Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (15 page)

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.

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

R
ob 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. . . .
”