town previews? Would this meeting (which would turn out to not be a meeting so much as a wrecking ball to a friendship), have ever happened? Would the confabs at this juncture have been focused and fruitful, because we wouldn’t be inside a pressure cooker that was boiling away our faith in each other?

All I know is I hate getting yelled at. Hate it. Always have. Especially when my intentions are pure; when I mean no harm. For God’s sake, we were talking about plot points. In fact, I don’t just hate getting yelled at, which would be damaging enough to a relationship. No. I resent it.

I don’t remember how the meeting ended. I remember going up the stairs back toward the lobby. I was trembling, and embarrassed by it. Michael Cohl had stayed mostly silent through the meeting. He now had an arm around me; he gave me a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.

“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” I said grimly. “And what’s that?”

“Being the better man.”

Cold comfort. I preferred it when the lady and I were gleefully shouting ideas to each other across the train tracks. I still had high hopes for that night, though. Bono and Edge were seeing the show for the first time, and afterward they’d be attending a meeting back in the VIP room with Michael, Jere, and a sampling of folks from the creative team. One way or another, we’d make headway.

Act One that night went without a glitch. Clearly Bono had been bracing himself for disappointment, because at intermission he bounded backstage as excited as a six-year-old.

“That was one of the best things I’ve ever seen onstage. Ever.”

Some of the most endearing aspects of Bono were on display right then. Earnest in his hyperbole. Unabashed in his enthusiasm. He was primed to take his month’s worth of concern all back.

“There’s still the second act,” I reminded him.

“Well if it’s anything like the first, we’re in great shape.”

“You’ll see,” Julie said, knowing full well what was going to happen.

Bono returned after the second act looking like his dog had just died. Edge was more measured in his reaction. But the ending, in particular, was driving Edge nuts. It just didn’t make sense.

The meeting I was pinning my hopes on was now convening in the VIP room. Bono led off, saying Act Two turned into The Arachne Show, with three tantrum-throwing songs in a row. Julie said the three songs were very different in both tone and content, and the show required all three. Michael wondered aloud if perhaps Glen had some alternatives to put on the table. My moment had arrived. And I sounded as mealymouthed as ever. Julie flicked away the ideas with disgust.

Edge took a turn, raising some of the same questions about the ending that he raised three years earlier, but before he could gain any traction, Julie turned the tables and asked Bono and Edge when they were going to fix the lyrics, because the lines in several of the songs were so opaque, they were hampering her ability to deliver a clear story.

So we had the songwriters critiquing the book, and the book-writer critiquing the songs, and the temperature was rising in the VIP room. Bono made another sortie, but Julie was well entrenched in her pillbox with plenty of ammunition.

And why wouldn’t she be?

In Pleasantville, New York, a month before dance rehearsals for Turn Off the Dark began, Elliot Goldenthal and I were with Julie at the Jacob Burns Film Center’s ninth anniversary celebration. The speech being delivered in her honor explained that she was being presented the award for “her uncompromising vision . . .”

A month earlier she was in the Marriott Marquis ballroom, hearing those same three words as she picked up her New Dramatists Lifetime Achievement Award. “Her uncompromising vision . . .”

Receiving her MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; her Guggenheim Fellowship; her Brandeis Creative Arts Award; her Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts Award, her Emmy, her OBIEs, her Tonys—she sits and listens to the world reiterate yet again that she is being rewarded for being uncompromising—her uncompromising vision, uncompromising . . .

And now she’s only twenty-three, and she’s hiding behind a banyan tree near Lake Batur, in a village square lit only by the moon. She’s in pain, because a piece of rock made a deep and dangerous gouge in her leg when she took a fall while hiking on a live volcano the day before. And now she’s hiding because a procession of elderly men has suddenly appeared in the square wearing elaborate costumes. For the next thirty minutes, they perform a Balinese war dance—hands splayed, now fluttering, with knees in deep pliés. And now they’re stepping gingerly on their heels, now stamping, now suddenly squatting, now swaying, eyes wide as if in a trance . . . And where’s the audience? Julie looks around. She’s alone. Only after the dancers finish do villagers finally enter this square in Trunyan to hang a theatre curtain for an upcoming performance. Julie realizes that these men were indeed performing in front of an audience, but the audience wasn’t human. This was theatre for the spirits, theatre as devotion. Years later, she’d explain that this was “performing in a way that is not just for the critics or the writers or the money or the audience, but is a giving back. It’s a responsibility to who you are as a person in the world.” At the very end of the day, the artist is answerable to one producer: the producer of Life, of Existence. And with that producer, there is no compromising.

Back in the VIP room in the Foxwoods Theatre, Julie was sitting there listening to Bono with her arms folded and digging in her heels, but she was digging those heels into a patch of dirt by that banyan tree because a part of her has never left that spot.

But, man, it sure looked like ego-fueled pigheadedness. Bono had finally had enough. Raising his voice, he told Julie that she could fix the script problems or not fix the script problems. As for Edge and himself, they’d work on the music, “because at least that’s something we can do, and our reputations are on the line.”

Folks began to file out of the room. And that’s how we were leaving it?

Plan A, by all appearances, had been rejected. And as I sat there on the couch watching everyone leave the room and wondering where we went from here, Jere bent down and whispered into my ear before he headed out the door: “But you’re right.”

And the thought bubble over the bewildered writer’s head contained no words. Just punctuation.

!?!!?!!

•     •     •

NUCLEAR BOMB DETONATES DURING REHEARSAL FOR ‘SPIDER-MAN’ MUSICAL

NEW YORK—In yet another setback for the $65 million dollar Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark . . . a thermonuclear device detonated during the first act of Tuesday night’s preview performance. “The bomb should not have gone off at all,” said lead producer Michael Cohl, adding that the explosion that vaporized most of Manhattan was “not that unusual” for a major Broadway show still in development.

The day after the VIP room meeting, a tickled Michael Cohl entered the auditorium, eager to share this article in The Onion, the satirical newspaper, choking with laughter as he read the last line out loud:

Despite the setback, Cohl told reporters that he is more optimistic than ever about the production, saying that director Julie Taymor and composers Bono and the Edge were disintegrated in the explosion.

Bono would later confirm what I was beginning to suspect: Michael Cohl must be a helluva poker player. How worried was Michael about the state of things? You couldn’t tell. Was he going to lean on Julie any harder? He was playing his cards too close to his chest for anyone to figure out. If only I could convince Danny that the show was in dire straits. Surely he could then convince Julie. But Julie was already on her way to convincing him that the scenes with Arachne would work once she and Danny restaged them.

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.

13

Plan X

On 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.

This is the moment, I thought. Two thousand days ago Bono looked me right in the eyes and said, “This show has to be brilliant.” He was right then. And I was right now. The time for pussyfooting was over.

“Bono, there’s a new idea, and it’ll fix everything. Did Michael not tell you?”

“He didn’t tell me anything.”

I glanced toward the door. It was shut. The VIP room was empty but for the three of us.

“Well . . .”

Bono sat up. Edge was looking at me intently.

“Just consider this—”

WHAM! The door swung open and Julie breezed into the room.

Did she hear us? No, because she immediately launched into a discussion of the lyrics. But that discussion was brief because she said it was time for the Spotted Pig. I had no idea what she was talking about. I finally gathered that it was a restaurant in the West Village. Bono was a part owner. The whole company had been invited to a party there in lieu of the opening night party we were going to have on January 11 before opening night got postponed. The two lads and Julie and I were heading toward the town car that would take us down to the Village. I desperately needed twenty minutes alone with Bono and Edge to lay out Plan X, but I had no idea how to arrange that. Suddenly Julie was being stopped by Kat Purvis, who needed to discuss a brief scheduling matter with Julie.

“Shall we wait for you?” asked Bono.

“I’ll meet you down there!” Julie said.

Perfect.

A couple of the composers’ assistants would be riding with us. So as we stepped into the car, Edge whispered that we needed to be a little circumspect. He then said aloud as the car turned down Ninth Avenue, “So, Glen . . . in future productions of the show, how might you see the plot possibly changing? Just as something to consider?”

I dove into Plan X, taking the composers point by point through the whole show, needing to be thorough yet knowing time was tight, and grateful for some gridlock south of Fourteenth Street. The outline was fresh in my mind, and it was so sensible that it was easy to spin the tale with confidence and clarity, and other than asking a question or two, Edge and Bono listened in attentive silence.

The town car arrived at the Spotted Pig, and now it was idling. Bono dramatically turned around from his front seat. His hand gripped mine.

“I’m in.”

As we got out of the car, Bono and Edge said they would kick the plan’s tires. And when we were absolutely confident that it was the way to go, we would present it to Julie. But it had better be soon, I thought. Bono and Edge were leaving the country in four days.

The room upstairs at the Spotted Pig was already packed with company members taking advantage of the open bar and thrilled that the next day was a day off. Not only had they been putting on shows every night, they had been required to attend rehearsals every day. And for a typical show, that grueling double-duty would have been ending that night. Had we just opened, the exhausted actors and dancers would now be relaxing into the groove of an eight-show-a-week schedule, interspersed with light brush-up rehearsals. Instead, they had another whole month of intensive rehearsals. From this point forward, every Goodwill Point got spent at double the rate.

It was a spirited party. Chris Tierney was there, which was putting a smile on everyone’s faces. But it was also a party laced with trepidation. Julie and Michael had been back in New York a week and yet, to the Turn Off the Dark company, there seemed to be no indication that anything significant in the show was changing.

In the middle of the party, Julie delivered a speech to the assembled. Her confidence was unsteady, and she was barely trying to hide it. She told the cast it didn’t matter what the public thought of the musical. What mattered was that we were staying true to our original vision. Her intent was to counsel the actors not to get caught up in the negative press. She wanted to rally us all around the tabernacle of Art. But it was a grave miscalculation. Her speech made it appear as if she didn’t care if the show closed. She seemed to be telegraphing to everyone in the room that she had no intention of “fixing” the show.

Edge, astonished, turned to manager Paul McGuinness. “I can’t believe she just said that.”

To Edge, Julie’s speech seemed to confirm that she knew the ship was sinking, but was resigned to that fate.

I was ready to leave. It was crowded and loud in the room so, as I was saying goodbye to Edge, he brought his mouth close to my ear to say:

“As her partners and as her friends, it is right to support Julie and her vision. But . . . it is also right . . . at the same time . . . to continue on a separate track and develop this other plan, should we need it.”

For as long as I had known him, Edge had struck me as a thoughtful man, an ethical man. A serious man. You couldn’t listen to Edge and say the fellow wasn’t conscientious. If he was telling me that what we should do was take a “twin-track” approach, then there had to be rectitude to it.

And as I was leaving, Bono told me that Wednesday would be the day. January 12. I passed the information on to George Tsypin and Rob Bissinger in an e-mail. The big meeting—the day of reckoning—would be Wednesday. And then at the bottom of the e-mail I hastened to add (because almost every letter and conversation had to end with it now): “. . . But keep it under the hat.”

14

The Serenity Coin

I’m going to give you some advice. Whatever you do, whatever happens, stick with Julie.

Like a kiddie alarm clock set for two thousand days in the future, Seth Gelblum’s words were now shrill bells in my head. Danny Ezralow had found a large coin on the street the week before and made a point of showing it to me. I wanted to keep the coin because to me it seemed to possess a real talismanic aura. But Danny thought so too, so he kept it. We were both clearly strung-out, because the coin was probably just something that fell out of the pocket of an AA member. It had a bunch of enigmatic symbols on one side, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer” on the other.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Danny didn’t say it, but he was showing me this coin because of Plan X. I was onto him.

“Glen, you’re depressed. Everyone can see it. Julie’s been talking to me about it. You need to figure out how to find serenity in all this.”

He was right. I was depressed. But why was “serenity” the answer? After all, they only called it the Serenity Prayer because the “serenity” bit came first. If the clauses had been switched, they’d be calling it the Courage Prayer. The unspoken subtext for our entire conversation was:

“See?! The coin is a clarion call to me to push and keep pushing for Plan X.”

“No, you idiot, the coin is telling you to back off.”

Plan X was designed to create a narrative framework that would justify keeping as many of the eye-catching Arachne set pieces as possible while minimizing the technical hurdles. But the simple idea of sticking the Spidey-Goblin fight at the end of the show was already in the air. It had been suggested by fans on blogs. Patrick Page even took a discreet moment at the Spotted Pig party to float the notion to Michael Cohl and Edge. And on the afternoon of January 11, Julie herself mentioned the idea in passing in the lobby of the Foxwoods.

“Well . . . uh . . . funny enough . . .” I said, scratching my head, “it would solve a lot of the problems that we—”

“Oh, Glen,” she interrupted, sounding sympathetic and weary, “don’t think about that now.”

She then warned me never to mention the idea to Michael or Jere.

“Once you open that door, they’ll want to do it. And then? Forget it. It’ll be a theme-park show. This is how shows die. When people start abandoning the vision that got us here.”

I was listening to her, trying to figure out: Did she know about Plan X? As for Julie, she was probing, trying to figure out: Was he still with me?

“All I know is,” she added, “if that’s what they want to do, then I’m walking.”

“Really? You’d . . . walk?”

“Actually, no—I wouldn’t walk. They would have to fire me.”

“Well, it’s not like they’re gonna get another director.”

“Exactly.”

Julie had already gamed it out. And now she was confidently heading into the auditorium to supervise the rehearsal. Moments later Michael Cohl called me. He said the investors had just unanimously voted to allow the producers to shut down the show. If it came to that. But, Michael added, he wasn’t at all convinced it needed to come to that.

I’ll never convince these guys. Danny was right—maybe it was time to switch from courage to serenity. Glenn Beck’s radio show the next morning (January 12) wasn’t helping my case. The Tea Party movement torchbearer saw our musical the day before. “By far the best show I’ve ever seen. . . . Give a kidney to go see Spider-Man. I’m telling you . . . this is the Phantom of the twenty-first century,” he said.

Mr. Beck devoted thirty minutes of his program to praising our show. To six million loyal listeners, he proclaimed Turn Off the Dark “the eighth wonder of the world.” Michael Cohl called the conspicuous jump in ticket sales that week “the Beck Bump.” Parched for an unabashed and vocal proponent of her show, Julie drank in the words of Mr. Beck, who gushed: “ ‘Rise Above’ is the song for today: You have a choice to make. You can be the hero.”

“I have to admit, Glen,” Julie said to me. “He gets it.”

Later that day, Julie assembled all the female dancers in the VIP room so she could bring them up-to-date on her new vision for “Deeply Furious.” I had wanted her to cut the number. Instead? She was expanding it.

I clomped up the stairs back to the lobby, where Michael and Jere were chatting. As promised by Bono back at the Spotted Pig, tonight, post-performance, was when the producers and composers intended to have the mother of all meetings, when Plan X was finally going to get aired and all this sordid conspiring would end. But Michael wondered if maybe now might be a good time to grab a moment with Julie, so that the producers and writers could begin the heart-to-heart. Bono could join in later.

“Julie was just downstairs,” I told him eagerly.

“Great. I’ll go check if she has a minute. Stay here,” he instructed.

Michael headed downstairs toward the dressing rooms. Minutes went by. Michael still hadn’t returned. I went down the stairs and tiptoed toward the closed door of the VIP room, where I rested an ear.

I could hear Michael’s voice. It was RAISED. It was interrupted by Julie’s voice, which was AGGRIEVED. Now Michael’s voice was SCOFFING. Julie’s was SCATHING. Michael’s was CONTEMPTUOUS. Julie’s was—no, I wasn’t gonna stick around any longer. I crept away. No way was I getting in the middle of that. Kat Purvis, standing outside the stage manager’s office, shot me a little grin. “Any idea what they’re talking about in there?” she asked.

“Not really.”

“I saw Michael come down here. He found Julie, and it went from zero to a hundred like that. They’ve been in that room ever since.”

I found Michael an hour later. He was still under the influence of adrenaline and other aftereffects of the blowup.

“Was it over Plan X?” I asked, hopefully.

“I didn’t even get to that! She quit the show twice before I even brought it up! I had to chase her back from the elevator each time. And I’ll tell you this—the next time she quits, I’m not chasing after her.”

After the show, I headed to the VIP room, expecting the room to be empty except for a few serious people ready to deal with some serious issues. Instead, it was a party, with actual VIPs getting drinks at the bar and showing no signs of leaving. Julie was there, but she said she was heading home in a moment. Not only was she giving no indication of the rumpus between her and Michael earlier that day, she didn’t seem to know that there was supposed to be a meeting—a really important meeting—tonight. As in, right now. Michael murmured to me that the meeting wasn’t happening tonight. No one was really in the right frame of mind to have a serious talk. I wandered demoralized out of the room, only to see a man coming at me with a beautiful smile and an outstretched hand.

“You, sir, have written one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. It’s going to be a huge hit, and I’ll do everything I can to make that happen.”

It was Glenn Beck. And he was saying everything—everything—a playwright dreams of hearing from an audience member. So I shook his hand, deeply gladdened. And then I bolted out of there, deeply confused.

•     •     •

Michael Cohl had an announcement the next evening at the nightly production meeting. Get out your calendars—opening night was moving from February 7 to March 15.

“March fifteenth,” one of the production managers mused aloud. “So we’ll be opening on the Ides of March.”

“I like that,” said Julie. “It’s got a good ring to it. Wait—what’s the Ides of March again?”

Someone piped up, “It’s when they murdered Caesar.”

“Uh, maybe I’m not so crazy about the Ides of March after all,” Julie joked, prompting laughter. Conspicuously uncomfortable laughter.

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.

15

Spidenfreude; or, How Do You Want to Fail?

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

And 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.

Meanwhile, I pulled another all-nighter rewriting the first Geek scene, but I didn’t get it done, and rather than facing Julie’s outrage, I turned off my phone and spent the next two days holed up in a rented conference room with three other writers to work on a new children’s show for WGBH. This was another hazard of postponing the opening. Members of the team were beginning to get distracted by other projects. Danny had been flying between Los Angeles and Italy for the last month. And now George Tsypin was in Europe; Rob Bissinger was designing the sets for a new Off-Broadway show; Scott Rogers, Jonathan Deans—they were all moving on.

