Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (18 page)

Wooden boards had been laid over entire rows of seats. At one of these makeshift tables, there was a glowing bank of computers and a black phone with a handset. This was where eight-time Tony Award–nominated lighting designer Don Holder and several assistants were ensconced. Most everyone else these days used headsets, but Don was old school. He’d have that anachronistic phone on his ear for most of the next ten weeks, looking dyspeptic, like one of those 1975 police detectives methodically calling his list of leads. Of all the people Julie considered geniuses, she asserted it the most to me about Don Holder. Don’s loyalty to Julie was genuine and deep: She believed in him enough to hire him for
The Lion King,
which he credited for transforming his career.

On the other end of Don’s phone was a lighting operator who was manning a computer somewhere high up in the theatre. Don’s phone also connected to the house-right balcony, where stage manager C. Randall White, sitting with a computer and headset, would be running the moment-to-moment execution of all the flying cues. Unlike other Broadway shows, this one was so complex that another head stage manager was required (Kat Purvis), to coordinate all the movement of the various set pieces.

A few rows down from Don Holder’s base camp, near the very center of the auditorium, there was a table for Teese Gohl to work on various music mixes and to confer with David Campbell over his musical arrangements. And costume designer Eiko Ishioka was taking notes next to him. Next to her were the assistant director,
the associate director, and Danny Ezralow—all poised with laptops and iPads. And at the center of this table, in the center of the auditorium, like the termite queen, was Julie. Resting on the table in front of her was “the God Mike”—a wireless microphone that enabled a voice to be amplified throughout the auditorium. Sometimes Danny got to use the God Mike. Otherwise, it was the exclusive property of Julie.

There wasn’t shouting in the auditorium, there wasn’t bustle—there were a lot of low-voiced consultations. The banks of computers; the headsets; the scattered paper filled with graphs and technical jargon; the palpable vibe of competent folk focused on the narrow bandwidth of stuff that only they knew how to do—it made the whole scene feel like Mission Control, Houston. It was the vibe of a team that knew—as with any NASA endeavor—that anything less than success
was a fireball.

Julie and Danny positioned the cast in what would be a tableau of black-trench-coated citizens. The cast began chanting, sounding quite deliberately like something out of Carl Orff ’s
Carmina Burana.
The floor lifted, revealing Jenn Damiano as Mary Jane “dangling” from a rope underneath the floor. As eyes adjusted, one noticed that the backdrop depicted one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, painted at a dramatic angle. And running toward her (and us), in slow motion, was Spider-Man, who appeared just as the heroic-sounding theme to “Boy Falls From the Sky” kicked in on the rehearsal piano.

“Hold, please.”

In addition to Julie with her God Mike, the other person with the authority to send his voice resounding through the auditorium was stage manager Randall White.

Something was wrong.

Julie had Don adjust the intensity of the lighting while Danny
honed the choreography of the actors onstage, but something very wrong was
not
being addressed. And it was simply this: Spider-Man. Running toward Mary Jane.

I suppose I had imagined close-ups, and quick cuts between Mary Jane and Spider-Man. Dramatic angles. In other words, movie editing. Danny Ezralow had Chris Tierney try a sliding motion of a sort to enhance the slow-motion running effect. Chris did it well. But he looked like a mime. A mime miming “A day at the Olympic speed-skating trials.” Could we not use a strobe? Or something? Was I the only one who thought he looked like a mime? Anyone else seeing a mime?

This was our opening. It was a minute long. The somewhat terrifying Orff-esque chanting—which sounded like an angry mob demanding blood—was either daring or pretentious. The rising floor was cool. The reveal of Mary Jane was visually and narratively satisfying. But then the spectacle of Spider-Man—not swinging, not leaping, but
running
(and not running, but performing a theatrical interpretation of “running”)—managed to pound the message deep and irrevocably into my consciousness for the first time: This show was never going to be
The Lion King
.

