Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (25 page)

“OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.”

Someone in the room was shouting. Meanwhile, words were spilling out of Randall as if a plane were going down, and from Julie’s mouth a wail,
“NOOOOO!”

And I looked down to see Julie collapsed on the floor, and I looked up at the monitor and the bridge was empty, and the show seemed to have ground to a halt, and Kat Purvis was ashen as she rushed out of the office with the rest of the assistant stage managers.

Chris Tierney had just fallen off the bridge. A thirty
-
foot drop onto the concrete floor of the pit.

•     •     •

One of the guys on the crew—we’ll call him Sam. He had a three-step routine worked out for this point in the show. At a precise moment in the middle of “Boy Falls From the Sky,” Sam heads to the back of the stage, where Chris Tierney’s safety line sits coiled on the floor. It’s dark back there, so Step One for Sam is to fish around in his pocket and pull out a little flashlight that he can wear on his forehead like a headband. Once that’s done, Step Two is to take one of the ends of this safety cable and clip it to a ring embedded in the floor. By the time Sam accomplishes Step Two, Chris Tierney (who was dancing as one of the spider-men in the “Boy Falls” number) has shown up at the back of the stage. Sam clips the other end of the safety cable to the back of Chris’s harness. That’s Step Three. The floor rises, and Chris Tierney—in Spider-Man costume—runs in slow motion toward the front edge of the floor, which is now a good fifteen feet higher than it was a few seconds before. As at the top of the show, the Goblin Cut Out (the set piece blocking one of our sound designer’s speakers) “slices” the rope, sending Jenn Damiano “falling” into the
pit. Chris lunges forward, making to leap after her. The precisely measured safety cable—hooked to the floor on one end and to Chris’s harness on the other end—goes taut. Thus Chris is able to freeze in pre-leap, as if he’s an image in a comic-book panel.

So this was how things were supposed to go, and it was how they went in the twenty or so performances before now. What was different about tonight? When Sam went to the back of the stage, he fished around in his pocket for the little flashlight. And have you ever fished around in a pocket, unable to find the thing that you absolutely
know
is in your pocket? That happened to Sam this evening. So it took him just
that
much longer to pull the flashlight out and affix it to his head. That was Step One. By the time he bent down to pick up one end of the cable, Chris Tierney was there for him. And as was the routine, when Chris Tierney shows up, the end of the cable is clipped to the harness. That’s Step Three. All three steps completed, Sam’s job was done. The floor rose. And Chris began his slow run toward the front edge of the stage.

As soon as Chris went into his leap, he could feel the slack behind him and he knew what had happened. Or rather, what
hadn’t
happened—
Step Two
. He tried to grab the edge of the stage, but he had too much forward momentum. (“If you don’t go for it, it just doesn’t play,” he had said more than once.) He began plummeting, headfirst, with Jenn Damiano’s recorded scream (treated with reverb and a dash of distortion), accompanying his fall as if a live person were reacting in horror in real time to what was happening. And of course, the audience (including that unhappy boy who had just returned from the bathroom) was unsure if this was all just part of the show.

Chris had maybe a half-second in the air to react and, in that time, this professional dancer twisted his body as much as he
could because he knew if he landed on his head, he was a dead man. Natalie Mendoza was in the pit, having just gotten into the spider-legged twisty belt for the final scene. A body plunged right in front of her, with the untethered cable trailing behind him. A boy falling from the sky.

He landed on his back.

There were stage managers and those with emergency training racing to the scene; cast members in the backstage hallway standing stricken against the wall, fear on their faces, tears held back and tears not held back; Julie bolting past them, half-certain Chris wouldn’t survive this, if he wasn’t already dead. Had there been a vote earlier in the day for “favorite company member,” Chris could have taken first place. Julie had cast Chris once before—he played a rambunctious Princetonian in the “With a Little Help from My Friends” number in
Across the Universe
. Danny had introduced Julie to Chris after working with him several times in the past. Good, raucous times. Maybe it was in Italy that Danny had once seen Chris fall a dozen feet from a lamppost he had been climbing, only to see him immediately spring back up on his feet. Chris was a very cool cat, and he tended to treat his nine lives with a boyish indifference. Now Danny was watching EMTs slice through the fake muscles in the Spider-Man suit. And now, with grave caution, they were slipping a brace around Chris’s neck. And wouldn’t you know it. All this sickening business was going on within
the exact square feet of space
that was identified to Danny by that laughable Ritual Maven as containing the darkest energy in the entire building.

