Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (9 page)

Would we be able to duplicate this sequence in the actual theatre? He wasn’t sure yet. But the sequence gave everyone in that soundstage plenty of confidence that
something
pretty thrilling would be devised. Julie asked for a slight adjustment in Goblin’s flight pattern, and Scott said they’d get right on it, but it could take a while, because they’d have to program the new code into the computer.

This was the downside to bringing computers into the game. Programming took ages, and it was ratcheting up the anxiety levels of David Garfinkle and Martin McCallum. Nearly all the programming accomplished in this workshop would have to be redone once an actual theatre was found, since the new dimensions would require new algorithms. Would there be enough time to reenter all the computer code? What happened if an adjustment to a flying sequence was required at the last minute? Disastrous delays? Hope for the best, I guess. In the meantime, Scott would keep working, alongside Jaque Paquin—our long-haired, thick-bearded Québécois aerial rigger from Cirque du Soleil.

Michael Curry, meanwhile, was occupying himself with the challenge of making a web-shooter for Spider-Man. Michael was the man who devised, with Julie, all the puppet-work on
The Lion King
. Resembling a Wings
-
era Paul McCartney, he was the sort of fellow who sketched out solutions on the backs of napkins. Actual solutions. He intuitively understood how different materials behaved. He grasped the physics behind the fluttering of fabric. He worked with the universal laws that made an insect leg extend just so, or eagle feathers unfurl, or any of the engineering and aesthetic marvels all around us that we generally take for granted until we see their essence presented on a stage.

It was easy to see why he and Julie made for such felicitous partners on
The Lion King.
Michael’s engineering know-how was coupled with the sort of attitude that Julie prizes. The attitude that the unsolved was merely the not-yet-solved. The soon-to-be-solved. (Why Michael Curry left
Turn Off the Dark
—resulting in a number of
never
-to-be-solved issues—we’ll get to in a bit.)

So while we waited for the next aerial demonstration, we noticed Michael Curry picking up a wad of something in a Baggie. He walked a few paces away from us. He turned, lifted his hand, and—
THWWWIPPPP!
—a fifty-foot ribbon of white shot out of his hand in a blur. We rubbed our eyes, because the ribbon was still somehow hanging in midair, the whole length of it quivering.

Now the ribbon was fluttering away, and as our jaws returned from the floor, Michael explained how he attached one end of a bungee-like cord to the wall, and then affixed a fifty-foot length of silk to the other end of the bungee, and then wadded the silk up into this little pouch. Concealing the pouch in his hand, he walked away from the wall, thereby pulling the nearly invisible bungee taut. By holding on to the pouch but releasing one end of the silk, he achieved the web-shooting effect. Simple, with plenty
of theatrical bang for the buck, it was a quintessential “Taymor Effect.” We could cross another item off the to-do list.

Now Chris Daniels—the stunt double for Tobey Maguire in the first two
Spider-Man
films—was being fitted in a “twisty belt” (actually, the “Climbing Sutra Spinning Harness”), a swiveling metal hoop, with three cables attached to it. He was standing in front of a mock-up of Peter’s bedroom—five large lightweight panels which formed the floor, ceiling, and three walls of a forced perspective room.

A recording of Jim Sturgess singing “Bouncing Off the Walls” blared from speakers, and Chris was hoisted into the air and sent backward, careening into a wall. A flip and a half put him into a handstand, enabling him to spring off the floor and spin like a pinwheel toward the ceiling and then sing the next verse upside down as the walls (held in place by puppeteers) twirled and swayed to the melody, so that it wasn’t just the music and the aerialist but
the set itself
telegraphing exuberance.

The scene was pretty fantastic, even though the cables were distracting, and the twisty belt was inelegant. A discussion with costume designer Eiko Ishioka and her assistant, Mary, quickly ruled out any possibility of hiding that big metal ring around his waist. Julie concluded that the audience would just have to embrace the necessity of the setup.