So while Julie was working with the four Geeks at the Foxwoods, I was thirty blocks away, excusing myself from a meeting in order to get to a bathroom, lock the door, slump to the tiled floor, and let a bizarre amount of tears spill out of me. And what set me off was—well, thirty-one hours without sleep, for a start. And then it was the whiteboard in the conference room, filled with open questions phrased with precision and intelligence. And it was the disagreements—which were lustily engaged in and dispensed with, but all within the lexicon of my people, the language of writers. I had written 150 scripts for PBS—these guys knew my work, and I knew theirs. And so when I talked, these collaborators listened. And we ran with each other’s ideas, and we knew we had found the answer when there was nothing but the grinning, twinkling nodding that comes with consensus.

Bono once told me one of the secrets to U2’s crazy-long career. How had these four men—each with a strong personality and unique understanding of his craft—been able to work together for over thirty years? The four of them realized long ago that if they were arguing over a song, then that was an instant indication to the defenders that the song wasn’t good enough yet. “Because,” Bono said, “when something is good, truly good, there is no arguing.”

I had no idea just how depleted of common sense and mutual respect my days had become until an amicable and lucid discussion of a plot point in a conference room sent me to the floor of a men’s room to bawl my eyes out.

•     •     •

Mubarak, president of Egypt, was in the news on February 11 because he had just resigned in the face of massive public protests. Rob Bissinger was on the phone with me, and he was angry. He said the entire Tech staff was ready to revolt—they would boycott the implementation of any more changes, or maybe they would just quit, but either way they wouldn’t take any more of this piddling and twiddling.

The Goodwill Points were all used up. Julie’s simplest scheduling requests seemed to take twice as much effort to make happen. The most basic stage prep for a rehearsal was taking twice as long as it used to. The stage managers, the crew—they had all reached their limit.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Everyone was sick of the stupid sea.

Michael wrote me that he was meeting with the higher-ups at Marvel in four days to discuss the results of the focus group, Joe Quesada’s report, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s report, and Plan X. He said nothing could happen without the approval of Ike Perlmutter and Bob Iger (Disney’s CEO), so any definitive plan was still a few days away. He then added: “Please tell the agitated it’s all coming together. . . . Remember, there may be politics, and probably lawyers and painful settlements. Be strong.”

I reread the sentences. Something wasn’t getting through my thick head. What precisely was he getting approval for? Shutting down the show for three weeks? Then what did lawyers have to do with it? Why settlements? Why painful? And for that matter, why was he meeting with all these executives before he did what surely he was going to do at any moment—what I had been waiting over fifty days for him to do: get Julie in a room with the whole production team, lock the door, and not let anyone out until everything had been presented in the bluntest terms. Julie would see the light, and then we could move forward. What was I missing?

One day around this time, George Tsypin held up the piece of reality that had been in my blind spot.

“Glen, you realize, don’t you”—his Russian accent sounding more Russian than ever, carrying the double burden of clear eyes and a heavy heart—“that if this Plan X actually does happen, Julie cannot be the director. She will never be convinced. You know this.”

It was the most glaring and most dreadful of the unknown knowns. And it was unknown no longer. But wait—if there were no Julie . . . then what in God’s name was the plan?

There must have been something new in my eyes as Julie and I sat next to each other in the orchestra seats during that afternoon’s rehearsal with the Geeks, because she turned to say something to me, and stopped in mid-sentence.

“What. Glen, what is it.”

“What.”

She was cocking her head as she looked at me.

“There’s . . . I don’t know—is there something you’re not telling me?”

Damn her and her intuition. I shrugged. Tried to smile. “No.”

“It feels like . . .” She was searching my eyes. “Like there’s something you’re not letting me see.”

She let it go. But not really. She could feel that something was up. In her upstate home on Valentine’s Day, in the same cozy room we sat in five and a half years before for our first giddy writing session, I found a stack of pages on her little desk that I hadn’t seen for years: Neil Jordan’s outline. She admitted she’d been rereading it. “There’s some very good ideas in it,” she said. You could hear surprise in her voice. And also, faintly, the fear that all those years ago she had made a catastrophic mistake. I’ve lost her. Then again, if she was rereading an outline from a writer she fired six years ago, then she, herself, was lost.

•     •     •

The Button Man had arrived. You could hear his hearty laugh thundering from the VIP room, where he was working out chords at the piano. Michael Cohl told me “getting him aboard was one of the worst fights I’ve ever had in my career.” This statement beggared the imagination. For forty years Michael had been a rock promoter—what epic clashes he must have lived through. But no, “one of the worst” was the fight with Julie Taymor over the man hired to fix the buttons.

In musical theatre, the “button” is that final, definitive musical note that tells an audience “you can applaud now.” And getting applause isn’t just an end in itself. Applause helps create an atmosphere—it supplies a show with momentum and lift. Turn Off the Dark, however, contained songs that faded out, or at least ended with the subtlest of doomps instead of a WHOMP! Or a BOOMP! Or a double button—a Bomp!-BOMP! Or a zipper—a rapid ascent to a final note, as if you were zipping up a fly—zaaaaAAAAA BOWMP!

Enter Paul Bogaev.

In his lengthy career, Paul has worked with Elton John on Aida and Phil Collins on Tarzan, and was the music director on a number of Andrew Lloyd Webber New York premieres, so unlike Teese Gohl or David Campbell, Paul had some unimpeachable Broadway bona fides. Beefy, with a goatee and let’s say Robert Redfordish hair, Paul Bogaev is also a jocular fellow. He has a predilection for off-color jokes. The members of the Turn Off the Dark company meanwhile—after the bruising reviews, the accidents, the seventy previews—were an increasingly haggard and somber lot, and weren’t sure what to make of this Button Man.

Also new to the Foxwoods that week was Peter Hylenski, who had been tasked to remedy the sound issues that had already sent the great Jonathan Deans over the brink. But the presence of neither Hylenski nor Bogaev would be publicly announced for another week. It was another name that broke in the Times’ Arts Beat blog on February 16. Patrick Healy reported that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa had been invited to rewrite the book.

Well for the love of—“Michael—hey, man, did I just get thrown under the bus? You can see, can’t you, how it’s like a big practical joke—urged to follow Julie’s writing orders for a month and a half, and then this?”

Michael called me back and told me to chill out.

Chill out because it was just a spurious rumor? Or chill out because the degradations were only beginning?

That night, with T. V. out of the show with laryngitis, and with the new “Deeply Furious” wedding-nightmare scene eliciting (as an out-of-patience Rob Bissinger reported) actual laughter from the audience, Michael Cohl took Julie out to dinner. Michael told me later that words weren’t minced. He didn’t go into specifics. So I was left to work out a crucial calculation. If Michael Cohl decided to commit to Plan X, then the only chance of getting Julie behind it was if I sent the plan to her right now. Yes, seeing such a highly detailed scheme worked out in secret by her collaborator would piss her off. At first. But if she could get past that, there was a chance she’d agree to direct it. Otherwise, if Michael sprang it on her as an ultimatum, she’d reject it out of hand.

However, if Plan X wasn’t going to happen, then sending her this scheme would accomplish nothing except explode to smithereens what was left of our relationship. And the only chance of improving the show the little it could be improved without Plan X depended on us working together. In which case, I shouldn’t send the—fuck it. I sent it to her. I sent her Plan X. The whole thing. On February 18. Forty-one days after I first wrote it down. And now at least everything was out in the open.

But here’s the thing. She missed it. Before that time she had never missed an e-mail of mine—not once, from 2005 to that moment. But this e-mail—surely the most urgent, the most vitally important e-mail I ever sent her—was overlooked. And then, what happened next was a plot twist usually found in farces, but sometimes tragedies: the “Misconstrued Conversation Leading to an Erroneous but Critical Assumption.”

Because the next morning, the subject of restructuring the show along the lines of Plan X came up between Julie and me. And something Julie said made me think she had read my e-mail—that she had read it, given it careful consideration, and rejected it. And based on this erroneous assumption, I decided that whatever happened next was out of my hands. I had come clean, and now I would “find serenity to accept the things I could not change.”

And Arachne peers down from the shadows, sighing sympathetically for these myopic mortals who still cannot see the machine they’re inside of . . .

•     •     •

It was a Saturday morning, the sun was bright, the air was crisp, Julie wanted to do a little clothes shopping, and she invited me to tag along. I stupidly took the offer as her gesture to assure me “we’re still cool, even after your little show-restructuring scheme.” So we ambled down the street toward SoHo and chatted away like chums. She said she had read Sacasa’s suggestions for fixing the show. She hated all of them. “If he was the one who had gotten the job five years ago instead of you? I would have fired him after a week.” She told me she didn’t even know why Michael reached out to Roberto in the first place. She just wanted somebody who could write some jokes—she didn’t want suggestions for a whole rewrite. “You’re much funnier, Glen. You’re just exhausted—you needed some assistance, but we can forget that.”

Guess she’s decided she needs me on her side after all. She said Michael Cohl yells at her all the time now. She didn’t like it. She warned me, “You don’t understand—you haven’t seen this side of him. He comes off all friendly and casual, but underneath, he’s a thug.”

More hip, high-end clothing stores. She wanted to buy me a shirt. She didn’t remember that she ripped my (already ripped) shirt. She was just in a giving mood. The shirts were all way too expensive. So I demurred. Still, two good hours with my old pal.

And then I returned to the apartment to find this e-mail from Edge:

Glen, I just got off a call. We are resolved to go after a new beginning for our play. The exact lineup of new players yet to be decided. I argued strongly that your knowledge of the material and production intricacies made you a key person in finding solutions to the problems we face. Everyone agrees . . . I feel very excited about the next few weeks. We just need to hold our nerve. . . .

I’m thrilled by the note. I’m horrified by the note. How was this possibly going to work?

Riedel reported in the New York Post the next day that along with Sacasa, the show’s producers were “looking to hire a co-director. Sources said they have reached out to Phil McKinley, who is best known for directing Hugh Jackman to a Tony in The Boy from Oz.”

Julie’s press agent contacted the Spider-Man press people. She wanted that story shut down. Now. But was Riedel onto something? I wasn’t sure. I had heard Phil’s name mentioned once. He was already working with Michael Cohl on an arena show based on the Bible, and a person extremely close to Julie suggested him to Michael as a possible replacement for her.

Two Maxims:

1. People are not to be trusted.

2. You must trust them anyway.

The following day, Michael Cohl called. “Glen, you’re in, Sacasa’s out.” (Apparently, Julie wasn’t the only one who didn’t like Roberto’s notes.) Michael also informed me that he was just on the phone with Julie. It was a brutal conversation, but now “everything’s on the table.” He told Julie to take a vacation for three weeks, during which time a “creative consultant” would come in to implement changes.

Julie called me minutes later. She was sweetness and light. She wanted me to talk to Rob, to make sure the design team was working on the “Arachne decals” that she wanted the Geeks to affix to the Geek Wall over the course of the show. And she wanted me to talk to Edge about revisions to the lyrics. “Because Edge doesn’t listen to me anymore,” she said resignedly.

No. She didn’t mention any recent telephone calls she might have had. No mention of a cataclysmic call from her producer just minutes ago in which she was asked to leave the show.

Nope. Instead she described the decal: a spider logo with an “A” above it, about a foot wide, red against a black background. . . .

Did I dream Michael’s call? Was Julie in denial? Or as Riedel reported the day before, was she just truly exhausted? As soon as she entered a rehearsal room, all the vitality was there. But that’s the thing about exhaustion—it doesn’t stop you cold. Not at first. What exhaustion might do first is convert your passion into a mania, sending you trudging down an increasingly narrow tunnel, where perspective sloughs away and clear-eyed self-assessment goes out the window. By late February, not just Julie but all of us were like Tom Simpson trundling wobbily up Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France. “Go on, go on,” he said, not realizing he was going to die before reaching the top of the hill.

At any rate, Julie had stopped listening to Michael Cohl. She believed any “softening” of Spider-Man ticket sales could be attributed to Michael’s Broadway inexperience. He was botching the marketing, just like Sony botched it with Across the Universe. She was making passionate appeals to me: “If we don’t stick together, Michael is going to sink the show.”

But that night, as I was being driven back to my apartment from the theatre, Michael and Jere revealed that we were to meet at Edge’s apartment tomorrow to interview Phil McKinley. Jere said, “Glen, there are people who say your loyalty is with Julie. That we shouldn’t trust you, because you’re a double agent in all this.”

I tried and failed to think of a good response. Protesting to these guys in the car that I wasn’t a double agent would make it sound like my loyalties lay with them. I didn’t like that, either. It made me sound like a turncoat. I recognized this role, but I was miscast. It was the same role played by Judas (which Julie would be calling me regularly to her friends come April). Except if I was Judas, that made Julie Taymor Jesus Christ, the Lord Our Savior, when we were just a couple of folks working on a play. But then, why did I feel like I needed a shower? Because, justify it all you want—but your dear friend is in peril and you’ve given up trying to save her. We reached my apartment.

“So we’ll see you tomorrow,” Jere said as I got out of the car. He then added, with a crowbar in his voice, “And keep your mouth shut.” And with that, he slammed the car door. The SUV drove away.

And I was alone.

“Perverting my upstanding studies, converting counselors into renegades . . . he confederates with the king of Naples . . .”

To think she once had such faith in me, she commissioned me to rewrite William Effing Shakespeare. . . .

•     •     •

Philip William McKinley was in Edge’s TriBeCa apartment describing himself to Michael, Edge, Jere, and me as “a team player” and “a people person”—traits that he stressed would be ever so important during this “transition” in order to keep the company intact. He saw the show, and he read Plan X, and agreed that it was the sensible way to proceed. Phil touted his extensive experience with flying systems and large-scale theatre machinery. Although Phil had only one Broadway credit, he directed seven different productions of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He had thrown up plenty of elaborate shows in just three weeks. And he had worked with tigers, elephants, fire, and alcoholic little people, so he was confident he could handle whatever Spider-Man threw at him.

In Edge’s former apartment, fifty-two months ago, Tony Adams slipped into a coma. I was looking at Phil describing his ideas to change Julie Taymor’s staging, and I couldn’t imagine what Tony would have said about all this. Just who was this guy who thought he could step into Julie’s shoes? Did he understand he wasn’t to tamper with the Taymor aesthetic? “It would always be about serving Julie’s vision,” Phil insisted.

Edge wanted time to consider. There would come the day when the new director would be introduced to the Turn Off the Dark company. The first impression needed to inspire confidence and hope because otherwise it would inspire rebellion. Michael reminded us that we didn’t have the luxury of time to deliberate. The new opening date needed to be announced within the week. But in the meantime, Michael said he had apprised Julie’s lawyer, Seth, of the situation. Michael confirmed that George Tsypin, Rob Bissinger, and—significantly—Danny Ezralow were all “on our team.”

“Okay,” wrote Edge. “Wait for the fireworks.”

And so there we were. On the brink of actually going through with an unprecedented restructuring of a Broadway show. And then?

I got wobbly. It started because the show that night—with my much-improved Geek scene, and new curtain call music devised by Paul Bogaev—worked maddeningly better than I had ever seen it work. And then, backstage after the show, I took the temperature of the cast, and they were all anticipating the opening on March 15 with such eagerness it hurt. The producers waited too long to make a move. There would be morale collapse and defections if Michael postponed again.

Seth Gelblum was arranging a meeting, a very serious meeting, at his offices on Saturday morning. Bono wouldn’t be able to attend—he didn’t come back to New York until the following Tuesday. But I entreated Edge, Michael, and Jere in an e-mail to see the show before the meeting. Because maybe we had no choice but to go with the show we had. I swore to them that Julie now seemed amenable to cuts and a certain amount of rewriting. In other words, she was listening.

Upon reading my note, Michael Cohl got livid. “If you write another e-mail like that, you’ll be in some deep shit. In fact, we’ll all be in deep shit.” He said the ovation the night before was still “our same old ‘popcorn standing ovation’—poof! and it’s over.”

Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein (a former partner of Michael’s and producer of Julie’s Frida) had recently given Michael some advice: “Julie’s a genius, and you don’t have to listen to her.” It took a simultaneously magnanimous, arrogant, and pragmatic son of a bitch to come up with that calculation. But judging by Michael’s attitude over the past two weeks, he had embraced it. Our show was blowing past the old Broadway record for most previews because of Michael’s commitment to get Julie’s vision to the stage. But that commitment was coming to an end.

Nevertheless, Michael agreed to attend the show that night. Edge too. It was another full house. I sat next to Julie, who seemed to understand how much was riding on this performance. The direction of the next morning’s decisive meeting depended on the audience’s reaction tonight.

And it was the most technically disastrous show since December. Midway through “Spider-Man’s Debut,” one of those Murphy’s Law grouses showed up. The “rotate line” got hung up on the “rotate arm.” First time that ever happened. A frustrated audience experienced TurnOfftheDarkus Interruptus, watching an empty stage for twenty minutes before Randall made the decision to disable the fly rig and cancel most of the flights in the show.

Not that I stuck around to endure it. Five minutes into the twenty-minute stop, I fled downstairs. Julie followed. So now we were alone in the little assistant director’s room as an audience of two thousand sat upstairs watching absolutely nothing.

She looked at me with an inscrutable expression. “So let’s have it.”

The voice she selected for this occasion was her special reserve blend of contempt and sarcasm, with notes of suppressed fury. Not my favorite.

“Plan X. Tell me the whole thing.”

It was the first time I ever heard her say “Plan X.” She made the phrase sound as stupid as the phrase actually was. She asked me again, but I didn’t understand the question. She had already read the entire thing, so why was she insisting I recite it, other than to be dickish?

“You do know at this meeting tomorrow you’re going to have to defend your ‘plan.’ Michael and Jere are ready to shut down the show to do your ‘plan.’ So let’s have it.”

“I really don’t want to do this now.”

“If you believe in your ‘plan’ so much—”

“I’m not—prepared—at this exact moment—”

“Well, we’re all talking about it tomorrow, so you better get prepared. Really. I would like to know where ‘everyone’ thinks this show should be going. Don’t you think I’m owed that much?”

Why was she pretending to be so thick? She read it! She told me so! Over a week ago!

She said if the opening was postponed again, T. V. and Reeve would both bolt, “so good luck finding another Arachne and Peter.”

I didn’t doubt they’d quit. Reeve had never really shaken out of his funk that began the night Chris Tierney fell. And both he and T. V. were devoted to Julie, for good reasons. The chances were high they’d do what she asked them to do.

