Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (2 page)

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. . . .

T
here 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.”

I
n 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
co
writer. 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”).