“In fact,” she said, “
Peter Parker
should embrace it. Have him toss the cables to a crew guy. You know? ‘Hook me up, Joe!’ ”
Expose the artifice.
This was an approach Julie had taken in dozens of shows, and when the gambit worked, theatre asserted its theatricality, and
it felt good
—like how life felt when we were tots, regularly shifting back and forth from reality to make-believe in our minds.

And when such a gambit
didn’t
work? Then it was just a lot of
embarrassingly clunky machinery. But we were pretty sure having Peter acknowledge the cables would immunize the scene from awkwardness. Pretty sure. The trick to doing any scene with cables was remembering that the scene was
not
about the hardware, it was about the
emotion
. In this case, it was about Peter’s joy, his exhilaration.
“Hook me up, Joe!”
A shout-out to a crew guy almost said it better than the flying effect itself—Peter was so exuberant he was breaking the fourth wall! We just had to remember this insight when it came time to put it onstage.

And . . . we didn’t.

Moving on, here were two stage directions near the beginning of the script that I wrote in five easy seconds: “Arachne’s weavers make a giant tapestry”; and “The tapestry is destroyed by Athena.” Danny had a notion for how to achieve this, and recruited eight dancer-acrobats from Los Angeles who were unafraid of heights.

With a wistful chuckle, Danny once told me how he and Julie nearly killed each other during their first project together—a 1995 production of Wagner’s opera
The Flying Dutchman
. But Julie was loyal and Julie was practical—she stuck to artists she could trust. Danny was now one of her closest confidants, having choreographed
The Green Bird
in 2000, and then
Across the Universe
. In that film, the football players careening off each other with bruising grace; the businessmen heading to work with shifting synchrony; the balletic horseplay in the bowling alley—they were all Danny’s brainchildren. One of the original members of the groundbreaking dance troupe MOMIX, he had a rakish, Jewish, and—rare for male choreographers—unmistakably heterosexual vibe. He shared many of the qualities of other longtime Taymor collaborators—talented of course, and also not easily daunted, and—crucially—good-natured.

And now Danny was standing in front of eight thirty-foot-long loops of silk. Eight dancers stood at the ready on a platform. “Arachne’s Theme” blasted over the speakers, the kettledrums thundering. Then, on the downbeat (and it
had
to be exactly on cue or the whole sequence would get completely fouled up), four dancers leaped onto the looped bottoms of their silks, and—
SWOOOSH
—swung out directly toward us.

Right as they reached their farthest point of oscillation, the dancers threw open their arms in unison, stretching the silk and fleetingly evoking angels or pale Luna Moths.
Simultaneously,
a long banner of silk launched from the floor behind the four swinging weavers—
WHOOM-CLACK
. The banner blasted thirty feet up in a blink, sent up by a couple of fearsome air compressors.

The four swinging weavers were now beginning to swing backward, just as the four remaining weavers leaped onto their loops and swung out toward us. Another banner of silk launched
between
the two groups of swinging weavers, and meanwhile, the chorale resounding through the soundstage was suggesting to our various sense organs that some heavenly realm was opening up before us.

In front of our eyes, eight giant horizontal silks were being woven between the dancers’ eight vertical silks. With the silks gently fluttering, the result looked like some immense pot holder made by a seven-year-old god. The air was then released from the compressors, and the horizontal silks collapsed toward the ground—
CLACK-CLACKETY-CLACK
—as if destroyed by a displeased goddess of wisdom. Danny Ezralow—that son of a gun—he did it. He turned two sentences’ worth of stage directions into the first showstopper of the show.

Fired up, Julie began describing to lighting designer Don Holder how the finished tapestry could be used as a projection screen,
upon which threads of light could “weave” to form an animated image, as if Arachne was “working her loom.”

In Ovid’s telling of the myth, Arachne’s tapestry cheekily depicted the gods committing embarrassing acts. But Julie didn’t want an animated scene of humans and animals rendered in an “ancient Greek” style. She wanted “an abstract image.” She wanted the threads of light to suggest the image of a sun. It was clean, with a Zen-like appeal.