I started with the beginning of the show, how it was basically the same, but she interrupted almost immediately and methodically dismantled my logic. With a lot of stuttering, I responded that maybe I should skip to the second act, and describe that first. She shook her head slowly, out of pity. God, how this woman can intimidate me. By the time I was five plot points in, she had shot fifty holes in the plan. Every word out of her mouth was actually saying, “You’re out of your depth, boy. You got a taste of power but you’re just a callow mediocrity.” You could insert the myth of Icarus here. Or Phaethon—the boy who took the reins of his father’s solar chariot but couldn’t control the flame-breathing horses, and who had to be killed by Zeus before he burned up the Earth.

I hadn’t actually thought about Plan X for almost two months. I mean sure I had thought about the fact of it, but the details? I could barely remember them. The plan had been in a state of suspended animation since January 8. For the last fifty days I had done nothing but do Julie’s bidding, clarify the big points of the plan to Edge, and urge people to have meetings that never transpired.

I was too unnerved to evaluate what Julie was saying. I couldn’t tell if she was using little more than specious reasoning and intimidation to dismantle my outline. But I should have been able to tell. I was unprepared for this, but why was I so unprepared? I realized, aghast, that I had pulled a “Sam” and, like that stagehand, I skipped a crucial step. Ever since the day I first devised Plan X, I imagined three steps needed to be followed. Step One: Get the producers interested in a preliminary version of the plan. Step Two: Gather trusted Tech people and possibly an additional writer in a room to work out all the details. Step Three: Get the producers to pull the trigger.

And in this small, airless room, I was listening to my own stammering voice and realizing . . . we skipped Step Two. We hadn’t all met and worked out the details. And now Turn Off the Dark—this entire enterprise—was about to leap off the edge with its unclipped safety cable dragging behind it.

Where was I?

Julie was looking at me with her arms folded. She was wearing a smirk.

What IS this place? I have arrhythmia. My arms are prickling. I thought I was so smart. I was going to save the show. But there IS no show! Spider-Man the Musical was never Spider-Man the Musical. I see that now. It’s always been nothing more than a diabolical machine built by the gods to teach humility. And I’m trapped in the dead center of its workings . . .

I staggered out of the room, out of the building, and down the street. I wandered into a hotel lobby. It was late, but I called my agent, Joyce Ketay. When I called her excitedly back in 2005 to tell her how I had just landed this incredible Spider-Man gig, practically the first words out of her mouth were “Be careful what you wish for.” I was so mad at her. Could she be more of a downer? It was like having the Delphic oracle from Oedipus Rex for an agent. And now, almost six years later, it was like . . . having the Delphic oracle from Oedipus Rex for an agent.

She extracted enough from my agitated babble to get the lowdown. She said I shouldn’t be expected to defend anything at the meeting the next day. “Plead the Fifth,” she said, because the meeting should really be between the producers and Julie as to how to proceed.

Plead the Fifth. I can do that. I went back to the theatre, slightly calmer. The fubar-of-a-performance, which had just ended, had only strengthened Michael Cohl’s resolve to stop listening to Julie. I found him in the lobby.

“I can’t defend Plan X tomorrow.”

“Glen, no one’s asking you to defend anything.”

“Really?”

“You know what I think? I think you have battered-wife syndrome. Why else would you still be defending Julie? I think you’ve had your wings clipped for so long, you don’t even realize it. Go home. Get some sleep. Stop writing e-mails.”

I promised him. I was heading toward the door when Michael said one more thing to me.

“Glen. How do you want to fail? Because that’s what it comes down to. We’re not asking you to ‘defend’ anything. But you have to ask yourself how you want this thing to end. Do you want to be able to say we tried everything? Because if you want, we can just call it a day right now. So give whatever answer you want to give tomorrow. But it’s a simple question. How do you want to fail?”

16

The Crucible

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

It 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.

But I didn’t.

I made myself some coffee.

•     •     •

“You don’t have a soul.”

Julie had arrived back in New York. And after two weeks sitting like unexploded ordnance in her inbox, Plan X finally got read. And that’s why Julie was calling me at three thirty in the morning and telling me I didn’t have a soul.

“I was still holding out hope,” she told me. “I thought maybe it will make sense, who knows, maybe I can get behind it. But, Glen, it’s incoherent. It’s a cut-and-paste mess.”

And then it started—the offensive. But I was prepared this time, my insecurities ushered into bomb shelters to wait it out until the shelling stopped. Her critiques now sounded facile. Maybe they were brilliant, but I didn’t hear it, because I was sick of it. I only had to push back a little before her dramaturgical bullet points were abandoned in favor of the personal. The thermonuclear. As soon as a relationship is built, we carry around the codes to atomize it. And this was the moment. The cover was off, and now nothing was between her and that big red blinking button.

Press it.

We would never talk again. Or no—one more time we’d talk. But it was months later, and it was like a brief meeting of ghosts. Our friendship was now a Superfund site and I was too tired and teed off to even care. The next day, Julie was fired. And within a week, Julie was being satirized as a narcissistic fruitcake by Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live.

Rule #1: In every theatrical production, there is a victim.

Rule #2: Don’t be the victim.

Berger’s Corollary: Until everything is played out, don’t assume you know who the victim is.

Carl Jung once noted: “The work in process becomes the poet’s fate . . . It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe.”

On screens less than three months before, Julie had Prospera lament to her daughter how she was deposed and they were sent into exile by conspirators, “to cry to the sea that roar’d to us.” And every night at the Foxwoods, audiences watched an artist brought low after her artistic creation was destroyed. Arachne was punished for remaining true to her Art, whispering wretchedly to Peter in the title song: “I am the queen of dreams / Banished to a shadow prison . . .”

Almost six years before, I asked Julie, “Why did Arachne try to kill herself after her tapestry was destroyed?” Instead of the explanation found in most versions of the myth—that Arachne hanged herself from shame over her conduct toward Athena—Julie said Arachne made the noose because her artistic impulse had been thwarted.

In fact, Julie said Arachne wasn’t punished for thinking she was more talented than the goddess of weaving, she was punished for actually being more talented. In other words, Julie had unwittingly reinterpreted one of the most iconic myths about hubris as not being about hubris at all. Was that a symptom of hubris? Or was it simply one artist sympathizing with another? In their respective stories, Prospera and Arachne were banished. But when the time was right, both of them struck back. Their patron goddess became the very deity whose image Athena wove on her tapestry during that ancient weaving contest: Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance.

•     •     •

Edge and Bono were in a music studio in Midtown. They had begun working with legendary producer Steve Lillywhite to cut the Turn Off the Dark cast album (Lillywhite had been producing U2 albums ever since their debut album, Boy, thirty years before). But that night—hours after Julie was officially dismissed—Edge and Bono were working on a new version of “Rise Above” with twenty-seven-year-old British up-and-comer Alex da Kid. They were intent on turning the song into a number one hit in two months’ time.

Bono and Edge had already thoroughly revamped “Bouncing Off the Walls.” The verses were sung to a new melody. It wasn’t as raw, but it was more tuneful. And the new lyrics were more intelligible. The lads had taken the criticism of their songs to heart and produced a song that was simultaneously not as good and also probably better.

The boys also demoed an entirely new song to replace “Spider-Man Rising,” and it was . . . new. It—well, it sounded at first-listen like something out of a spaghetti western remixed for a European late-1970s discotheque. It sounded like that at second-listen too, so I guess that’s what it was.

“It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek,” said Edge. It sounded like nothing else in the show, and it was another indication to me that we were entering a new and weird epoch of the project’s life. The composers and I left the studio together, and I hitched a ride downtown with them, Edge eagerly discussing dramaturgy all the way down.

I turned to Edge and Bono. “This is all so bizarre.”

Edge shrugged apologetically. “Yeah, we don’t do normal well.”

Bono informed me that Michael and Jere were checking with the investors. They might need a “high-wattage” name to collaborate on the new script. Someone who might do no more than contribute some suggestions and credibility. They reached out to Aaron Sorkin (writer-producer of The West Wing), but he politely declined. In the meantime, I should proceed to work with this Canadian fellow, Jim.

By March 8, after a couple of marathon sessions in my sublet (the baffled owner of the apartment had been told I’d be out of there by Christmas), Jim and I were within striking distance of having a full outline from which we could start generating pages. It was going to work. I reported to Michael that “the Canadian” was just the fellow I needed—we were speaking the same language. It was a functional, focused collaboration.

And it was about to go away forever.

That night, at the March 8 performance, director Chris Ashley was going to see Turn Off the Dark for the first time. The artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse (and last seen on Broadway as the Tony-nominated director of Memphis), Chris indicated that he would make a decision right after the show about taking the “creative consultant” job. Bono mused aloud that, with Phil McKinley out of the running, “we better hope Ashley says yes because otherwise, we’re in trouble.”

With the Tuesday show over, the composers and producers filed into the VIP room with Chris Ashley—all five of them looking anxious and grim. They shut the door behind them. They emerged twenty minutes later. They said nothing, but they were striding down the backstage hallway toward the exit with springs in their steps and broad smiles. Jere slapped me on the back. As Edge passed by me, he gave me a wink. Chris Ashley was going to be the new director of Turn Off the Dark.

Twelve hours later, Phil McKinley was the new director of Turn Off the Dark.

Apparently Chris Ashley had called Michael the next morning with cold feet. Probably because the man was sane and intelligent. Consequently, onstage that night, just before the Wednesday evening curtain, Michael Cohl addressed the cast, with Bono and Edge at his side. He told them that Julie would be taking “a leave of absence,” and he told them about the new “creative consultant.” And Michael then told them that we were opening June 14.

“Have a great show!”

The audience was filing into the auditorium, but whether there actually would be a show that night was suddenly uncertain. Many of the younger performers were preparing to change back into street clothes and simply go home. They were sick of being yanked around, and many of them were literally sick from being worked day and night without some proper time off.

The more seasoned members of the company—Isabel Keating, Jeb Brown, Ken Marks—were no happier about the situation than anyone else. But they knew that although it was the hoariest cliché of them all, and although Turn Off the Dark seemed to be testing the truth of the adage in ever more perverse ways, the show must go on. And they—with quite a bit of urgency—commiserated and negotiated with their less experienced comrades until the show had a quorum again. And the curtain rose on the most mixed bag of a milestone: an unprecedented one hundredth preview of Turn Off the Dark. And it was performed in front of an audience completely unaware that the most dramatically compelling part of the evening had already happened.

•     •     •

“Just talk with him. He’s here to help. You’ll work it out.”

The search for a superstar writer figurehead had petered out. But the producers still needed someone to assuage skittish investors and intrigue a dubious public. So Marvel had put forward the name of a writer who had written stories for Marvel Comics (the Fantastic Four and the Sensational Spider-Man titles, among others), in addition to being a playwright and a writer on HBO’s Big Love for its last two seasons. He was also no stranger to rewriting superhero musicals. The previous summer—when Spider-Man was just going into rehearsals—his newly overhauled script for the 1966 Broadway musical It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman went up at the Dallas Theater Center.

“Wait. Roberto? But I thought you didn’t like his notes,” I moaned to Michael.

“Just talk with him.”

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and I had gone to London together back in 2004 as part of an exchange program sponsored by Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic. I hadn’t seen Roberto since, but I remembered him as an amiable, gangling comic-book fan with Clark Kent glasses and a keen appreciation for solid dramatic structure. My plan was to meet him at a Midtown coffeehouse and invite him to join the Canadian and me. ’Twould be a merry band—we’d drink, confabulate, and do the good work that needed doing. We didn’t have to make the process miserable—those days were behind me.

I walked into the coffeehouse. I saw him all the way in the back, sitting on a couch, working on a script, engrossed. He looked relaxed and amused at what he was typing. I remember vividly the last time I looked like that while writing. It was 1991.

“Roberto!”

“Glen Berger!”

We found a table and I spun my vision for the next month. The fact that he had worked in television would come in handy. I evoked the idea of the writer’s bullpen—that egalitarian room where instead of the personality, it was the strongest idea that prevailed (on its best days, at least). I mentioned the “showrunner”—the television writer who had final say on creative decisions. I was sure we’d come to consensus ninety-nine percent of the time, but—

“Glen? Um . . . why do you think we’re meeting right now?”

Roberto had a concerned look on his face.

“What?”

“I’m listening to you talk and . . . I’m a little confused.”

Why is he looking like that? Something is very wrong.

I was sent to this meeting with the understanding that Roberto would be coming onto the project as a script consultant for a script that I would be writing. I. Me. And now I was learning from Roberto that Roberto had been sent to the meeting with the understanding that Glen Berger had gotten canned, and he, Roberto, was rewriting the new Spider-Man script. Roberto. On his own.

We were off to just a fantastic start.

A couple of decades ago, when I worked as a temp, I was sent to work the register at a florist’s shop for the day and, within an hour, I had somehow wound up with my arms around a voluptuous young Brazilian woman. I was giving her dancing lessons, in fact, when suddenly her fiery, jealous lover burst through the door. As I desperately tried to defuse the situation, a snickering camera crew came out from the back room and informed me I had just been filmed for the New Candid Camera.

That was the memory that came to me as I sat with Roberto in that coffeehouse. Because I was feeling more and more like the unwitting subject of a never-ending Candid Camera episode produced by Franz Kafka. Somehow I convinced Roberto that I hadn’t been canned. And Roberto insisted he had no ego invested in the project—he didn’t even anticipate his name showing up in the program. I said I would send him the latest structure, and we’d all have a chat about it. And as we left the coffeehouse I said, “And listen, man. Any problems—just call me. Communication on this show has been sucky, and it would be great if that started improving.” Roberto said he heard me.

An hour later, Michael was yelling at me on the phone. “I told you to talk with him! To find a way to collaborate!”

“What? WhadIdo?!”

Michael said he just received an angry call from Roberto’s agent.

“You told Roberto he’d be your errand boy?!”

“What?! I didn’t say that!”

“You said someone needed to be the runner. Go out on coffee runs.”

“Coffee runs?!” I’m losing my mind. Wait—“I did say ‘show-runner,’ but—”

“So you did say it!”

“Michael! That’s completely different! A showrunner is like the head writer, it’s—”

“Glen—”

None of this boded well.

“Michael, now that we’re on the subject of ‘head writer,’ who is the head writer now?”

“There’s no head writer. You’re collaborators. Work together.”

“Well yeah, but . . . even if we agree practically all the time, there still has to be one person who—”

“Phil. Everyone answers to Phil.”

But Phil McKinley isn’t a writer. Seriously, none of this boded well.

Two years before getting the Spider-Man gig, I wrote a musical that was based on The Tempest. Only, in my version, it was revealed that the “treacherous” Antonio character was actually the one wronged by the imperious Prospero character.

So Julie made a Tempest making the male Prospero a sympathetic female. I made a Tempest sympathetic to the betrayer. And Roberto? He too wrote a play based on The Tempest. It’s called Rough Magic, and Prospero is the villain. And the hero of the play? Melanie Porter. She’s a dramaturge. A script doctor. And she has magical powers.

“The work in process becomes the poet’s fate.” The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad put an arachnid spin on the same idea: “We are like the spider—we weave our life and then move along in it.”

The hero was a magical script doctor—I didn’t even want to contemplate how that boded for my collaboration with Roberto. But Michael’s sudden silence regarding Jim Millan meant he didn’t want to recommit to the Canadian (who would have been a valuable ally). I informed my agent.

She wrote back a three-word e-mail: “Gather your troops.”

This was getting ridiculous. These weren’t the Napoleonic Wars. I made a vow to Michael Cohl, and told him that if everyone made the same vow, we were going to be all right. I promised him that until opening night I would remain:

Sane.

Collaborative.

And competent.

Though, frankly, I wasn’t sure I was capable of sticking to such a promise.

17

Mutate or Die

So what shall we call the fight between Arachne and Peter? “Last Dance of the Spiders”?

Oh—no—it has to be a tarantella!

A tarantella?

A tarantella! Like Captain Hook in Peter Pan!

I woke up vomiting. It was March 13, 2011. And I had all the symptoms of tarantism except one. In 1370, near the town of Taranto, the first case was recorded. Believed to be caused by the bite of the tarantula, tarantism’s symptoms include vomiting, exhaustion, palpitations, involuntary erections, shameless exhibitionism, acute melancholia, and delirium. I was now experiencing all of these symptoms. Except shameless exhibitionism, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had suddenly gotten the urge to strum on a guitar in my underpants next to that Times Square cowboy. Perhaps having one’s name in ten-foot-tall letters on a billboard in Times Square would count as shameless exhibitionism. But on March 13, I felt so much shame seeing my name up there, I was probably in the clear.

I had been away from my wife and children for seven months. Friends and colleagues had either stormed away from the production, been ditched by the producers, or were in a confused torpor. It was said of tarantism that even the intoxication from alcohol couldn’t bring relief. The only cure (it was said) was music and dancing, which had to be “prolonged and strenuous.” And this was the origin of the tarantella, a galloping dance in 6/8 time—the dance Julie wanted for the end of the show. Arachnologists have now concluded that it wasn’t, in fact, the tarantula that was responsible for the symptoms of tarantism. Rather, it was the malmignatte—a Mediterranean black widow—one of several spider species featuring a female that devours any mates not nimble enough to get away from her after collaborating on a creative endeavor.

Julie Taymor—as Riedel reported—“is said to be hellbent on vengeance.” And in another article he wrote that Julie was “now threatening that if she is forced to go, she’ll take her script with her.” This, of course, would bring down the production.

“Can she do that, Joyce?” I asked my agent.

“Well . . . possibly.”

A month earlier, Joyce explained to me how the typical Dramatists Guild–approved contract worked regarding “approvals” in a musical: In a dispute, all of the “authors” of the musical have a vote—not just the bookwriters, but the lyricists and the composers as well. So if Bono, Edge, and I were all in agreement, we, in theory, could overrule Julie. This seemed like handy information as a last resort, and with my ancient deal memo buried in a file cabinet upstate, I never bothered to confirm that the Spider-Man contract was essentially the same as a standard Guild contract.

It wasn’t.

Julie actually had exclusive approvals over everything in the script—both as the director, and also as the co-bookwriter. Plus—being an author meant she got to approve the selection of the director—which was suddenly no longer a redundant clause. For the first time, I understood why Michael had written a month before about Plan X leading to “lawyers and painful settlements.”

“But—Joyce—what does that mean? What happens if I keep working on a script that she doesn’t approve of?”