A curt announcement had already been made through the speakers in the auditorium—“That’s our show this evening, thank you for coming.” Two thousand people milled out of the theatre, confused and rattled. A hundred lingered outside the stage doors
on Forty-third Street. Within an hour, one audience member had uploaded video to YouTube, having captured the entirety of Chris’s fall on their phone. Were they recording the whole show? Did they just happen to turn on the camera a minute before the accident? Mystifying. At any rate, word was out, and the clip was being played over and over on the local news. By eleven a.m., camera crews from local and national news stations were beginning to stake out spots outside the theatre doors.

Inside, Chris was being wheeled to a waiting ambulance to rush him to Bellevue. Incredibly, he never lost consciousness. He had a fractured skull, a punctured lung, internal bleeding, four broken ribs, and three cracked vertebrae. But he was talking. And he could wiggle his toes. And thus, mixed with the sobs backstage, the anger, the heaving hearts, and the bewilderment, there was also that evening intense
relief
. (“In all my years of dancing,” Chris would say good-naturedly later, “I didn’t get injured
once
. I knew all that good karma couldn’t last forever.”)

While Chris went into surgery to get a handful of screws put in his vertebrae, an inner circle of producers and creative-team members remained at the theatre, commiserating solemnly and getting updates from the hospital until we got the “all clear” at midnight that we could go home. We were ushered down a corridor in the dark toward an unlit side entrance. It was the only egress unguarded by the news crews, who were stationed outside the other entrances of the Foxwoods like the Greeks at the gates of Troy. Our security detail opened the doors, and we made a dash for the waiting SUV as a herd of reporters rushed toward us and cameras snapped like we were Mafiosi who had just been arraigned.

The next morning, December 21—the day that
Turn Off the Dark
was going to have its triumphant opening once upon a time—Julie, Danny, and I visited Chris in his hospital room, having
first made it through three security checkpoints. One tabloid reporter tried to join us, pretending to be Chris’s relative. Julie told her to take a hike, and the reporter threatened to “bury her.” More reporters were idling a few yards away, like fish that knew where the best chum got tossed. Chris, meanwhile, had just gotten off the phone with Bono and Edge, and was looking astonishingly upbeat.

“I don’t feel angry at all. It’s just one of those things. I can’t
wait
to come back.”

“Really?”

“Are you kidding?!
Of course
. Julie, you
know
I don’t blame you, right?”

Forgiveness
. You could see the guilt that had been draped on Julie like a lead cloak suddenly drop away as Chris assured her how much he loved her, how much the show had already “saved his life.”

“He
is
Spider-Man,” Julie said ardently as she left the hospital. She meant it. She repeated it an hour later to the entire cast, which had assembled in the auditorium for a meeting. Outside the theatre were camera crews. They had been there since eight a.m., and would be camping out until midnight. The next two shows had been canceled. Riedel reported that Assemblyman Rory Lancman, who chaired the workplace safety subcommittee, had “sent producers a stern letter today, saying he’s considering holding hearings into the problems with
Spider-Man
.” Investigators from the state Department of Labor, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the FDNY had already been in the theatre that morning, interviewing members of the Tech staff and the producers.

Now everyone in the whole company had assembled. Everyone, that is, except Natalie Mendoza. Seared into her brain was the
image of Chris Tierney crashing to the floor in front of her. She’d had enough of this show. T. V. was going to be the new Arachne.