But privately, I wondered if maybe
narratively
it wasn’t the best choice. We had to assume that hardly anyone in the audience would come into the theatre knowing the myth of Arachne. Therefore, we had to make sure they got—really
got—
the idea that the images Arachne created on her loom were so vivid that they seemed—as described by Ovid—
to be alive
. As I would eventually have to write for an insert in the program, “woven bulls bellowed and leapt, rivers roared, and the water made of thread splashed those who came near her tapestries.” If this concept wasn’t drilled into the audiences’ heads, if the idea wasn’t understood that Arachne was as much a master illusionist as a weaver, then the arrival of illusory supervillains in Act Two—i.e., the musical’s main plot point—would feel random and confusing.

“Julie, also, are we worried about this? The story we’re telling is of a tapestry-weaving
contest
between Arachne and Athena, but we’re only showing
one
tapestry.”

Julie looked over her glasses and asked me with the warmest affection twinkling in her eyes: “You have a better idea?”

She knew that I didn’t have a better idea.

“I’m working on it,” I answered, cagily.

Julie shook her head. “I think the audience understands the weaving competition from what the Girl Geek says.”

“If the audience hears it,” I mumbled.

“Well why
wouldn’t
you hear it?” she pounced, addressing the whole table of designers. “I’m sorry—I think ‘story theatre,’ where you show everything, is a
drag
. I really think the most important thing is that a girl turns into a spider. That’s all you really need to know—that she’s
Arachne,
and she’s gonna get
mad
.”

If it became a problem it would be a discussion for another day, I supposed. Anyway, an easy-enough correction somewhere down the line. Surely.

The week was capped by two days of strenuous discussion in a hotel conference room, the whole team reviewing and re-reviewing every cable, winch, and motor-related aspect of the show. “Fly tracks,” “cable dressing,” “pick points”—really the snack table was all I could focus on. But everyone else was with it. Even producer Martin McCallum turned out to be an engineering wonk, pointing out things like how “the downstage cables have to lift the
subfloor,
so now you’re doing a cantilever that’s forty feet long.” It was twelve hours of that. For as many as eleven of the twelve hours, the primary speaker was Julie, who trudged through the whole show, thinking out loud and receiving confirmations or clarifications from the rest of the team.

We adjourned with many a technical question yet to be answered, but with producers confident enough to begin looking in earnest for a place to house this spectacle. We planned to be in rehearsals for
Turn Off the Dark
by May 2009. Just sixteen months away.

•     •     •

There was no way Chicago was happening. The original intention was to have twelve weeks of performances in David Garfinkle’s hometown. But once it became clear just how much reconfiguring a theatre would have to undergo to accommodate the show,
the idea of doing an almost-three-month run in Chicago just so it could all be dismantled and reconstructed in New York seemed ludicrous.

“And what’s the purpose of out-of-town tryouts anyway?” we were all asking. Oh, there was a time when artists and producers could tinker with their show in the relatively “safe” environment of a New Haven or D.C. There was a gentleman’s agreement between creators and audience, between producers and media, that no one would consider the out-of-town show as anything other than “a draft.”

But these days? At the end of the summer of 2007,
The Little Mermaid
mounted an out-of-town tryout in Denver, while
Shrek the Musical
debuted in Seattle, and thanks to the Internet and its bloggers, the entire industry back in New York, as well as scores of Broadway fans, were chattering about every single detail of the productions. It was guaranteed that
Spider-Man
—already proving to be a media-magnet—would be treated like a frog in a tenth-grade biology class. And those frogs never turn out well.

And did we even
want
feedback from an out-of-town audience? Julie kept a nice selection of rants in her rant cellar about “art by poll.” Were we not theatrically savvy enough to figure out what improvements were needed on our own? Wasn’t this mania for focus-grouping everything leading to nothing but bland, dumbed-down fare?

And besides (and this reason was the head-spinner): There wasn’t much we’d be able to change about our show anyway. If our technical elements worked at all, it would be because a mind-numbing number of hours had been spent figuring out how to transition from one technical event to the next. Messing with that sequence in any way would send our whole Rube Goldberg contraption toppling.