Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (41 page)

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!

T
he 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.”