Our original treatment—the one Avi Arad at Marvel rejected back in 2005—opened with the myth of Arachne. With the loom and the weavers and the transformation of a girl into a spider, it would’ve delivered all the opening wow we needed. But Avi felt this choice put an undue spotlight on Arachne. “Why aren’t you presenting Spider-Man at the top?” Fine. We pitched a new treatment to Marvel in 2005 with an opening that contained a half-dozen spider-men battling a half-dozen villains all over the auditorium.
That
treatment was approved in 2006.

The thing is, Julie had nothing
specific
in mind for that “Spider-Man opening extravaganza.” And over the years, the vision for the
opening scene was pared down and down to what we were now teching. Dramaturgical logic dictated the choice. As the audience would eventually learn when they saw this scene repeated halfway through Act Two, Peter Parker didn’t have his powers anymore. So, logically, the actor couldn’t do any Spider-Man stuff at the top of the show. Run he must. Mime he must.

Narratively speaking, there was no arguing with that. But “pulling out the stops” was Julie’s strategy for the opening of
The Lion King,
and it’s one of the great coups de théâtre in the history of Broadway. People cry during the opening of
The Lion King
.

But that just wasn’t gonna happen here. Not this time. Next musical.

The heavy “Iris Wall” descended, because it was time to tech the loom. The wall was actually two large half-walls with a wedge cut out of each, enabling a diamond-shaped hole to be formed when the walls were spaced a certain distance apart. Behind the walls, while the Geek scene played, the loom swing was being installed and the “weavers” were being hooked up for their big swinging entrance. Julie had always imagined the first four weavers would immediately begin swinging out toward the audience as soon as the Iris Wall opened up. But now stage manager Randall was informing Julie that he couldn’t allow it. Julie was ready to argue the point until Randall explained that each weaver was being held in place by a cord. Should one of the cords accidentally release while the wall was still in place, that dancer would begin to swing helplessly toward the wall, ultimately slamming into it at a speed approaching fifty miles per hour. In other words, that dancer? Could
die
.

Okay. Can’t argue with that.

Making these sorts of determinations was one of Randall White’s key jobs on the show. The previous year, he was one of
the main stage managers overseeing
This Is It,
Michael Jackson’s mega-concert tour that got canceled when one morning, Michael Jackson never woke up. With close-cropped hair and little room in his day job for joking around, Randall seemed tightly wound. But fair enough—stage-managing was a big responsibility. Nobody wanted his job. We were told privately that on several occasions, Randall used the 10-minute breaks to head out to 43rd Street and scream out his frustrations, startled pigeons be damned. It was disconcerting to hear this. Randall had his shit together like no one I've ever met. He was experienced. If
he
was screaming to the heavens, maybe more of us should have been as well.

So the Iris Wall parted, and we watched the seven weavers, standing in their long swings made of silk, slowly being pulled backward amid fog, eerie lighting, and mysterious, intensifying music. It didn’t look so bad, really. However—“Hold, please”—there was an issue with the automatic cord release.
I was starting to get the feeling we were going to hear “Hold, please” a lot.

Issues with the loom delayed us. Then finding the right lighting for the Queens High School scene took time. “Don, remember what I said about ‘pink’—that’s getting too close to pink!” Julie hated pink. It also seemed as if she could discern gradations of red on the electromagnetic spectrum that no one else could. Humans are “trichromats,” meaning we have three types of cone cells in our eyes. However, it has been surmised that, because of the XX chromosome, some women may possess a
fourth
variant cone cell, situated between the standard red and green cones. This would make them—like birds—“tetrachromats.” These hypothetical tetrachromats would have the ability to distinguish between two colors a trichromat would call identical.

To date, only a few female candidates for tetrachromacy have been identified. I didn’t tell Julie my suspicions. And I’m not saying she
is
a tetrachromat. But it sure would explain several of
those extra hours in Tech, when Julie had hues finessed to a fare-thee-well. But then again, a writer will fuss over a single word, to the exasperation of a choreographer who will make endless refinements to a dance step, deliberating between differences an engineer can’t even perceive. In other words, an obsession over subtleties may just be an attribute of
expertise,
rather than evidence of being a mutant. Still, a scientist should check her out.

After four days, we were getting through forty-two seconds of the show for every hour of Tech.