The answer was that it would get messy, because my contract also stipulated that I was compelled to fulfill any bookwriting duties as requested by the producers. So no matter what I did and whose stipulations I followed, I was breaking my contract.

But it got even messier. Because neither Julie nor I had actually signed our contracts. We signed “deal memos” years and years before, but the complicated final contracts were still in Lawyerland when rehearsals started, and then everyone got distracted, and then everything got weird, so final versions were never generated for signature. Which now gave Michael Cohl a few more ergs of leverage over both of the original bookwriters. Michael could put the fear in me anytime he wanted (and he did) simply by “innocently” asking, “Have you signed your contract yet?”

Never play poker with this guy.

I was sitting with Michael now—along with Jere and Phil McKinley—in a booth in the back of the Lambs Club. They invited me to this booth-meeting to make a few things clear. Firstly, my back-channel days were over. It was time to get in line. Everything on my mind needed to be directed to Phil and only Phil, and Phil would disperse the information as he saw fit. This included all correspondence with Bono and Edge. No side talks with them.

They assured me that I shouldn’t feel like I was being singled out—new protocols were being put in place across the board. Every department was going to have one representative, and only that representative would present that department’s perspective to Phil. Talk between departments without Phil’s presence was going to be discouraged. There was going to be a tidy chain of command, rigorously enforced, and this would cut down on all the breakdowns of communication that occurred in the ancien régime.

I nodded into my glass of ice water. The wooziness, the clamminess, it was all coming back. They’ve just described a lovely recipe for dysfunction.

Secondly, “Glen, we want you to be open to new ideas.”

“Of course.”

Phil said that—just as an example—he may want to open the second act with the Chrysler Building and Goblin, with Spider-Man swinging in, and—

“But, Phil, the Tech for that would be—”

“Well that’s another thing, Glen,” interrupted Jere. They all wanted me to stick to my job description and stop worrying my pretty little head about Tech issues. They already had experts who would tell Phil what would or wouldn’t work, based on—

I had stopped listening.

Just before this meeting, my wife had called me, updating me on how life was going back home. It was all good. Except the basement had flooded, and our water heater was dead.

“It’s a shotgun wedding,” said Phil, “but I’m sure you and Roberto will find a—”

Yeah yeah, a “rhythm.” More words about Roberto needing his space to write; Roberto being owed the chance to get a feel for the material; Roberto having some good ideas—

My family has no water. I need to find a plumber.

“. . . and so once Roberto is finished with his pass of Act One, you’ll of course have plenty of opportunity for notes—”

Wait. Wha—

“Roberto’s going to take this week to write his Act One.”

“Oh—so should I start writing my Act One too? Because according to the schedule, the Act One is due at the end of the week, so maybe if we both wrote versions and then—”

Phil repeated what he just said, with a bit of testy emphasis.

“Roberto’s taking this week to write Act One.”

I wouldn’t find out for weeks that Roberto and Phil had already attended the show together. And that Phil, subsequently, made some decisions about what to do with the vestigial writer. But I could already tell where this was going, and if Phil went down that road, I was going to make everyone very miserable. I would pull at these pillars and bring this temple down on all of us. Already I could tell “Sane, collaborative, and competent” was going to be a heavy lift.

I dashed off an e-mail of concern and conciliation to Phil and he responded, “If I gave you the impression that you were not to write scenes then I’ve been misunderstood. I simply wanted to give Roberto an opportunity to catch up to the show.”

I was being played. But I’d deal with it. At least now I had it in writing from Phil that I’d be penning scenes. Phil also offered his opinion of Bono and Edge’s original music demos for the show that I sent him earlier in the day. Before hearing the demos, Phil had been expressing just how underwhelmed he was by our composers’ output. But he heard Edge’s GarageBand demos and got religion:

“I have to say, I feel like I’m hearing the music for this show for the very first time. It’s a beautiful score and the fact is we are not hearing it in any way, shape, or form based on these demos.”

There we go. If Phil can find a way to show off these songs to better effect, we’ll be golden.

An as-long-as-it-takes meeting to beat out the plot with Phil and his two bookwriters was scheduled for the next day. The script would change more in the next forty-eight hours than in the last four months. The last four years. Roberto wrote to his collaborators late that night, “As Stan Lee says, ‘Face front, true believers!’ ”

If Stan Lee was being quoted in e-mails, this really was a new team.

•     •     •

Phil had a lot of little-people stories. If the years Julie Taymor spent immersed in Indonesian culture were her lodestar for approaching art and life, Phil’s were the years he spent in the circus. To illustrate to Roberto and me the importance of staying flexible as we began the script process, he brought up the time he devised a procession for Ringling Bros. that was led by a little person followed by an elephant with a tiger balancing on the elephant’s back. Phil recounted that before he could implement this scenario, one of the trainers told Phil that the procession was a bad idea.

“But why?” asked Phil. “It’s a great image. You’ve got the contrast—the short midget, the big elephant—”

“Yeah,” said the trainer. “Except the tiger will see the midget as food.”

So Phil, being artistically flexible, decided not to do the little-person-elephant-tiger combo after all.

Nice parable. Point taken.

However, Phil’s story about the incident at a European circus in which a little person was accidentally swallowed by a hippopotamus was the most harrowing thing I had ever heard, with no apparent lesson to be gleaned other than you shouldn’t devise trampoline acts involving both trotting hippopotami and little people.

“He got a standing ovation, though,” Phil recounted. “The crowd didn’t realize that getting eaten wasn’t part of the act.”

Set pieces catching fire, husband-mauling bears—I found all these stories assuaging, as they seemed to suggest perhaps Michael and Jere had found the right creative consultant for Turn Off the Dark. What was needed most was someone who wasn’t easily daunted.

So Phil, Roberto, and I began the script meetings in a small room in the PRG offices, where Tony Adams once ran Hello, and where David Garfinkle still labored away on . . . stuff, at a desk hidden from view. Later in the day, we moved the discussions to Phil’s newly rented apartment. (Phil had temporarily relocated from Iowa for this job. He wore his Midwestern cred proudly.) After nine hours, we had dismantled and rebuilt all of Act One. It was all work I did just the week before with the Canadian, but with differences.

For one, the Geeks got the axe. Almost no aspect of the show had garnered quite as much scorn from the professional and amateur critics as the Geeks, and Roberto and Phil were positive they wouldn’t be missed. And now there was a chance to replace their scenes with character-deepening dialogue with, say, Uncle Ben or Mary Jane. Almost as importantly, cutting the Geeks would signal to the critics that we were serious about this overhaul. And the last strike against the Geeks: They were “principal performers,” so cutting them would save the production over a half-million dollars a year in salaries.

So four actors (including Alice Lee, who was hired to play Miss Arrow when T. V. Carpio became Arachne) were about to lose their jobs. After performing their roles over a hundred times, they were going to be sitting in the audience instead of taking a bow on opening night. (And actually, three of the four would end up deciding they had better things to do that night.) The stage-left area where they hung out during the show would become inaccessible—used as space for a large speaker instead. Peter Parker was going to sing “Bouncing Off the Walls” alone, instead of being accompanied by four spastic backup singers. And the actors’ dressing rooms—with their mood lighting, computer games, and shelves of comic books—would be converted into soulless prop-repair rooms.

The rest of the day in Phil’s apartment was spent using sentences like “I’m bumping on that plot point,” and “Yeah, I’m bumping on it too,” to express that an idea didn’t make sense yet. Television-writer-room speak.

Our mandate from Marvel and the producers was, yes, to “turn off the dark.” If the show was going to sell volumes of tickets, it needed to be family-friendly, and that meant it needed to be accessible. Sunny. Phil took this mandate to heart, often literally. “Picture This” got its title and refrain temporarily changed to “Sunny Days.” And he wanted different makeup for Arachne—less kabuki, more . . . pretty. Peter Parker was going to lose his suspenders and start looking normal. Mary Jane’s father would no longer be an abusive drunk, just a muddled one.

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.

“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.

18

A Goblin in a Box and an Eensy-Weensy Spider

Near 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.”

And yet, before I could feel disheartened, I would run into actors feeling like they had a new lease on life. Backstage, Patrick Page made sure to let me know how wholeheartedly he supported where the new script was going.

“Julie kept insisting things were getting clearer and clearer in the old script. But I wanted to tell her, ‘Julie, maybe they’re getting clearer, but that doesn’t mean anyone in the audience cares.’ ”

He was right. Very few cared about Arachne. The problem was probably fixable at one point, but . . . well, not anymore.

•     •     •

“What is happening to this show???”

It was the first communication I had received from Julie Taymor in over a month. The e-mail had only one other sentence: “The reports I am getting are mind-boggling.”

I vented to her. Because by April 6—just eleven days before we shut down for three weeks of Tech—the seams were coming undone. Phil’s wish list was growing by the day. He just wanted a more lucid and approachable show. Nevertheless, the growing number of staff grumbling about both his approach and his solutions was reaching critical mass. The associate lighting designer was writing to Don Holder that Phil was fixing things that weren’t broken and “breaking things that are fixed.” Don Holder admitted he hadn’t returned Phil’s most recent call “as I worry that I may say something (or several things) I’ll regret later.” Rob Bissinger, meanwhile, was warning George Tsypin that if no one put the brakes on Phil’s new vision for the show “it will only get worse.” If the design team’s attention continued to be diverted to the items on Phil’s ever-growing list, it could scuttle the whole schedule. Finally, Michael Cohl told Phil he had forty-eight hours to cut his wish list in half.

Although many people were characterizing the changes Phil sought—from the costumes, to the set, to the script—as ones that would make the show “a theme-park entertainment,” there were those who didn’t see a problem with that. Upon reading the new script, Marvel representatives were telling Phil “you’ve given us the show we’ve always wanted.”

Bono and Edge, however, were calling from Buenos Aires with a different opinion. With their encouragement, I lobbied Phil for some alone time with the script to “massage” some of Roberto’s material. But the request went nowhere. After all, wasn’t I the guy who wrote 1.0? He didn’t seem to remember me sitting across from him at his own interview. Well, I figured, I could always tell Roberto what I thought of some of the writing. After all, he said he had no ego involved, and that he welcomed a frank exchange of opinions and ideas. So I told him what I thought. It didn’t go so well.

Note from Glen to Roberto: “Hey man, just wanted to apologize again for any insensitivity on my part on the phone.”

Note from Roberto to Glen: “I know you weren’t doing ANYTHING intentional, Glen. As Stan Lee would say, ‘ ’Nuff said.’  ”

Stan Lee had a “Stan’s Soapbox” column in the issues of Marvel Comics that he edited. In the column, he’d often end a sincere or lofty thought with “ ’Nuff said.” I’d take any of those clichés—“It’s water under the bridge”; “We’re cool”; “It’s all good”—anything to get past the grudge bearing and move on.

I’m going to strive to do better.

•     •     •

In the rehearsal notes sent out on April 14, I noticed a request for the costume department to generate T-shirts with the phrase GOBLIN’S GODDESSES printed on them. Apparently it was for the new number at the top of Act Two.

“ ‘Goblin’s Goddesses’? What the hell is that?” I asked Roberto. He didn’t know either, but wondered: “Is that a Charlie Sheen reference?”

Oh God. It’s probably a Charlie Sheen reference.

That month, the actor Charlie Sheen was reaching the climax of his career implosion. He had become a wild-eyed, self-destructive media magnet, which was probably why articles had been referring to Turn Off the Dark of late as “The Charlie Sheen of Theatre.”

With a bit of research, I found out that Charlie Sheen called the ladies in his life “his goddesses.” Stage manager Randall joked to Phil during rehearsal the day before that the female dancers in “A Freak Like Me” should be called “Goblin’s Goddesses.” It was meant as a joke, but Phil liked the idea, and by the end of the day, new costumes were being ordered.

Most everyone on the original creative team shared Julie Taymor’s nausea for disposable pop culture. For years, it wasn’t unusual in a Turn Off the Dark meeting to hear a reference to composer Krzysztof Penderecki, or “grotesques” in ancient Japanese setsuwa tales. And now? A costume referencing the extracurricular activities of a sitcom star was going to be in the show. Phil’s response, of course, would be that using a Polish composer known for such works as Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima as a reference point pretty much summed up what went wrong in Turn Off the Dark 1.0. Point taken. But Charlie Sheen?

“It’ll date itself inside a month!” I squeaked to Roberto. I had reached number sixteen on my list of why the idea was a bad one.

“So you want me to deal with it?” Roberto asked.

Yes please.

So Roberto casually noted to Phil that his wardrobe request was for Act Two, scene one, but the Goblin wasn’t actually named “the Green Goblin” until Act Two, scene four. Therefore, T-shirts saying GOBLIN’S GODDESSES wouldn’t really make much sense.

“Shit. You’re right,” Phil said.

Nicely played, Roberto.

•     •     •

“Have you fixed our show yet?”

“Not yet!”

“Well,” said Kat Purvis one day, “it won’t be fixed until ‘Think Again’ is back in.”

“You think so too, huh?”

I urged Kat to work on Phil. Be subtle, but persistent. I tracked down others who felt similarly about “Think Again” and asked them to do all the lobbying for the song they could muster. This was two weeks previous, and now the little campaign was bearing fruit. Phil announced that “Think Again” was back in the show.

I ran to find T. V. Carpio as soon as I heard the news—she had a song back! One that showcased a whole other side of her character! She could be more than just the “Gentle Lady Spirit Guide”! But she didn’t seem happy.

“What’s Arachne’s point now?” she sighed. “Why even keep her in the script at all?”

T. V. said she was trying hard to be a good little soldier, but she was also talking to Julie on the phone regularly, and those conversations weren’t full of happy talk about Phil. Phil was asking her to sing full-lunged with what’s called “a Broadway belt,” and with more vibrato; i.e., to sing in the exact opposite way Julie wanted her to sing. It was messing with her head. Her attitude during that whole month was mystifying our new director, who had been earnestly trying to get through to her but was now speaking openly to Roberto and me about replacing her.

T. V. couldn’t decide if maybe it would be a blessing to be fired. Several dancers were expressing similar sentiments later that evening. They had just come out of a bewildering meeting that Phil had convened with the dancers, all of whom were looking forward to airing their grievances, and talking about the process going forward. Phil had already gotten on a soapbox to tell me the problem with Julie’s relationship with the company was that she didn’t listen to their concerns.

“I just want you to know,” said Phil sympathetically to the dancers at the top of that meeting, “if you have a problem, any problem at all with the direction this show is taking—with how rehearsals are being run—really, I mean it—with anything at all . . . you can leave.”

One of the dancers quit the show on the spot. There were smiles in the Telsey audition room the day Julie and Danny cast her. And now she was gone, and there were a few more on the ledge that evening. These dancers were feeling exploited, expendable, and unworthy of having an opinion. If Phil had good intentions—giving disgruntled company members an easy way out of their contract instead of forcing them to continue in their indentured servitude—his gesture still managed to come off as misguided. The meeting did achieve the one result Phil was looking for, however. It silenced dissent. I kept underestimating Phil. He had clearly learned that if you want to keep trapeze artists and poodle trainers in line, sometimes you need the velvet glove, and other times, the iron fist.

I reported the latest to Edge and Bono, who relayed their concerns to Michael Cohl, who then called me to yell at me: “I should just fire you all!” he shouted. And coming from a guy who had just fired some people, the line had some bite in it. He followed up his yelling with a letter.

I bet on Julie and Julie’s team. They failed me. Not one deadline was ever met. So now it’s in Phil’s hands. Stop second-guessing him. That’s for the Julie Camp people. It’s a closed chapter. P.S. Did u sign your contract?

I saw now that Michael Cohl was a serial monogamist. Fiercely loyal, he remained devoted to Julie long after he was warned she was heading off-course. And now, in order to be fully loyal to Phil, his disenchantment with the old team had to be total. I mean, it was hardly accurate to say, “Not one deadline was ever met.” That said, there did seem to be a greater adherence to the schedule under this new regime. One reason, of course, was that the Tech crew was now well seasoned after all the months of trial and error.

But there was another reason the trains were running on time. Her name was Eileen. Eileen the Unsung. She had been Phil’s assistant for years—so many years that I could never retain the exact number, because it always hurt my brain to contemplate it. She was by Phil’s side for circus gigs in Florida, a Ben Hur Live spectacular in Germany and London, and on Broadway for The Boy from Oz. She had devoted her life to anticipating what Phil would need before Phil knew he needed it. And now with clipboard and laptop, she was shuttling back and forth between the stage manager’s office and the stage, and then up to the rehearsal rooms, and then over to the technical director’s table, all the while constructing schedules, organizing meetings, reminding, revising, facilitating, and getting less sleep than anyone in the building.

Such selflessness, it was almost self-abnegation. But no mere lackey, she was the only one familiar enough with Phil to rap him hard on the knuckles whenever he needed disciplining. Julie had personal assistants, but she never had an Eileen. Perhaps the autumn of 2010 would have gone differently if there had been someone like that. But yes, as Michael wrote, it was a closed chapter.

•     •     •

“Today is a sad day,” Julie wrote me. It was April 17. And the theatre was shutting its doors to the public for twenty-four days after that afternoon’s performance. In just a few hours Turn Off the Dark 1.0 would be turned off for good. Danny was in town to make a surprise appearance, and to hug the dancers. Julie wanted to know: “Have Bono and Edge seen the new rewrite and direction and choreography?”

In fact, the composers hadn’t seen the new direction and choreography yet. But they were coming back to New York soon. And they had seen the latest rewrite.

Glen, it’s your fretful-not-in-the-neighborhood-but-friendly rock star here. I am extremely worried about the corniness that’s crept into the script. Confidentially, I have raised the alarm with MC in quite a dramatic fashion and I expect Phil will feel what I’m saying soon. I think they will look more and more to you to rebalance the ship.

Michael and Phil would continue to ignore Bono’s alarms. Michael had also been ignoring Julie’s increasingly desperate demands to have 1.0 recorded before it was lost forever. He couldn’t tell if Julie’s impulse was sentimental, artistic, or litigative. In any event, he wouldn’t allow it to happen.