Michael Cohl addressed the company, stressing how seriously he took the issue of safety. “You, I don’t trust,” growled Michael Mulheren (our Jameson and the Equity deputy for the cast). Scott Rogers stood in front of the cast and broke into tears. Not calling attention to himself, assistant director Dodd Loomis was seated off to the side, doubled over with shuddering grief. Reeve looked like he wasn’t even in the room. For the next month he’d be there in body but not in spirit.

After more actors unloaded on Michael Cohl, Julie, and Danny, or expressed words of grief or love, Patrick Page stood up and reminded everyone that the previous day was the winter solstice. The darkest day of the year. And in a rare conjunction, last night, during the show? The moon was erased by a total lunar eclipse.

“The ‘dark’ in
Turn Off the Dark
has never seemed more appropriate. But from this day forward, daylight slowly returns to the Earth . . .”

The cast embraced, then went their separate ways, passing by our poster of Spider-Man swinging in front of a luminous full moon. They also passed by several dozen reporters.

And the media bombardment was just beginning. First, the theatre community unleashed its outrage. Alice Ripley, who won a Tony playing Jenn Damiano’s mother in
Next to Normal,
tweeted, “Does someone have to die?” And original
Rent
cast member Adam Pascal posted on Facebook that “they should put Julie Taymor in jail for assault!”

In print, online, on television—everyone seemed ready to tie Julie to the stake. Of course, no one was more outraged by the recent events than pure-souled Michael Riedel, who by this point would have happily given up covering any other Broadway show.

An old video clip was unearthed by the local news (it eventually went viral) in which Julie said, “I don’t think that anything that’s really creative can be done without danger and risk.”

The quote seemed damning, but of course it was out of context. She was speaking in the way all artists speak about “danger” and “risk”—hyperbolically. Sure, artists like to act like they’re astronauts or marines. But danger and risk for an artist means putting your work in front of an audience with the possibility of falling flat on your face. And—just to be clear—not even
actually
falling on your face. But Julie’s comment was being spun in the news as if she had just admitted she was Josef Mengele.

Patrick Page played Lumiere in
Beauty and the Beast
on Broadway. He had two butane tanks strapped to his back, hoses running down his arm, a stun gun to ignite the gas, and two-foot flames flaring out from him. “And things happen,” Patrick shrugged to the press. “There were so many times I hit myself with that stun gun and shocked myself. But hey, you know, it didn’t make the newspapers.”

Spider
-
Man
was making the newspapers. We on the inside could only imagine the toll it was taking on Julie, who was already exhausted by the last three months of storm and stress. And it was all so
meta
. Here we had based our second act partly on the 1967 issue “Spider-Man No More!” in which Peter Parker is so beseiged by the press (led by a demagoguing Jameson) that he has a breakdown and gives up being Spider-Man.

“The terrible thing is,” said Peter about Jameson in this issue, “he actually
believes
what he says! He sincerely thinks I
am
a threat to society!”

Something set Julie off the next afternoon during Tech. And suddenly our director was out the theatre doors.
She was gone.
I dialed her number. She didn’t answer.

In “Spider-Man No More!” as Peter walked down the street—beads of sweat on his anguished face—Stan Lee had words blare around him:

“MENACE!”

“EGOMANIAC!”

“PUBLIC ENEMY!”

“FRAUD!”

“MENTALLY DISTURBED!”

I called Julie again. I could hear traffic noises on the other end of the line.

“Julie?”

Breathing, with trembling in it.

“Julie? Where are you?”

“I don’t know where I am. I don’t know.”

Flurries were swirling thickly as dusk descended. I grabbed Danny.
“
C’mon. We’ve gotta find her.”

Only a few blocks away from the theatre, we spotted her. And our hearts wept—she looked miserable, huddled against the cold, leaning against a building. Danny and I threw each other a glance. Julie clearly didn’t realize just what building she was huddled against. It was the New York Times Building, reporters filing in and out the doors just feet away from her. Before Patrick Healy was the next reporter to walk past her, we ushered her into a nearby robata grill to get some tea into her and shake our heads in wonderment.
We’re just trying to put on a play. . . .