•     •     •

Brandon Rubendall was one of the dancers. He also played The Lizard. But he excelled as one of the flying spider-men. In fact, he was the one who executed “The Big Jump,” perhaps the show’s signature moment. With Brandon kneeling, the whole back of the floor swiftly rose, elevating him until he was at the top of a twenty-foot-high ramp, raked at a forty-five-degree angle. The lights in the floor then snapped on, revealing the ramp to actually be a skyscraper as seen at a dramatic angle. With the aid of two cables pick-pointed to his hips, Brandon leaped forward, did a back gainer, and landed in a crouch at the very lip of the stage, just inches from the audience sitting in the front row. (The first time this move was performed for Julie, Scott Rogers sat her in one of these prime seats. Fearing Brandon was going to land on top of her, she shrieked like a little girl. It was hard not to.) Upon landing, Brandon stood up and waited for the ramp behind him to lower to a twenty-degree angle. The cables then whipped him upstage as he executed a backward somersault. Landing on all fours, he then began crawling as if he were scuttling down the side of a building.

In the three hours before Tech each day, Scott Rogers and Jaque
Paquin programmed and refined the flights in the show. And on the morning of September 26, they were practicing this newly programmed Big Jump with Brandon. The ramp rose. Brandon performed the back gainer. He stood, the ramp lowered, and the cables sent him hurtling upstage.
Except . . . the ramp hadn’t yet lowered all the way to its twenty-degree angle.
The timing of the cue was just a bit off. Perhaps the ramp was only five degrees off its target, but those five degrees were the difference between being deposited onto the ramp, and being slammed into the ramp.

The force of the landing broke Brandon’s toe, and caused some hairline fracturing in the rest of the foot. By the middle of Tech that day Brandon was cheerily hobbling about on crutches, outfitted in a massive cast already half-covered in Sharpie signatures and drawings of Spider-Man. He was going to be out for several weeks. Randall implemented new protocols, with the temptation no doubt rising again to let loose a primal scream from the sidewalk.

That same week, while Tech continued its glacial progress downstairs, Danny and assistant choreographer Cherice reworked the “D.I.Y. World” number with the dancers in the upstairs rehearsal room. Looking for new steps, Danny encouraged the dancers to improvise, and Gerald Avery—whose inventiveness had already inspired one of the number’s main moves—attempted a flip. He landed on his head. He was out cold. Gerald was taken away on a stretcher that night to a waiting ambulance, his neck immobilized by a brace just in case more undetected damage was done. There had been no culprit but the creative impulse. Nevertheless, “caution” was becoming the new watchword. Even those not dancing or flying were becoming aware that there were potential pitfalls to being an actor in this show.

Literally.

The pit didn’t make such an impression two years ago in George
Tsypin’s studio, when little paper figurines stood near the six-inch-deep pit. In real life, the fifteen-foot-deep pit was starting to freak us out. Designed as a platform on top of a large scissor lift, it took up the space the orchestra would have occupied. (The musicians were consigned to two rooms in the back of the basement.) So this sizable amount of square footage was simply part of the stage most of the time. But it was also a “pit lift” that could deliver large props from the basement below. A two-foot-wide “passerelle” had been constructed between the audience and the front of the pit, so that an actor could cross from one side of the stage to the other when the pit was down.

We had now begun to tech the short Geek interlude before the wrestling match. In order for the wrestling ring to be loaded onto the pit lift, the pit needed to remain down for almost two minutes while the Geeks pretended they weren’t delivering lines on the edge of a chasm. We watched T. V. Carpio and Mat Devine cross paths on the passerelle, and suddenly that two-foot width seemed lunatic. Place a foot wrong and you were falling fifteen feet onto unforgiving basement concrete. And this was how it was going to be
every night
? With adrenaline flowing during the heat of a performance, no one would ever stumble? With eight shows a week, we would have done a hundred shows before we were halfway into our first year. With even just a one percent chance of someone falling, it meant odds were there
would
be a fall by April. But maybe that was overstating the risk. How about a minuscule .1 percent chance? That still left us with an actor falling into the pit before the end of our third year.