Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (21 page)

“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.