Associate director Keith Batten drew a caricature of the Geeks, including Alice Lee in her cat-ears hat reading from a big book of Ovid, containing the story of an artist whose work was destroyed. The drawing was now hanging on the wall backstage, capturing that weird manic energy that was about to disappear from the show. After that day, the four Geeks were out of a job. They took extra bows at the curtain call while behind them three dancers in Spider-Man costumes confidently held up handmade signs in webbed lettering: BE. BACK. MAY 12. But this being art, and life, there were no guarantees. Among the Geeks’ going-away gifts were DVDs of Rivers and Tides, the 2001 documentary about the artist Andy Goldsworthy, who constructs sculptures out of natural materials—leaves, pebbles, sticks—that eventually collapse . . . or get swept away . . . or fall apart before they can even be completed. . . .

19

The Russian Hairdresser’s View of History

Since late November, it had been the third-highest-grossing show on Broadway. Turn Off the Dark had earned more than twenty-five million dollars. More than 245,000 people attended one of its 145 previews. And now we had shut it down. As Patrick Healy of the Times pointed out about our shutdown that week, “Spider-Man is without historical precedent.” To get entomological, the Foxwoods had turned into a giant cocoon. But what was going to emerge—if anything—was still a matter for debate.

“Glen,” wrote Edge, “I just sent an e-mail to Phil formally requesting that you are given the chance to start rewriting the bad scenes, with or without Roberto, immediately.”

Bono went a step further. Sensing Phil’s continuing reluctance, Bono called me the morning of April 18 with top-priority, top-secret instructions. I was to rewrite the script. Period. Don’t worry about Phil, or Roberto. We hired them, not the other way around. We absolutely must replace all the dialogue that, as Bono put it, “sounds like it’s out of The Waltons.”

Bono was sounding like he did the first time I met him backstage at the Meadowlands six years before. This show had to be exceptional, or he was going to walk away. He said if it was necessary to conceal what I was doing from Phil, so be it. So. Was I in? Would I do it?

Hell yes.

An hour later I was in the upstairs rehearsal room at the Foxwoods, with just Phil and Roberto. And Phil was in high dudgeon. Michael Cohl had just told him about complaints from composers, staff, and who knew who else.

“You need to tell us right now, Glen. I need to know if you’re on board with us or not.”

I stammered to buy some time. I needed to work out some calculations. Roberto and I had begun to trust each other—“ ’Cause I’ll tell you right now, Glen. Roberto and I will walk.”

I caught a flicker of confusion on Roberto’s face. He didn’t know what the hell Phil was talking about. But Phil was serious. Serious enough to actually leave the show? Nah—he knew what a great gig this was for him. So do I detonate my manure bomb? Obliterate any chance at a working relationship with Phil and Roberto for the next six weeks, and assume Bono will take care of the mess?

“Yes,” I finally answered. “Of course I’m on board. But c’mon—I hope that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to be rigorous. We have to scrutinize every damn thing in the script, or we aren’t doing our jobs, right?”

“Of course! No no. Obviously.”

“More important than getting what you want is giving what you have.” That was the final lesson Peter Parker had to learn. Service and sacrifice. It was the eleven o’clock number for all of us. Bono wanted to know how my rewrite of the whole show was going, and I had to write him back to inform him that the situation on the ground was more complicated than he might have imagined. I told him most of the cast, as well as Marvel, Disney, and the producers, liked the direction the script was going in. I assured him that making the script “exceptional” wasn’t even that important: “The heart, the intensity, and the mythic glimmers are going to be delivered by the music and the spectacle, and the story’s job is to make sure that it gets delivered.”

In fact, because it suddenly seemed so true, I explained that creating a musical was like rolling a joint: “The story is ‘the rolling papers,’ and the other elements are ‘the high-quality sinsemilla,’ and I believe the problem with Spider-Man 1.0 is that the rolling papers kept falling apart—they were torn and badly rolled.”

The e-mail was getting embarrassing. I finally pointed out that Phil clearly never got the marching orders in early March to absolutely rely on me more than Roberto, and now we’d just have to make the best of it.

Bono wrote back: “an amazingly lucid e-mail, even if it is not all or even most of what I wanted to hear. Let’s make our limitations strengths now.”

I had dutifully bcc’d Michael Cohl on the e-mail, to demonstrate to him that I was playing ball, but Michael didn’t take it that way: “Wow . . . not a letter I expected. Nor do I believe it. To me it feels like ‘the Russian hairdresser version of history.’ . . . Frankly I can’t finish reading your email, too long and not in my opinion in the better interests of the show . . .”

I was in the Cohl doghouse again. He was sick of me. I’d have fretted about it, except I was sick of people being sick of me, so there. I was pretty sure what I wrote to Bono wasn’t the Russian hairdresser version of the last month, but after spending two sessions with Google, I still had no idea what Michael Cohl meant by “the Russian hairdresser version.” Michael had his own version of the last month. So did Phil. Julie. Reeve. As I said, this book is a story about storytelling. All of us engage in the act every minute of the day, and then again when we’re dreaming. So maybe we’re all Russian hairdressers, I wrote back to Michael: “It’s sounding like a much better job at the moment than co-bookwriter.”

•     •     •

“Has Edge seen the run-through? What are his thoughts? Are you able to make a dent? Ready for Tech? J”

The last e-mail I ever received from Julie. She had now written me three haiku-length e-mails three Sundays in a row, all of them at almost exactly the same time. Clearly, after one’s morning coffee with the Sunday crossword, but before lunch, was the proper time to write ex-co-bookwriters.

Were we “ready for Tech?” she asked. Well, Chris Tierney was back in rehearsals, and eyes teared up just talking about it with each other. Meanwhile, a huge hole had been cut in the proscenium to make room for a new “center-speaker cluster.” Along with the two large stacks of speakers and subwoofers taking up much of the floor space on the two ends of the stage, the set now contained eyesores that made George Tsypin’s eyes sore. But the sound was noticeably improved.

And the automated bed for “Rise Above”? Did it get fixed? Well, as a matter of fact, a couple of months ago it got outfitted with larger wheels. Too large to fit inside the bed, unfortunately, so the wheels were mounted on the outside of the bed, concealed with painted plates. However, the bed continued to get stuck in the cracks in the floor. So the bed went back to the shop, and more money was spent on still-bigger wheels with some serious treads. We now had a bed that could handle any topography. If you needed to go on a cross-country road trip in a remote-controlled bed, this would be the one. And then? It had just been decided that week that there would be no automated bed. It would be brought on manually by stagehands.

So yes, we were ready for Tech.

•     •     •

On the morning of April 26, Phil, Roberto, and I were in the green room of The Today Show waiting to spend five minutes live with Matt Lauer. I watched the segment preceding ours on the green room monitor, sipping disappointing coffee. Matt Lauer was interviewing the mothers of two fourteen-year-old girls who were best friends. The girls were bullied at school for the same old stupid stuff. So one night they had a sleepover. They wrote suicide notes describing things they wanted at their funerals. And then the girls hanged themselves. One of the mothers discovered them in the morning. Ungraspable, the grief that mother must be carrying. And now that mother was back in the green room. I had no words. I couldn’t look at her. Because we were next. We were the puff piece.

The last six years on this show—everything I thought I had endured so stoutly—and it still amounted to nothing but fluff. I watched a prerecorded clip of Phil telling an interviewer that we were making “the impossible possible,” and I sat on that couch on the Today Show set, in front of a few million people, and brooded silently about how I was wasting my life. Matt showed a clip of dancers rehearsing the new “Bullying by Numbers” choreography, and I could only think what a mockery we were making of those mothers’ pain. At least with Danny Ezralow’s choreography, there was a brutality in the song. But now “Bullying by Numbers” was a big empty nutsack because heaven forfend we make bullying seem like the abominable thing that—waitaminute—did Matt Lauer think I was one of the new people brought on board? He just introduced us as “three members of the new Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark creative team,” and now he was asking us: “When you three first sat down and watched the show with your own eyes, what was your first reaction?”

Phil looked at Roberto who looked at me, and I looked at no one. I pretended I was a mannequin. I discovered I liked the idea of being seen as part of the new crew hired to clean up the mess of the original team. I mean, what were those original writers thinking? I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the interview.

•     •     •

After a run-through of the whole show—just a few days before our first preview—I had never seen Michael Cohl looking so distressed. Even when he was upset, he usually managed to project amusement. Not now. Questionable dance moves had infiltrated the entire show. 2.0’s running time had somehow gotten longer than the show’s previous incarnation, and the entirety of Uncle Ben’s death was now, bizarrely, just Aunt May and MJ standing on a nearly bare stage informing Peter that his uncle Ben was shot a few hours ago.

And for all the work to make the show less “dark,” the first act in particular was a downer. The Geeks may not have been “laugh riot” funny, and many found them grating as hell, but they did add a certain goofy levity to the mix. Michael’s solution was to hire a young joke-writer who showed up in the lobby one morning, intending to submit a list of one-liners by the end of the week. This was guaranteed to fail to produce the desired effect. Between ourselves, Roberto and I gnashed. And eventually, the joke-writer was paid off and sent away.

Meanwhile, there were troubling issues that weren’t being addressed with the air-raid-siren-urgency they required. 1.0’s garish and messy “Ugly Pageant” had gotten replaced by a garish and messy “Freak Like Me” number. Finding a viable concept that would justify having an ensemble of dancers join the Goblin in song was proving difficult. Phil and Chase had decided the dancers were random mutant figments of the Goblin’s imagination. But the overworked costume department had little time to throw something together, and Chase Brock wasn’t finding the concept inspiring. According to a consensus of company members and staff, the resulting number resembled a tribute to Michael Jackson’s Thriller video as performed by eight-year-olds during Gay Pride Week. Clearly someone was going to have to come up with something better. But it wasn’t going to happen before the first preview—a preview destined to get reviewed by a whole bunch of bloggers and Michael Riedel, so—not good.

But with “Freak Like Me” not changing for the moment, was there another way to give the Green Goblin a little heft? Patrick Page came up with what Roberto and I thought was a brilliant idea. Patrick suggested that when the Green Goblin was revealed at the Daily Bugle, he should kill a reporter. Specifically, Buttons, the old-timer. Just strangle the life out of him in front of all the other reporters. It would make his evil indelible in the minds of the audience. Phil was reluctant—it felt awfully violent. And, on a more practical level, once Buttons’s corpse was on the ground, there was no way of getting him offstage. Patrick had an answer for that: the Goblin could drape Buttons’s lifeless body over Jameson’s desk, so the corpse could be ferried off when the desk was sent offstage.

At last 2.0 was going to get a little grit into it. It was really too bad that Patrick’s frustrated attempts to hoist Buttons’s limp body onto the desk resembled Japanese hentai monster porn. Nothing could be contrived in the mere twenty minutes of Tech allotted to make it look like Buttons wasn’t being violated from behind by a green mutant, and Phil shut it down. He also—just two days before our first preview—decided to cut “Think Again” again. Arachne forevermore shall be nothing but a Gentle Lady Spirit Guide.

•     •     •

May 12. We were hours away from our first preview of Spider-Man 2.0, and we didn’t have an ending for our show. I’d be feeling déjà vu, but déjà vu was a trick of the mind. I really had already stood by the stage hours before the first preview of Spider-Man watching an ending getting slammed in as the minutes ticked down. But now Julie was a tall bearded man in a baseball cap directing technicians to tweak the position of the confetti cannons.

In Spider-Man 1.0, there was a two-minute gap near the end of the first act while the stage crew prepped the aerial rigging for the final sequences. This gap was covered with some excited blather from the Geeks wondering how the story was going to turn out. Now this gap was happening near the end of the whole show, and there were no Geeks to cover the two minutes. A two-minute drop in momentum after the exciting aerial battle would ruin the sequence. It would ruin the ending. It would obliterate the entire reason for shutting down the production and implementing Plan X in the first place.

Roberto came up with an idea: Instead of the Geeks, we’d have New York citizens—including Jameson—supply the dialogue. And we would have Spider-Man–costumed dancers planted in the auditorium ready to leap and toss “web confetti.” (The confetti was Phil’s idea.) More and more web confetti would be thrown until it climaxed with an explosion from a “confetti cannon,” sending streams of spermatic webbing onto the heads of the audience. (The thought of such a “theme-park” approach would have sent Julie exploding into little confetti-like pieces.) Phil had been itching to get a confetti cannon into the show since mid-March, but up until that moment, he had been overruled by stage management, who worried that the streams of paper would get caught in aerial equipment, and that the ushers would start demanding extra pay to clean it all up every night. Those were the excuses they gave Phil. Really, they just thought it was tacky. But now the cannon was in.

The sequence was teched without a moment left on the clock. In the VIP room just minutes before the show, the anxiety was thick. The show wasn’t quite sold-out, but the auditorium felt packed. A lighthearted dramaturgical discussion between Roberto, Phil, Chase, Eileen, and me suddenly turned into shouting. I was shouting at Phil, he was shouting at me, and we didn’t care what we were shouting about so long as we were shouting at each other. He stomped out of the Very Important Person room, and we took our seats.

Michael Cohl appeared onstage in front of the show curtain to address the audience. “Welcome to all of you: ladies, gentlemen, and uninvited critics.” The show didn’t open with Spider-Man speed skating down a bridge with Mary Jane in peril anymore. Reeve, as Peter Parker, simply stood in front of the Iris Wall, delivering a book report about Arachne. (Edge and Bono in particular found this shockingly underwhelming, but all of their ideas to improve it got vetoed.)

The loom didn’t work that night, but at the end of the show, the climactic Spidey-Goblin fight thrilled the crowd. Web-throwing spider-men appeared in the aisles; the confetti cannon fired. Reeve and Jenn delivered their final dialogue, and then Reeve swung away over the audience. The final triumphant bars of music played. Blackout. The lights came up. The dancers came out to take their bows . . .

And the audience leaped to their feet. The standing ovation was sustained through the entire curtain call. No “popcorn ovation” this. The reaction by the audience was more boisterous than anything 1.0 ever generated. There on the stage—those weren’t just the gracious smiles of professional performers. They were unfiltered expressions of pure joy, a profound exhale as the company sensed that maybe, just maybe, this thing was going to work out after all. I glanced over at Michael Cohl and Jere Harris. They were giving fist bumps to everyone they saw. They were looking so relieved it was as if they had just received their invitations to the Rapture.

As the audience filtered out, I picked up a program lying on the floor. The cover was different from the 1.0 cover. “Spider-Man” used to be in small letters and “Turn Off the Dark” in big letters. That had now been reversed. The message from the producers was clear: Nothing overshadows Spider-Man. I opened to the first page. “Original Direction: Julie Taymor. Creative Consultant: Phil McKinley. Book by Julie Taymor, Glen Berger, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.”

A machine built by the gods to teach humility . . .

Roberto assured me in March his name wouldn’t appear in the program. At a certain point during this last month, this seemed both unfair and preposterous to both of us. But getting equal billing also seemed ludicrous. When he found out how the new credits would appear, he didn’t have the heart to tell me. So I discovered it on my own that night. However, it only took me a minute to get over it. Or more like a week, actually.

I’m still not over it.

Roberto had been on the job two months. I had now been working on the show for six years, and . . . criminy—it was to the day. Yes, exactly six years before the first preview of this Phil McKinley–helmed production—on May 12, 2005—Julie Taymor had called me after reading my Goblin-piano scene and asked me to be the co-bookwriter of Spider-Man, and my heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

20

Rise Above

Once upon a time, in a parallel universe, the New York Times ran a photograph, and in it, Bono was congratulating Julie Taymor in front of two thousand friends and associates. And the kiss between the two of them said it all—for in it you saw nothing but love, undying respect, a dash of triumph, and unutterable relief. It was a photograph that—for almost six years—I had already conjured up in my head as one of the indelible images destined to be generated by our show’s opening night.

And the photograph in this universe’s New York Times looked almost exactly like the one I just described. The only difference was a barely perceptible black-sleeved arm next to Julie. The arm belonged to Phil McKinley. And so that kiss didn’t say it all. You could see the love, triumph, and relief. But you couldn’t see the gut-twisting swirl of other emotions, as well as the reams of unspoken words.

During the last weeks of May, while previews for 2.0 were running, Julie was thousands of miles away in her hideaway in Mexico, and she was certain that was where she would be on opening night. When her assistant Jules first suggested to Julie that she come back to the Foxwoods on June 14 and take a bow, Julie scoffed. It just didn’t seem possible that everyone in this story could be on that one stage without violating some law of emotional physics. Too awkward—it strained the imagination so, no, it wasn’t going to happen. But Jules wasn’t going to give up so easily.

Meanwhile, word of mouth was beginning to spread that the show had turned itself around. Robert Trussell of the Kansas City Star had already come out with a positive review, enthusing how “the creators pursue serious artistic ambitions while dishing up spectacle designed to get the same sort of response if you woke up one morning and saw a mastodon grazing in your backyard.” He said the score “included some of the most effective songs I’ve ever encountered in a rock musical.” It was a bona fide good review.

Whether or not all the other critics would fall in line, at the very least, perceptions about the show appeared to be malleable again, and the producers were eager to shape those perceptions. They launched a new upbeat ad campaign that retained the old rain-soaked font for the title, but now paired it with a tagline (“Reimagined! New Story! New Music!”) in a hyper-slick, zippy font that seemed purposely designed to make Julie’s eyes bleed.

The death of Uncle Ben was augmented. It would get better. Then worse. Then better. There would be a lot of that in those last three weeks—tweaks and cuts, and then the restoring of what was once cut, but only after a tweak. Phil’s assistant, Eileen, confirmed this was her boss’s habit as previews began to wind down. “Phil just needs to leave the theatre—for his own good,” sighed Kat Purvis, who had seen this particular mania seize many a director as opening night approached because changes aren’t made after opening night. For a director, opening night is a kind of death.

•     •     •

The show’s advance—which was ten million back in January—was now down to six million. Some days saw smooth previews with strong ovations. Other performances were rockier. Spider-men still hung impotently in the air from time to time, confetti cannons misfired, and “Freak Like Me” still wasn’t pleasing anyone. Chase, more than anyone, was eager to find a new angle for the number, but “We’ll get to it, baby doll,” was Phil’s standard response. All directing had to be put on hold until Phil returned from Los Angeles.

In L.A., on May 25, on the season finale of American Idol, Reeve, Bono, and Edge debuted their new version of “Rise Above.” An aerialist in a Spider-Man suit flipped over the studio audience, dry ice filled the stage, and 29.3 million viewers heard a song from Turn Off the Dark. The single was released that night, peaking at a respectable seventy-four on Billboard’s Hot 100. Hundreds of comments on YouTube praising the song seemed like a mirage when they first appeared. I kept scrolling through the comments looking for some explanation other than the obvious one that people just liked the song.

