Judas speaks!
In my hot little hands is the manuscript of “The Song of Spider-Man,” Glen Berger’s forthcoming tell-all (from Simon & Schuster, Nov. 5) about “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the most expensive — and dangerous — musical ever produced.
Just two weeks ago, another poor actor got mauled by that $85 million death machine over at the Foxwoods Theatre.
But the show’s most famous victim was director Julie Taymor — and she holds center stage in “The Song of Spider-Man.”
Taymor plucked Berger from obscurity (and poverty) to write the show with her. But when things went off the rails, he turned on his benefactor, secretly sending e-mails to the producers about how he could fix the show — if only she’d get out of the way.
Taymor was fired, but Berger remained to rewrite the musical with a new creative team.
Taymor came to despise him — I dubbed him Judas in a column, which he quotes in the book — and they were embroiled in a brutal lawsuit. But from what I’ve read so far (I’m a third of the way through), he still carries a torch for her.
He describes those early, heady days when he and Taymor are firing away on all creative cylinders. She mesmerizes him, seduces him, really, with her brilliance. After a meeting in Ireland with Bono and The Edge, who wrote the score, he’s hanging out in an airport lounge when suddenly a pair of arms enfold him.
It’s Julie, sneaking up from behind.
I’ve never met anyone like you, she tells him. He shivers with delight.
(Where’s her boyfriend, Elliot Goldenthal, I’m thinking!)
They did not, I hasten to add, have an affair. But Berger became obsessed with her — and remains so to this day. He knows she hates him, but he wants nothing more than to be back in the orbit of this blazing creative sun.
Fat chance, Judas!
Of course, if you fly too close to the sun, you get burned. And when Taymor turns on someone, her wrath is as frightening as that of, well, Arachne, that annoying character that almost took over “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” in its initial incarnation.
In a juicy scene from the book, Taymor discovers that one of her longtime collaborators is passing off her work on his Web site as his. She picks up the phone and annihilates him. After the rage has passed, she tells Berger that she’s had an out-of-body experience. She watched herself, she says, destroy her colleague over the phone — and could do nothing about it.
(A few days later, the colleague’s lawyer informs her that, due to scheduling issues, he must withdraw from the show.)
Bono and The Edge come off as amiable dunces. They know nothing about musicals, so David Garfinkle, the show’s hapless producer, sends them a CD with 60 famous Broadway tunes.
They find them dopey and maudlin.
Jerry Herman? Stephen Sondheim? Richard Rodgers?
Nothing those hacks wrote can touch the score to “Spider-Man,” which has produced such standards as, well, give me a minute . . . “Bouncing Off the Walls”?
Because of other commitments, Bono and The Edge are slow in writing the score, finishing songs in rehearsals (which may be why most of their lyrics make absolutely no sense).
I’ve just read up to where “Spider-Man” is about to go into rehearsal, so I’ll give you more details in a later column.
So far, though, I’m enjoying this book. Berger is brutally honest about everyone, including himself.
He’s a snake in the grass, but he writes well.
The lights — all the lights — dimmed for the great Julie Harris Wednesday night. After a little prodding from you know who, the Broadway League got its act together and pulled off this tribute with aplomb.
At 7:45 all the theaters along West 45th Street went dark for one minute. Bystanders, Tyne Daly among them, applauded. The Lyceum, where Harris gave her last Broadway performance in “The Gin Game” in 1997, went dark for 15 minutes.
I ran into a bunch of executives from The Shubert Organization. They were deeply grateful for my help in getting this dimming of the lights back on track (it was getting sloppy).
They reiterated that when I go, they will TURN UP the lights!