Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (39 page)

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.)