The sun seemed a little brighter, the air a little fresher. I watched the tree outside my window drop all its leaves last November. Who knew I’d see the tree blossom and now quiver with green leaves again? My landlady wanted to know if she could finally put the sublet back on the market for July.

“That would be ‘Yes.’ ”

The last day of May I went upstate for a quick visit home. The next time I’d be going home it would be for good. I got the kids to school. I bought mousetraps because we clearly had a problem. I mowed the lawn. I kissed the children good night. My daughter woke up and started vomiting. Maybe it was those roasted beets before bed. She was going to be fine. I spent twenty minutes cleaning her rug. And it was glorious. It was all glorious.

And I called Julie Taymor. I knew she wouldn’t answer if she saw my number, which was fine, because I just wanted to leave her a voice mail. “You should come to opening night, Julie. Everything that makes the show great is yours. You should come. Accept the flowers. Take the credit.”

After seeing the “reboot,” Roger Friedman—who had been a longtime Taymor-booster at his Showbiz411.com—concurred in an article a couple of days later: “Julie Taymor’s going to get a surprise. There’s just as much of her work in the show as there was to start with . . .”

I had given up on “Freak Like Me,” but Roberto came up with a new concept that gave Phil, Chase, and the costume department something to latch on to, and they all dove into revising the scene. It was as Bono said: “When something is good, there is no argument.”

The very last thing in the script to be scrutinized before opening night was the very first thing I ever wrote for the show. Edge and Bono thought the death of the Green Goblin had no twist, no depth of feeling, no redemption. There were meetings, e-mails, but we were out of time. Phil broke the news to Bono and Edge that this was the show.

“The show, in my opinion, is bulletproof at this point,” Reeve Carney told Patrick Healy in an interview that week. “I mean, as bulletproof as anything can be.” Jenn Damiano told the Times, “When someone says something negative about our show now, I’m like, ‘You’re boring me—it’s not cool anymore to be negative about Spider-Man.’ ”

Edge and Bono added an additional chorus section to the new version of “Rise Above,” with words that weren’t in the stage version of the song. While the new lyrics were a typical U2esque appeal for peace, they were also written as an intensely personal appeal to their former collaborator:

In a time of treason

Is there time for trust

When there’s no them

Only us

Is there time for reason?

Has your heart had enough?

Is it time to let go

And rise above?

The lads were in California on the ninth of June (making up tour dates), when Bono rang Julie and talked with her for an hour—the longest and most civil chat since the chill days of February. He wanted to see her at the show on opening night. It was a sentiment even Michael Cohl was leaning toward. That is, until the next day, when the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society filed an arbitration claim on behalf of Julie Taymor to recover the $200,000 in royalty payments the producers allegedly owed her (a figure that included only director royalties, not her royalties as co-bookwriter). Of course, the Times and the Post dutifully covered the news.

Michael Cohl was furious. These were not the headlines he wanted for his show just three days before opening night. He wanted to know if I had any inside info on whether Julie intended to show up at the Foxwoods on the fourteenth. My latest intel from Jules was that Julie was sticking in Mexico.

“Good,” Michael said. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

It didn’t stay that way. Because—among other reasons—on June 12, the 2011 Tony Awards were broadcast, and Julie watched some of the show. The awards were dominated by The Book of Mormon, a true smash hit, regularly breaking attendance records and snagging nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical. In humiliating contrast, the show’s emcee, Neil Patrick Harris, challenged himself to tell as many Turn Off the Dark jokes as he could in thirty seconds (“Spider-Man is the only musical where the actors in the cast are actually in casts”). It wasn’t this wearisome ribbing of Spider-Man that got Julie thinking twice about opening night. It was seeing the performance of Reeve and Jenn, singing a tender rendition of “If the World Should End” on a fire escape: “If this world should all come crashing down I wouldn’t care at all . . .”

Julie felt pangs of nostalgia for the cast and for the show. And a righteous feeling of ownership awoke in her. The next morning she called Jules. She was coming home. Jules texted the news to Michael that Julie would be attending. Michael Cohl texted her back. NO, SHE WON’T BE ATTENDING. The arbitration claim had snuffed any lingering impulse in Michael to accept Julie’s presence at the opening. Jules texted back, imploring him to change his mind. Michael was unswayed. In his mind, Julie had been booing and hissing from the sidelines for three months while he sunk yet more millions into the show. Any desire to see an amicable reunion was overruled by his business brain—why risk it? He implied to Jules that any attempt by Julie to go to the show would be met with legal action.

But Julie had already landed in New York. And on the morning of the fourteenth, a hair and makeup person was at Julie’s apartment helping her get ready. A car service had been hired. There weren’t any tickets reserved for Julie at the theatre, but Jules had tickets on hold. Julie had figured she’d simply use her assistant’s tickets. However, when Jules arrived at the theatre, she discovered that Michael had anticipated that move and had those tickets pulled.

It was two p.m. The creative team and assorted celebrities would be on the red carpet on Forty-third Street in just a few hours. And Julie Taymor, the sole director of Turn Off the Dark for over three thousand days, now had no way of getting in the door to watch it.

I showed up early. A Turn Off the Dark open-roofed tour bus was parked across the street from the red carpet. The sun was out, with a nuzzling breeze. Camera crews had arrived and masses of equipment were being set up. The opening night party after the show was going to be held at the bowling alley around the corner. (After months of losing reservation deposits at ritzier establishments thanks to postponed openings, the general managers finally said, “Screw this. We’re having the party at the Bowlmor.”)

Bags with various opening night gifts were lined up downstairs in the Geeks’ old dressing rooms. One of the gifts was a light switch plate, with a little rectangular hole for your light switch. Above the hole: TURN OFF THE DARK, and below it, TURN ON THE DARK. And at the bottom of the plate: OPENING NIGHT DECEMBER 21, with a bit of corrective tape on top of it, reading JANUARY 11, with a bit of corrective tape on top of that reading FEBRUARY 7, and then another piece of tape with MARCH 15, and one more piece of tape with JUNE 14.

I stared at the thing. Whoever came up with this gift was a genius. This show clocked in with 183 previews, and starting that night it would never have another one. I was only just beginning to fathom this when I bumped into Phil McKinley near the VIP room. He had just heard from Michael Cohl, who had just heard from the show’s publicist: Julie had found a ticket. She was coming.

“Where did she get the ticket?!” That question banged in the back of Michael’s brain for much of the evening. It turned out it came from Teese—Julie’s loyal, displaced music supervisor. Later that night, I would hear that Teese’s active involvement with the show had come to an end.

At the Foxwoods, the cast was excited, the press agents were fearful, the producers were angry. The word was that “Julie has promised the publicist she will behave.” But she had never seen this version of the show. The press would be scrutinizing her every move. Would she seriously be able to watch the show without leaving halfway through in disgust? Would she be able to not whisper disparaging things about the show to her companions as she watched how her scenes had been mutilated? Could she truly refrain from muttering under her breath? Sighing with contempt? Even once? I just didn’t think she could do it. And I thought that because I was fairly certain I wouldn’t be able to do it. Or waitaminute . . .

Alcohol.

I dashed into the empty VIP room and got to work. Between drinks, I opened up my brand-new CD of Music from Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. It turned out there was a man who wouldn’t be mentioned at any time onstage that evening, but Bono and Edge had remembered to put him prominently in the liner notes to the cast album: “To the memory of Tony Adams.”

I wandered upstairs, rendezvoused with Roberto, and waited for our turn on the red carpet. Lou Reed was in the stairwell checking his phone. My wife, my parents, my in-laws—they were there somewhere. Danny Ezralow was there somewhere. Julie was there somewhere. I had pictured this night for so long, but I hadn’t pictured me floating through it, trying not to meet anyone’s gaze, trying hard to avoid the inevitable awkward “Congratulations.” Half the people in the lobby that night thought I got ignominiously replaced when Julie got the boot. Just the day before, Playbill stated that, “Bono and Edge are the only members of the original creative team still involved.” Then again, what if they thought I was still involved? There were still things on that stage I’d readily disown. Conflicted, that’s what I was. Baffled. Alone. Hey—there’s Rob Bissinger. He’ll be a good one for some commiseration.

I headed toward him, but he thought I actually wanted to talk to the woman standing next to him, so he drifted away and I was suddenly face-to-face with her.

Julie.

If only there was something I could say that would fix it all. Of course there wasn’t.

It was very loud in that lobby, so she had to get close to my ear for me to hear her. She said she had gotten my phone message. It was one of the things that persuaded her to come. She reminded me that I promised in my phone message that the new show was possibly watchable . . .“if you’re drunk.” A shared smile, in lieu of reconciling, in lieu of arguing, in lieu of . . . more awkwardness. A friend of Julie’s congratulated her, and I wandered away. And she and I never said a word to each other again.

Over thirty minutes after the show was supposed to begin, the ushers began corralling the happily gabbing crowd toward their seats. Eventually the lights dimmed, the overture dug in, and I watched the damn show one more time. And after all the bows by everyone at the end of the performance—the designers, the crew, the co-bookwriters, the composers—Phil got the microphone and said, “There’s one person without whom none of us would be here. Julie Taymor.”

Julie bounded onto the stage from the audience. She kissed Edge and Bono. She gave T. V. an emotional embrace. She even hugged Michael Cohl. She then sneaked back to the second row of company members onstage, not wanting to steal the spotlight. But Phil beckoned her back. And for a moment, it was there. You could see it. A glimpse of what we had all been beating our drums about for years. The briefest moment where you could actually see what a world would look like if we all would “rise above.”

Which, incidentally, was the gift Michael Cohl gave me the next day. A tiny solid-silver disc on a chain, which had inscribed on one side: RISE ABOVE. And inscribed on the other, for some reason: INFINITE.

Infinite. It wasn’t more than a week later that I would get a glimpse at what “infinite” could mean. I received an e-mail from Edge: “Glen, how is it going? Have you had a break from Spidey? When can we start to do more tweaks? I feel there is another 10–15% to go.”

O Arachne—patron demi-goddess of this endeavor! of every endeavor born of the unquenchable urge to make manifest the divine stirrings within us! Be merciful and let me out of here.

I swear I’ve learned my lesson!

•     •     •

If you want to live and thrive, let the spider run alive.

As the reviews started coming in, we were hoping the critics would adhere to that old proverb. So were the reviews good? Bad? Well, true to form, every critic put forth an opinion so unequivocal, so unassailable, that they all must be right. So the show must be “a Spectacular for the ages” with “the best Act Two on Broadway,” while also finding a way to be “an imbecilic entertainment for nap-loving preschoolers.” It’s “a fun family show” that was “definitely” worth the wait, and also “a bloated monster with bad music.” The show had somehow managed to be “just a bore,” while at the same time “never boring.”

Scott Brown—the New York magazine reviewer who found a perverse appreciation for 1.0—saved no love for 2.0:

Awash in a garbage-gyre of expository dialogue pumped in by script doctor/comic-book vet Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, its lavish stage pictures turned to colloidal mush . . . [the show] wouldn’t look out of place amid a backdrop of roller coasters and toddler vomit.

That “theme-park” theme showed up frequently in the reviews. Many of the critics sounded a similar note to Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post, who wrote that the show was “ready to join Madame Tussauds and Shake Shack on a tourist’s Times Square itinerary.”

And what about good old Ben Brantley at the Times?

Until last weekend, I would have recommended Spider-Man only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved Spider-Man.

Good enough! We’ll take it!

Epilogue

The day after opening, the show rang up $400,000 in sales. That was triple the daily box office before June 14. However, as Michael Riedel reported, the amount was “not good enough,” and he went on to predict that the show would do fine business in the summer before seeing steep losses in the fall and be gone by the end of the year. “The producers of King Kong, another multimillion-dollar spectacle, already have their eye on the Foxwoods Theatre.”

So Riedel thought the show would be gone by the end of 2011. Instead, in that last week of 2011, it shattered the record for the highest single-week gross of any show in Broadway history, taking in over $2,900,000. In November 2013, three years after its first preview, it was still running. The curtain had gone up on over a thousand performances of the show Riedel once predicted in print would be closed by its sixtieth preview. Turn Off the Dark reached the one-millionth-audience-member mark faster than any show in Broadway history. The weekly running costs being so high, the show wasn’t necessarily turning much of a profit. However, with every additional month that the show survives on Broadway, the show’s pedigree gets burnished a little bit more which, hypothetically, will help lure investors and generate publicity for touring productions. Though, as of late 2013, that future remained exceedingly hypothetical.

The predictions by stage management back in December 2010 that there would be at least two stops every week haven’t borne out, as the crew and stage managers have gained an ever-deeper understanding of how to keep this beast running smoothly. More often than not, at the bottom of the daily stage report, one word has been written, and it is the one you’re hoping will be there: UNEVENTFUL. Every night that you see that word, it’s a night without tangled cables, or power board failures, or actors falling into pits. It was all everyone in the company had yearned for: for all the drama to be replaced by routine: a job that every day is uneventful, uneventful, uneventful.

Jenn Damiano’s last performance was a little less than a year after the first preview. T. V. Carpio left the show the week after that. Patrick Page—who earned glowing words for his performance (even in otherwise merciless reviews)—happily continued his green, prosthetic lifestyle until the Tony nominations were announced in May 2012. Many insiders considered him a shoo-in for a best supporting actor nod. There was a time—before rehearsals began—that Julie predicted Turn Off the Dark would net at least eight Tony nominations. Mortifyingly, the show only netted two nominations—one for sets, and one for costumes. Patrick Page turned in his notice soon after. And Spider-Man got blanked at the Tonys. Even George Tsypin—with all of those eye-popping, wonder-inducing, budget-straining designs—would end up losing to, of all things, Once, with a set design consisting of a single humble interior of an Irish pub. Eiko Ishioka never even learned she was nominated for her costumes. She died of pancreatic cancer four months before the nominations were announced.

Alternate Spider-Man Matthew James Thomas had thought he’d take over the role full-time once Reeve Carney turned his attention back to his band. But Reeve—who Julie predicted would bolt from the show before 2.0 even went into rehearsals—was still Peter Parker in summer 2013, and Matthew turned in his notice to go and play the lead in the Broadway revival of Pippin.

After Spider-Man opened, Phil McKinley headed to Italy to direct a Coliseum-sized remount of his Ben Hur circus show. Julie finally returned to the stage in fall 2013 to direct Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—the inaugural production in Theatre for a New Audience’s new Brooklyn theatre. Julie had considered directing Macbeth, but decided against it. “I know a lot about treason,” she explained in a Newsweek interview, “but I’m not going to do it.”

Even while Spider-Man was still in its final previews, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa was beginning to turn his attention to new projects—a bound-for-Broadway musical and a writer-producer gig on Glee. The headline for a Business Insider profile of Roberto that came out during previews: “Meet The One Guy Who’s Making Money On The Spider-Man Musical Disaster.”

Spider-Man was never about the money for me. Or rather, it was never solely about the money. Or rather, I lost whole days daydreaming about Spider-Man money. But the truth is, due to contractual whatnots set in stone long ago, Neil Jordan—Neil Jordan!—has made almost as much as I have. I mean, yes, I did return from the whaling ship with a whale. But it was an orca. Or maybe an adolescent minke. And Roberto? Has he made more than me on this stupid show? I’ll never know because I can’t bear to ask him. Though Roberto did ask me what I was making, and I gave him a full accounting. What did I care? I figured being so open would prompt him to respond in kind. I was wrong. This indicated to me he was too embarrassed to admit that he was, in fact, making as much as me. Or maybe more than me. Or maybe less. Damn it, he should have just told me, because there are days I can feel myself turning into Gollum from Lord of the Rings. As if this entire epic-length experience was, in the end, just about money.

Julie hadn’t received any bookwriting royalties since March 2011. Consequently, that fall, she sued the producers. I decided I would volunteer any assistance Julie might require in order to resolve this dispute in her favor. I was eager to show her I was on her side. That is, until I read on some blog a couple of days later that in addition to Michael, Jere, and David Garfinkle, the fourth defendant named in Julie’s suit was me. The first thing my new lawyer said to me on the phone: “Mazel tov! Now you’re a man!”

Of course, suing me wasn’t about the money. The amount she was seeking from me was the equivalent to what she made in royalties every four or five days from The Lion King. No—she sued me because the deepest yearning in an artist is the desire to communicate. And revenge is communication. Only instead of thoughts, or a spectrum of emotions, you’re conveying pain. You’re communicating your pain to the people you believe caused you this pain so that they can understand it in their bones. And rather than with words, or paint, or music, the medium of revenge is violence—the infliction of a physical or psychic wound.

They don’t allow phones or laptops in court, so I had a lot of time to ruminate as I sat in a Manhattan courtroom in March 2013 and looked at the back of Julie’s head as she engaged in gay banter with her lawyers. Back in 2004, at the end of a years-long series of conversations Bono participated in with his friend Michka Assayas, Michka’s very last question for him was “What leaves you speechless?” After pausing for quite some time, Bono answered: “Forgiveness.”

Forgiveness was how Prospera finally was able to leave her island. And forgiveness was how, in Turn Off the Dark 1.0, Peter Parker freed the long-suffering Arachne, and allowed her to ascend into the stars. And it’s what will release all the players from this drama once and for all. That, and a couple of court settlements.

In February 2012, the producers announced they had reached a settlement with the SDC, agreeing to pay Julie Taymor “full royalties for her director services,” which translated to $9,750 a week for the remainder of the Broadway run. Her suit for bookwriting royalties was still very much in play. But finally, after countersuits and a raft of postponements, on—yes—April Fool’s Day, 2013, my lawyer informed me that the settlement had been finalized. It was over.

There was a time—a year after the show opened—when you could go on to the Turn Off the Dark website and not find Julie’s name anywhere. Her history with the show had been erased in the best Stalinist style. There was only a picture of Phil, labeled DIRECTOR. But with the settlement in place, the program now and forever shall read: “Direction by Julie Taymor, Additional Direction by Phil McKinley.”

Bono had a new credit too: Aptostichus bonoi. In late 2012, a newly discovered species of tarantula-style arachnid was found at the Joshua Tree National Park. U2’s The Joshua Tree inspired the entomologist to name the new species after U2’s lead singer. Julie’s story for Turn Off the Dark ended with a spider becoming a human. And now I shall end my story with Bono becoming a spider.

Stories. This was a story about storytelling, and I’ve told it with a sincere effort to stay faithful to the facts. However, I am the Russian hairdresser, so all bets are off.

There’s a three-panel comic strip, which in three panels says everything I’ve ever wanted to express as an artist, and this comic-strip artist did it with a narrative and stylistic economy I could never hope to match. The title of the strip is 40,000 Years Between Panels. The first panel depicts, in a simple pen drawing, a desolate landscape. In the second panel, two wide-eyed, middle-aged, crudely drawn men are standing in a living room. One asks the other, “But why did you bring an extra pair of pants?” In the third panel, we see . . . a desolate landscape.

For this brief moment, we’re here, humans, flawed and earnest. Flawed, yes. But what if this ultimately wasn’t a tale of hubris? What if this wasn’t a story of egos run amok, or money-managing ineptitude, or blind ambition or blinkered artistry? What if this story, in the end, was about the earnest effort to heave a vision into reality. The story of starry-eyed, hard-nosed, thin-skinned, charming, flawed but undeniably earnest people enduring any amount of rigmarole—forging and destroying friendships—and all for the sake of—what?—Art? For money too, sure, but what were we all trying to make money off of? Art. What other animal does this? What kind of species is this?

A month after landing this job in 2005, I saw a U2 concert. A month after Spider-Man ran out of money in 2009, I saw another U2 concert. And a month after the show opened in 2011, I saw a third U2 concert. And over all that time, watching those four lads together onstage—as they’ve been together on stages for more than thirty years—it was clear the foursome’s spiritual ambitions hadn’t dimmed a lumen. Their earnestness could make you cry. Bono reaches out a hand and reminds you that the same hand that can flip the bird can also reach out in yearning toward the Infinite. Toward Love.

And that is the ideograph, the essence, the single image for Julie’s Turn Off the Dark. The gesture Chris Tierney made at the edge of the bridge. The web-shooter that didn’t work, and then the frozen leap. The gesture of a powerless superhero leaping for love and toward death with nothing to catch his fall. A boy falling from the sky.

Edge and Bono took the title of that song from a line in a poem by Auden (“Musée des Beaux Arts”). Which, in turn, was inspired by a seventeenth-century painting by Bruegel: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The painting is one of those typical merchant-ships-in-a-Dutch-bay-on-a-sunny-day paintings. In the foreground, a man plows his field. A little farther off, a shepherd tends his flock. And, barely noticeable at first glance, there in the bay—a splash, and a pair of upturned legs. Auden mused how the Old Masters were never wrong about suffering. How, after a disaster, life for the living always resumes, as it will. How the ship that witnessed “a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

All that mad hubbub Spider-Man generated has already subsided and will soon be forgotten. Like a magician’s flash paper, those delirious, baffling, inexcusably operatic days were a blinding but momentary blaze, and as my eyes readjust, I see Danny Ezralow and me in a Ninth Avenue Thai joint back in 2010 after a full day of auditions. Danny picked up the tab, but before he did, he broke out his video camera.

“Okay, Glen—let’s get it down on film.”

“Get what?”

“What do we want this show to be? What are we aspiring to?”

“Really?”

“We’ll watch it later on—when we’re in rehearsal—so we can stay on track.”

“Well, okay look . . . what’s the most important thing?”

There are shows that turn a theatre into a dark and suffocating coffin. And there are others that turn you on and resuscitate your soul. Life. That’s the most important thing.

We wanted to remind people that they’re alive. Now. Here.

“Danny, this project—it’s a huge chance we’ve been given.”

“I know.”

Danny’s eyes met mine. We were both as naïve and naked as any inhabitant of Eden. As any artist. As any human.

“So—”

“So . . .” Danny laughed. “Let’s not screw it up.”

We never did re-watch that video.

’Nuff said.

Acknowledgments

This book was once twelve thousand pages. Practically. If you had read the first draft at an average clip, you’d have experienced the eight-year gestation of Turn Off the Dark in real time. Nicholas Greene—discerning, compassionate, incisive editor Nicholas Greene—showed me how to cut this mother down, and always with humor, graciousness, and patience. I owe him an enormous debt. Jonathan Karp, on the strength of a scanty and scattered pitch, mustered up enough faith to offer me a chance to turn my pitch into a Simon & Schuster book. And then he kept that faith, even after I made a cruel mockery of his original deadline. For his wise and unwavering mentorship, this first-time book writer is deeply grateful. My book agent, Joe Veltre, and longtime agent, Joyce Ketay, are owed many thanks for their guidance and gentle prodding, as well as Jonathan Evans, the book’s production editor. For slogging through early drafts and still managing to find the energy to be encouraging and insightful, I want to thank Alex Aron, Jeanne and Myron Berger, Roy and Shannon Almquist, Ingrid Almquist, and Jules Cazedessus, who was also an inspiration for this book in uncountable ways. There are also those who assisted me simply by giving me the space to write this story without interference. No small sacrifice, it required serious acts of kindness and trust. Edge, Bono, Michael Cohl, and Jere Harris top this list, and they have my gratitude. Special thanks also go to Erin Oestreich and Rob Bissinger for being such reflective and obliging resources. Solomon, Sylvie, and Theodore Bergquist were my muses, though they endured more deprivations than any other thanks to all the hours I spent writing this ridiculous tale. The Mountain Laurel Waldorf School and its community of parents and students were a deeper source of strength than they could possibly know. And then there’s a list—pages long—of everyone who has donated a portion of their limited mortal life to making Turn Off the Dark a reality. The stage crew, all the performers, and the stage managers, the Tech staff, the people whose official job titles I never learned even though they are ten times more vital to the smooth running of the show than I ever was, the people who assist with the costume changes, and those who apply the make up, and mend the costumes, and design the web ads, and—well the list is truly pages long, and I reverently thank them all.

And then there’s Karin Almquist, who isn’t crazy about hyperbole or public confessions of love, but I’m here on bended knee in front of her, with a bouquet of a thousand flowers, in a stadium full of a million people, with skywriters writing “I Love You” and “Thank You” over and over again. Because I’d be singing early bongelese versions of the Spider-Man songs while drooling and wearing a straightjacket if it weren’t for her. I’ll never be able to pay her back, unless she leaves me alone for nine months with our three children and a dying dog (I hope she doesn’t), but it’s always an option.

Lastly: Just as this book was going to print, I received a call from Julie Taymor. I didn’t answer it. I figured she had simply sat on her phone. After all, she hadn’t called me for more than two and a half years, though I never erased her phone number because . . . well, just in case. And then my phone chimed. Because Julie had left a message. Hearing that voice again, inflected with warmth and familiarity . . . boy, that staggered me. What followed over the next two days was a handful of e-mails and three hours of conversation. The conversations weren’t just civil, they were genial—strange and psychedelic for being so almost-normal. Which is all to say, I wrote in my book that she and I never talked again. That’s now incorrect. Though her call came too late in the production process for me to incorporate additional changes, I hope she’ll see that I endeavored to make this at least an honest account, though my memory and my word count were limited, and she of course had her own perspective on the experience. With all my heart I wish her peace; I wish her a life of love and creation. Like no one else, she leaves me with nothing to do but to humbly repeat Dag Hammarskjöld’s morning prayer: “For everything that has been—thank you. For all that will be—Yes.”

About the Author

© DON HAMERMAN

Glen Berger cut his teeth at Seattle’s Annex Theatre back in the ’90s. His plays since then include Underneath the Lintel, which has been staged more than two hundred times worldwide, been translated into eight languages, and won several Best Play awards; and O Lovely Glowworm, a 2005 Portland Drammy Award winner for Best Script. He is a New Dramatists alumnus.

In television, Glen has won two Emmys (out of twelve nominations) and has written more than 150 episodes for children’s television series including Arthur (PBS), Peep (Discovery/The Learning Channel), Big and Small (BBC), and Fetch (PBS), for which he was the head writer for all five years of its run.

Glen spent six years cowriting the script of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

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Index

Abbott, George, 116

Across the Universe, 25, 44–45

alumni of, 54–55, 71, 203

Beatles songs in, 44, 45, 63, 116

casting of, 95

choreography of, 71

critical reviews of, 44, 63, 64

final cut of, 277

marketing of, 63, 262

message of, 65

Actors’ Equity Association, 45–46, 54, 301

Adams, Tony, 9–12, 23, 29, 42, 113, 120, 195

charm of, 9, 12, 108

death of, 26, 264

and Hello Entertainment, 10–11, 12, 102, 117, 295

memorials for, 26, 66, 340

pressures on, 25–26

and U2, 21, 22

Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, 326, 327, 347–48

and the author, 258, 284–87, 314, 323

and Cohl, 248, 255, 258, 261, 286–87

and credits, 330–31

and Phil, 292–93, 294–95, 297, 315, 322

and rewrites, 248, 258, 260, 292–93, 295, 297–300, 302–4, 314, 321–22, 343

suggestions for changes from, 328–29, 336

Alex da Kid, 281

Allen, Woody, 228

Amazing Fantasy #15, 5

American Idol, 98–99, 335

Andrews, Julie, 9, 66

Aptostichus bonoi (arachnid), 349

Arachne (myth), 13, 72–74, 129, 140, 144, 184, 259, 329

casting of, 98–99, 191–92, 194, 196, 206, 295

character of, 15, 27, 31, 40, 45–46, 79, 81, 160, 178, 190, 199, 280, 316, 328

in final scene, 56, 226–27, 229, 349

music for, 30, 38, 50, 72, 98, 122, 132, 160–61, 234, 299, 316, 328

Spider-Man battle with, 84, 157, 195, 248, 289

Arad, Avik, 25, 27, 144

Archimedes, 84

Aronson, Boris, 107

Ashley, Chris, 282–83

Assayas, Michka, 348

Aubin, Kevin, 154, 158, 163, 166

Auden, W. H., 351

Aung San Suu Kyi, 113–14

Avery, Gerald, 148

Bailey, Adrian, 170–71

Batten, Keith, 319

Beatles, 44, 45, 63, 116

Beck, Glenn, 241, 243

Beck, Matt, 161

Belafonte, Harry, 174

Berger, Glen:

and arbitration meeting, 271–76

audition for writer’s job, 17–19

called a double agent, 262–63

and chain of command, 291–94

and credits, 330–31

and critics, 171, 193–94, 249, 251–53

and dog’s death, 173, 176

family of, 173, 199, 248, 275, 290, 292–93, 335–36, 350

and finances, 43, 101–4, 122, 126–27, 151–52, 173, 226, 244, 347–48

and lawsuits, 134, 348

and opening night, 340–42

other work for, 254–55

and Plans A-C, 212–16, 219–22, 224

and Plan X, 229, 231–38, 239–43, 248, 255–56, 258–59, 260–61, 266–69, 272–73, 275–76

and publicity, 139–40

and Taymor, see Taymor, Julie

and writing collaboration, 258, 284–87, 292–93

writing the book, 31–34

Bing, Steve, 109

Bird, Andrew, 307

Bissinger, Rob, 85, 108, 238, 254, 258, 261, 341

as associate designer, 61

and new direction, 264, 277–78, 308, 313

question about Act Two, 125–26, 128, 226

and tech issues, 61, 120, 121, 153, 233–34, 255, 307

Blau, Herbert, 24

Bogaev, Paul, 257–58, 264, 312

Bono, 12, 21, 25, 76

and AIDS relief, 40

and Aptostichus bonoi, 349

“bongelese” of, 30, 52, 94, 122

contract of, 26

and financing, 109, 111, 113, 115

and forgiveness, 348–49

meetings with, 34–43, 218, 221, 234–36, 265, 271–76, 301–4

and Plans A-C/X, 212–13, 215, 218, 228, 234–38, 242–43, 272, 275, 276

and previews, 221–22, 274

and publicity, 90, 91, 92–93, 134–37, 139, 167, 168, 173–75, 333

and rehearsals, 174–76

and rewrites, 303–4, 314, 317, 319, 321–22, 323, 336

and schedules, 42, 47, 176

and Spider-Man music, 29–30, 35–42, 49–51, 52–55, 64–65, 88, 92–94, 99, 122, 159, 161–62, 222, 224, 281, 299, 301–2, 312, 335, 336–37, 340, 351

and U2, see U2

The Book of Mormon, 338

Boorman, John, 12

Bowie, David, 55

Brantley, Ben, 1, 118, 162, 247, 252–53, 343

Brickman, Marshall, 10

Brock, Chase, 308–10, 327, 329, 336

Brooks, Mel, 76

Brown, Jeb, 283

Brown, Scott, 251, 253, 343

Bulgarian Women’s Choir, 38, 99, 132

Button Man, 257–58

Campbell, David, 93, 129, 142, 159, 160, 258

Carney, Art, 90

Carney, Reeve, 206, 330

and chemistry, 171–72, 311

and choreography, 130, 133

and Julie, 89, 266–67, 274

as Parker/Spider-Man, 1, 89–90, 100, 117, 130, 329, 347

and publicity, 91, 134, 278, 335, 336

and schedules, 266–67, 274

singing, 91, 123–24, 133, 134–35, 152, 200, 278, 335, 338

and tech issues, 1, 152–53, 181, 184, 195–96

in The Tempest, 89, 100

Carousel, 39

Carpio, T. V., 258, 278, 346

as Arachne, 194, 206, 295, 316

and casting, 54, 89, 97

and Julie, 266–67, 274, 306, 316

and new directions, 306, 312, 316

and tech issues, 149

Chandler, David, 54

Chastain, Denise, 187

Cherice (assistant choreographer), 148

Cirque du Soleil, 68, 83, 159, 168, 253

Clark, Dwayne, 168–69

Clayton, Adam, 51

A Clockwork Orange, 171

Cobain, Kurt, 49

Cohl, Jacob, 129, 155, 301

Cohl, Michael, 114–16, 135, 172, 176–77, 193

and arbitration meeting, 271–76

and critics, 224–25

and finances, 111, 117–18, 119, 121

and Julie, 114, 137, 150–51, 257, 260, 337, 338–40

and litigation, 304, 337, 338, 348

and opening night, 197–98, 337, 338–40, 342

and Phil, 261, 295, 313, 317–18, 319, 323

and Plans A-C/X, 218–22, 232–34, 240, 245, 248, 253, 255, 258–59, 264, 265, 269, 274, 275, 276, 291, 300

and previews, 182, 183–84, 188, 195–96, 329–30

and rehearsals, 129, 156–57, 168, 174–75, 206

and rewrites, 248, 260, 261, 262, 286–87, 317, 319, 322–24, 326

and schedules, 197–98, 243–44, 247, 264, 278, 313, 317–18

collaboration, 6, 11, 36, 85–86, 176, 218, 254–55

cross-collateralization, 115–16, 303

musical alchemy, 161–62

and rewrites, 293, 312

in U2, 50–51, 254, 350

Collins, Phil, 258

comic books:

illusion expressed in, 24, 349–50

sex and violence in, 58–59

communication, 11, 45, 348

confidence, excessive, 307–8, 309, 350

Cooper, Alice, 98

Costello, Elvis, 302

Cox, Gordon, 37

Crosby, Bing, 167

Cumming, Alan, 89, 98, 101, 107, 110, 119–20

Curry, Michael, 69, 81–82, 169, 178

Dafoe, William, 31

Damiano, Jenn, 130, 330, 346

and chemistry, 171–72, 311

as Mary Jane, 123, 143, 311

and new direction, 311

and publicity, 278, 336, 338

and tech details, 143, 181, 201

Daniels, Chris, 70

Deans, Jonathan, 162, 168, 254, 258

Devine, Matt, 97, 149, 172

Disney Company, 107, 111, 139, 248, 255, 277, 323

Ditko, Steve, 5, 6

Dolgoff, Gene, 80

DreamWorks, 107

Dunst, Kirsten, 48

The Edge, 12, 21, 26, 76

meetings with, see Bono

and Plans A-C/X, 218, 234–38, 240, 260–61, 263–65, 267, 272, 276

and publicity, 90, 91, 92, 113, 134–35, 139, 173–74

and rehearsals, 174–76

and rewrites, 303–4, 314, 317, 319, 321, 336

and Spider-Man music, 29–30, 35–42, 49–51, 52–55, 64–65, 88, 94, 99, 122–23, 159–62, 281, 301–2, 312, 335, 336–37, 340, 351

and U2, see U2

Edwards, Blake, 9, 66

Eileen the Unsung, 318, 329, 334

Elice, Rick, 10

Elliott, Erin, 310

Ende, Joop van den, 10

Ezralow, Danny, 101, 102, 111, 254, 264, 319, 340, 351–52

and aerial action, 71–72, 124

and choreography, 66, 100, 124–25, 130, 131, 132–33, 148, 306, 309, 325

in exile, 300–301, 306, 308–9, 310

and injuries/glitches, 196, 203

and morale, 131, 195, 225–26, 300–301

and rehearsals, 143–44, 167, 171

and spirituality, 127, 177–78, 203, 239, 241

Finke, Nikki, 44

Flying by Foy, 67–68

The Flying Dutchman, 71

Fool’s Fire, 50

Ford Center for the Performing Arts, 76

forgiveness, 348–49

42nd Street, 192

Foxwoods Theatre, 127, 131, 137, 209, 340

Frida, 265, 277

Friedman, Roger, 336

Gallo, Fred, 84–85

Garfinkle, David, 11–12, 29, 90, 95, 114, 129, 348

and finances, 37, 48, 78, 83, 103, 106–12, 119, 158

and Hello, 12, 27, 112, 117, 295

and Hilton Theatre, 76–77

and Marvel, 55, 58, 87–88, 110–11

and music, 39, 64, 88

and schedules, 42, 47, 220

and technology, 68

and U2, 21, 38, 113

Geffen, David, 109

Gelblum, Seth, 20, 63, 112, 239, 264, 265, 271

George, Jennifer, 217–18

Gohl, Teese, 56–57, 95, 123, 258

as music supervisor, 52, 142, 167, 340

Goldenthal, Elliot, 12, 50, 52

Goldsworthy, Andy, 320

Good Morning America, 134–35, 218

The Green Bird, 31, 71

Green Goblin (fict.):

casting of, 54, 97–98

character of, 15, 31–32, 155–56, 299, 315, 327, 336

and grand piano, 18–19, 157, 179

Spider-Man’s dogfight with, 66–68, 131–32, 156–57, 170, 185–86, 229, 240, 330

Grendel, 50, 61

Grigsby, Kimberly, 93, 99, 161–62, 184, 191, 312

Harris, Jere, 116–18, 129, 135, 197–98, 330, 348

and arbitration meeting, 271–76

and finances, 117–18, 119

and Phil, 262, 291–92, 295

and Plans A-C/X, 224, 227–28, 231–32, 242, 262–63

and previews, 188, 221

and PRG, 116–17

Harris, Neil Patrick, 338

Healy, Patrick, 166, 173–74, 208, 258, 275, 321, 336

Hello Entertainment, 51–52, 66, 106–7

and David, 12, 27, 112, 117, 295

as Goodbye Entertainment, 117

launch of, 10

and Tony, 10–11, 12, 102, 117, 295

Hilton Theatre, 76–77, 101, 105–7, 117, 127; see also Foxwoods Theatre

Hippodrome, 105

Holder, Don, 72, 142, 143, 274, 313

Hopkins, Anthony, 98

hubris, 307–8, 309, 350

Hylenski, Peter, 258

I Ching, 227, 229

ideograph, 24, 350

Iger, Bob, 255

Ishioka, Eiko, 70, 91, 142, 346

Jack (crew member), 227–29

Jackson, Michael, 146

Jacksons, 115

Jameson, J. Jonah (fict.), 31, 165, 178

Jefferson Airplane, 98

Jersey Boys, 10

John, Elton, 99, 257

Jordan, Neil, 12–13, 14–15, 21, 29, 122, 257, 347

Joshua Tree National Park, 349

Jules (friend), 17, 23, 334, 338–39

Julia, Raul, 216

Jung, Carl, 280

Kansas City Star, 334

Keating, Isabel, 150, 283

Ketay, Joyce, 244, 268–69, 287, 290–91

Khayat, Nadir, 175

King Kong, 345

Kushner, Tony, 17

Lancman, Rory, 205

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Bruegel), 351

Lauer, Matt, 325–26

Lee, Alice, 295, 319

Lee, Stan, 5, 6, 154, 155, 208, 294, 314

Lennon, John, 63, 174

Les Misérables, 29, 182, 188

Letterman, David, 278

Leveaux, David, 166

Liberace, 179

Lillywhite, Steve, 281, 302

The Lion King, 13, 50, 69, 97, 99, 118, 142, 348

cost of, 48, 107

illusions delivered in, 14, 23–24, 62, 139, 246, 277

opening of, 145

The Little Mermaid, 75, 170, 273–74

Live Nation Entertainment, 108, 127

Lloyd Webber, Andrew, 258

Loomis, Dodd, 206

The Magic Flute, 61, 197

Maguire, Tobey, 70

Maisel, David, 27, 58, 92, 110

Manson, Marilyn, 54, 89

Marks, Ken, 283, 306

Marks, Peter, 252

Marshall, Kathleen, 309

Martin, Mary, 68, 170

Marvel Comics, 5, 314; see also Spider-Man (comic books)

Marvel Entertainment:

and Disney, 111

meetings with, 55–59, 87, 255

public image as concern of, 27, 41, 58–59, 79, 88

and Spider-Man movies, 11, 47, 48

and Spider-Man musical, 12, 13, 25, 41, 92, 106, 107, 108, 110–12, 121, 248, 272, 274, 296, 313, 323

Marx Brothers, A Night at the Opera, 181

Mayer, Michael, 41

McCallum, Martin, 62, 111

and finances, 78, 84, 110, 114

as line producer, 29, 112

and Marvel, 58, 112

and schedules, 42, 76

and tech issues, 68, 74, 77

McGuinness, Paul, 11, 26

McKinley, Phil, 262, 334–35, 339, 347

and the circus, 263–64, 294–95, 301

as co-director/director, 261, 282–83, 330, 331

and Cohl, 261, 295, 313, 317–18, 319, 323

and Goblin’s Goddesses, 315

and morale, 301, 306, 316–17

and new direction, 263, 286, 291–300, 311, 311–18, 327, 329, 336

and publicity, 325–26, 333

and rewrites, 314, 321–24

Mendoza, Natalie:

as Arachne, 98–99, 194, 198

and injuries, 190–92, 196, 203, 205–6

and tech issues, 181, 185

Menzel, Idina, 170

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 347

Millan, Jim, 278, 282, 287

Mirren, Helen, 89

Miss Saigon, 29

Molina, Alfred, 31

MOMIX, 71

Mulheren, Michael, 206, 305

Mullen, Larry, 51

Murdoch, Rupert, 174–75

Nederlander Organization, 11

Nemesis (myth), 280

New Dramatists, 20

The New Yorker, 209

New York magazine, 251, 343

New York Post, 47–48, 82–83, 103, 162–63, 171, 337, 343

New York Times, 1, 247, 277, 333, 337, 343

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 239–40

Obama, Barack, 124

Ochs, Phil, 151

Olivo, America, 191–92, 194, 196

Once, 346

The Onion, 224–25

Orff, Carl, Carmina Burana, 143, 144

Osborn, Norman (fict.):

casting of, 97–98

character of, 14–15, 31–32, 307

music for, 64–65

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 13, 73, 319

Page, Patrick:

and auditions, 97–98

as Green Goblin, 1, 97, 155–56, 190, 327, 346

and morale, 206

and revisions, 240, 306, 312, 327–28

singing, 98, 185

and tech issues, 156, 196, 207, 247

and Tony Awards, 346

Paquin, Jaque, 68, 147–48, 158–59, 195, 208

Parker, Michael, 11–12

Parker, Peter (fict.), 70, 79

casting of, 54, 89–90, 95, 100, 117

character of, 5, 31, 48, 49, 53, 124, 132–33, 145, 165, 233, 296, 322

in final scene, 15, 56, 349

music for, 296

Pascal, Adam, 206

Pascal, Amy, 44, 92

Pelosi, Nancy, 40

Penderecki, Krzysztof, 315

Pepper’s ghost effect, 80

Perlmutter, Ike, 110–11, 255

Peter Pan, 68, 170, 289

Peterson, Mary, 70, 91

Polymoog synthesizer, 161

Portishead, 159

PRG (Production Resource Group), 116–17, 135

Purvis, Kat, 142, 192, 201, 236, 242, 312, 334

Quesada, Joe, 87–88, 248, 255

Raimi, Sam, 11

Reed, Lou, 340

Rent, 41

The Return of the Pink Panther, 9

Richards, Keith, 176

Riedel, Michael, 48, 82, 90, 103–4, 108, 109, 159, 162–63, 165–67, 171, 187, 189, 192–93, 205, 206, 219, 245, 261, 290, 327, 345

Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus, 263–64, 294

Ripley, Alice, 206

Rogers, Scott, 67–68, 195, 254

as aerial designer, 66

and aerial events, 66, 68, 131–32, 137, 147, 156, 170

and Chris Tierney, 155, 206

and injuries, 158, 206

and tech issues, 137–38

Rolling Stones, 116

Roth, Joe, 277

Rubendall, Brandon, 147, 148, 154, 163

Rumsfeld, Donald, 127

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 77

Sater, Steven, 41

Saturday Night Live, 253, 279

Schoo, Dallas, 52

Schwartz, Jonathan, 172

Sear Sound, 122

Seeger, Pete, 174

Sellers, Peter, 9

“Serenity Prayer” (Niebuhr), 239–40, 241, 259

Shakespeare, William, 83, 226, 263

Sheen, Charlie, 314–15

Sheik, Duncan, 41

Showbiz411.com, 336

Shrek the Musical, 75, 107

Siegel, Bugsy, 232

60 Minutes, 92, 174, 188

Socrates, 233

Sondheim, Stephen, 305

Sony Pictures:

and Across the Universe, 63

and Spider-Man movies, 47, 48

and Spider-Man musical, 92, 108

Sorkin, Aaron, 282

Spacey, Ken, 284

Spider-Man (comic books):

Big Idea of, 5

iconography of, 46–47, 63–64, 88, 165

musical based on, 31, 198–99, 207, 208

Spider-Man movies, 11, 31, 47, 48, 67, 70

Spider-Man the Musical, 6

“Arachne’s Theme,” 30, 72

author’s audition for, 17–19

big plans for, 29

“Black Widows on the Town,” 93

“Bouncing Off the Walls”/”Spun Around,” 35, 52–53, 70, 133, 184, 196, 281, 296

“Boy Falls From the Sky,” 30, 55, 87–88, 90, 92–93, 124–25, 134–35, 143, 201, 247, 351

“Bullying by Numbers,” 125, 296, 325–26

contracts for, 26, 101, 274, 290–91, 317, 347

“Deeply Furious,” 94, 122, 212, 219, 231, 233, 234, 241, 245, 247, 258, 278

“D.I.Y. World,” 148, 297

“A Freak Like Me,” 299–300, 301–4, 315, 327, 335, 336

Geek Chorus, 32–34, 35, 36, 46, 56, 73, 97, 133, 145, 149, 169, 184, 262, 295–96, 305, 319, 326, 328

“If the World Should End,” 42, 56, 311, 338

“Love Me or Kill Me,” 160, 162

music for, 29–30, 32, 49–51, 52–55, 64–65, 92–94, 122, 142, 159–62, 168, 293–94, 334, 335

new title for, see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

“Picture This”/”Sunny Days,” 94, 296

“Pull the Trigger,” 125

“Rise Above,” 30, 36, 38, 53–54, 91, 98, 133, 152–53, 184–85, 241, 281, 324, 335, 337, 342

schedules for, 29, 30

script for, 31, 37

“Spider-Man Rising,” 168–70, 265, 281

“Think Again,” 50, 56, 299, 316, 328

title song “Turn Off the Dark,” 40–41

treatment for, 25

“Ugly Pageant,” 212, 233, 327

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark:

aerial action for, 67–68, 71–72, 77, 106, 124–25, 148, 154–55, 166, 170, 182, 185–86, 195, 306

Big Jump in, 147–48, 154, 158, 185

boy in audience, 200, 211

and camp, 179

cast album, 281, 340

casting of, 45–46, 88–89, 95–101, 107, 117, 317

center-speaker cluster in, 324

Chicago tryouts, 74–76, 220

choreography, 66, 100, 124–25, 130, 131, 132–33, 148, 297, 300–301, 306, 309–11, 316–17, 325–26

closing temporarily, 318–20, 321–24, 328

confetti cannons in, 328–29, 330, 335

costs of, 47–48, 77–78, 82–83, 84, 106, 110–11, 117–20, 138, 248, 272, 345

costumes, 54, 169

ending of, 212, 226–27, 229, 231–32, 275, 290, 328–29

feasibility of, 65–74, 80, 110–11, 156, 269, 272, 334

focus group, 245, 246–47, 255

Goblin Box, 307–8

Goblin’s Goddesses, 314–15

and illusion, 23–24, 72, 81, 144, 209

injuries and glitches in, 1, 148–50, 158–59, 162–63, 170–71, 177–78, 186–87, 190–91, 195–96, 200–206, 208, 248, 265–66, 335

investors in, 37, 78, 92, 106–7, 113, 117, 158, 241, 281, 283–84, 346

Iris Wall, 145, 146, 329

longevity of, 345–46

and media, 75, 82–83, 120, 165–67, 171, 189, 198, 205, 206–7, 247, 251–53, 277, 334, 342–43

and morale, 131, 167, 194–95, 206, 225–26, 255, 258, 283, 300–301, 306, 310, 316–17

music for, see Spider-Man the Musical

new title of, 37

opening night, 3–4, 6–7, 88, 167, 197–98, 199, 243–44, 264, 283, 301, 333–34, 336, 337–43

Plans A-C, 170, 212–16, 218, 219–22, 224

Plan X, 229, 231–38, 239–43, 248, 255–56, 258–59, 260–61, 263–69, 272–73, 275–76, 298, 328

previews, 30, 76, 121, 128, 166, 177, 182–88, 189–90, 195–96, 220, 265, 283, 301, 304–6, 321, 328–31, 333, 335

program credits, 330–31

publicity for, 88, 89–93, 134–37, 139–40, 158, 167, 188, 189, 218–19, 241, 253, 278, 325–26, 334, 335, 336

rehearsals, 74, 128–34, 138, 178–83, 231, 301, 306, 309–13

rewriting, 76, 179, 233, 245, 247, 253–54, 258, 260, 264–65, 282, 283–87, 292–93, 295–306, 321–24, 334

and safety inspectors, 166, 170, 171, 182, 205

schedules for, 42, 74, 83–86, 88, 92, 101, 121, 128, 166, 167, 170, 173, 197–98, 214–15, 220, 243–44, 247, 317–18

script for, 76

sets for, 61–62, 77, 83–86, 117, 148–49

and Sinister Six, 79, 80–81, 168, 190, 229, 311

technology of, 66–71, 74, 75, 79–81, 84–85, 120, 121, 128, 131–32, 324–25

Tech rehearsals for, 141–50, 152–59, 168–72, 174–75, 177–78, 179, 180–81, 188, 255–57

ticket sales, 219, 241, 245, 262, 321, 335, 345

title song, 40–41

and Tony Awards, 274, 338, 346

Turn Off the Dark 2.0, 304–6, 311, 326–31, 333–43

web ring/net, 84–85, 131–32, 137–38, 180–81, 188, 195, 208–9, 235

Spring Awakening, 40–41, 123, 297

Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), 306, 337

Stahl, Leslie, 92–93, 174, 188

Star Trek Forever, 10–11

Stein, Billy Jay, 161

Stephanopoulos, George, 134–35, 218

Stoppard, Tom, 17, 172

storytelling, 6, 324, 349

Stroman, Susan, 309

Sturgess, Jim:

and casting, 54, 88–89, 95, 99, 130

and early read-through, 54, 55, 56

singing, 70

tarantism, 289–90, 297

Taymor, et al. v. 8 Legged Productions, LLC, et al., 134

Taymor, Julie:

and Arachne myth, 13, 40, 280

and arbitration meeting, 271–76

author’s excitement about working with, 4, 7, 19, 20, 23, 40, 43–44, 51, 110, 133–34, 151, 194, 213, 226, 244, 256–57, 259, 263, 267, 269, 271, 273, 276–77, 298, 331

awards to, 12, 222–23

brought on board, 13–14, 331

and budgets, 47–48, 63, 77, 108–9, 120

and casting, 95–100, 123, 196

and contract, 26, 290–91

and credits, 330

and critics, 44, 63, 76, 118–20, 166, 167, 174, 193, 197, 198

and feedback, 189–90, 219, 245, 246–47, 305

and illusion, 14, 23–24, 50, 72, 77, 139, 223–26, 227, 246, 277, 306, 312

and Indonesian dancers, 177, 223–24, 246, 294

and injuries, 201, 203, 204–7

lack of communication with, 22–25, 213–16, 220, 235–38

lawsuits of, 134, 304, 337, 338, 348–49

and Lion King, 13, 14, 24, 48, 62, 69, 99, 142, 145, 246, 277, 348

and Marvel, 55–59

and the music, 30, 41–42, 44–45, 49–50, 65, 87, 93–94, 159, 160, 161, 222

and opening night, 4, 197–98, 334, 336, 337–41

out the door, 207–9, 215, 241, 242–43, 256, 261–63, 279–80, 283, 305, 313, 333

persuasive powers of, 19–20, 24, 35, 65, 74

and Plans A-C/X, 212–16, 218–22, 234, 240, 258–59, 266–67, 279–80

and previews, 183, 187, 188, 189–90, 222, 265

and publicity, 90–92, 134–37, 139, 140, 173–74, 333

and rehearsals, 129–31, 138–39, 171–72, 196–97, 200, 241–43

and rewrites, 305–6, 313, 316–17, 319, 324–25

shopping with, 260

and show’s survival, 150

and Tech rehearsals, 142–47, 149, 154, 168–69, 177

at TED Conference, 273, 275–76

and temporary closing, 318–19

as tetrachromat, 146–47

and Theatre for a New Audience, 347

and U2 (Bono/Edge), 21, 175–76

working with, 20, 62–63, 73–74, 75, 78, 81–82, 136–37, 144–45, 208–9, 214, 216, 224, 234, 237–38, 245–46, 257, 265–69, 316

and writing the book, 31–34

Telsey, Bernie, 95, 96–98, 101

The Tempest:

cast members in, 89, 98, 100

critical reviews of, 197

premieres of, 136, 194

Taymor film adaptation of, 83, 226, 280, 287, 349

variations on, 286–87

Theatre for a New Audience, 347

Thomas, Matthew James, 99, 100, 130, 188, 306, 347

Tierney, Chris, 350

and accident, 200–206, 208, 267

and aerial effects, 155, 201–2

and choreography, 144

comeback of, 219, 237, 324

on Good Morning America, 218–19

Titus, 50, 98

The Today Show, 325–26

Tony Awards, 12, 107, 123, 142, 223, 261, 282

and Spider-Man, 274, 338, 346

Trussell, Robert, 334

trust, 11, 218, 220, 261

Tsypin, George, 254

and The Little Mermaid, 273–74

and revisions, 198, 199, 214, 238, 264, 313, 324

and sets, 61–62, 77, 83–85, 148–49, 324, 346

and tech issues, 81, 85, 208–9

Turner, Ted, 32

U2, 12, 34, 161, 337

albums of, 51, 88, 160, 175–76, 281

and collaboration, 50–51, 254, 350

concerts of, 21, 22, 112–14, 116, 129, 350

Ultimate Spider-Man, 13

Underneath the Lintel, 18, 193

Via Galactica, 216–18

Victor/Victoria, 9

Vincentelli, Elisabeth, 343

Wasser, Alan, 110, 111, 127

Watson, Mary Jane (fict.):

casting of, 54, 55, 123

in rehearsals, 143–44, 311

Wedekind, Frank, 41

Weinstein, Harvey, 265, 277

WGBH, 254

White, C. Randall:

and injuries/glitches, 148, 185, 201, 266

and previews, 185, 187, 200, 247

as stage manager, 142

and Tech rehearsals, 142, 143, 145–46, 150, 154, 167, 315

Winfrey, Oprah, 167–68

Wood, Evan Rachel, 54, 56, 88–89, 100, 107, 109–10, 119

Young Frankenstein, 76

YouTube, 135

Žižek, Slavoj, 128

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Copyright © 2013 by Glen Berger

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition November 2013

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ISBN 978-1-4516-8456-8

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