On Oct. 19, 2010, a group of Broadway ticketing agents gathered at the Foxwoods Theatre for a sneak peek at some of the flying stunts in the upcoming Broadway musical “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark.”
Kevin Aubin, a dancer, performed what was called the “Big Jump,” leaping from the back of the theater, somersaulting through the air and landing, on all fours, on the lip of the stage.
“Four sales agents sitting in the front row shrieked in fear and delight,” Glen Berger, who co-wrote the musical, notes in his new book, “Song of Spider-Man.”
“So far so good.”
But then Berger noticed a grimace flicker across Aubin’s face. The dancer scuttled off stage and the presentation continued. The agents seemed delighted by the flying effects. Not one of them guessed that “Kevin Aubin broke both of his wrists right in front of them,” Berger writes.
Berger panicked. What if the incident got leaked? “Spider-Man,” the most expensive Broadway musical ever, was already under assault in the press for financial mismanagement, production delays and its ballooning budget. But nothing about Aubin, who was now wearing casts up to his elbows, appeared in the papers.
“Looked like the coast was clear,” Berger writes. “I didn’t even want to contemplate the sort of hay Riedel would have made out of this.”
If I was a little slow off the mark, it was because I happened to be on vacation the week Aubin cracked his wrists. But when I returned, I phoned a source on the show.
“I almost hesitate to tell you this, but the other week, a kid got seriously injured,” the source said. “Be careful how you handle it.”
The next day, Berger read in The Post, “ ‘Spider-Man’ Safety Scare: Actor breaks both wrists in failed stunt.”
“This was the day it started. The day the heat lamps got turned on,” Berger writes. “The Foxwoods was going to become a fishbowl. Containing a bunch of increasingly stressed-out fish.”
“Song of Spider-Man” (Simon & Schuster) is an entertaining tell-all about this infamous musical that, in the fall of 2010, made headlines almost every day.
The cast of “increasingly stressed-out fish” is A-list — Julie Taymor, celebrated director of “The Lion King”; Bono and The Edge, making their debut as theater composers; Michael Cohl, the billionaire, T-shirt-clad concert promoter who became the show’s producer; and Berger himself, an impoverished writer plucked from obscurity by Taymor to be her co-author.
Supporting players include yours truly, or, as Berger calls me in his book, “a parasite-carrying blood-sucking mosquito depositing the larvae of an elephantiasis-causing filarial worm under the skin of our show.”
(I’ve been called worse.)
The saga of “Spider-Man” begins as all Broadway shows do — with a sense of excitement and promise fueling the creative team.
Berger wasn’t part of that team at first, however.
The original writer was Neil Jordan, author of the screenplays for “Michael Collins” and “The Crying Game.” He was also one of Bono and The Edge’s closest friends. The four creators met at Bono’s villa in the South of France to outline the show.
It became clear, however, that Jordan and Taymor were no Kaufman and Hart. She thought his early drafts were too cinematic; he thought her ideas, such as a complex subplot involving a mythological character called Arachne, were pretentious.
And so Jordan was cut loose.
Berger learned through a friend who worked in Taymor’s office that she was looking for a new writer. He sent her a “treatise” on comic books, mythology and Taymor’s career. “It read like I was on drugs,” he writes.
But it got him an interview. And Taymor liked him. A lot. The day after he submitted a sample scene, Taymor called to say he had the job.
At the time, Berger was writing scripts for PBS, barely able to make his mortgage payments. Suddenly, he was being whisked off in an SUV to meet Bono and The Edge after a U2 concert in the Meadowlands.
“This has to be brilliant,” Bono told him. “Do you understand? It has to be.”
A prominent theater lawyer said to him: “You’re about to jump into some seriously deep water. You have no idea the amount of money and expectation riding on this project . . . But I’m going to give you some advice. Whatever you do, whatever happens, stick with Julie.”
It was easy, at first. Taymor was brilliant, beautiful, seductive. They brainstormed at her country house. She “excited the particles in the air — how else to put it — cast the spell. Where had this woman been all my life?”
Bono and The Edge didn’t cast quite such a spell. They weren’t around much because they were on tour. They sent in songs from the road, but slowly. Deadlines loomed; the score remained incomplete.
But Taymor and Berger thought what they submitted was “f–king inspired.”
“Spider-Man” was not going to be your grandmother’s show. It was going to be a rock musical — or, as Taymor called it, “a circus rock-and-roll drama.”
It was also going to be expensive. Unbeknownst to its creators, the money wasn’t there. The original producer, a wonderful man named Tony Adams, dropped dead of a brain hemorrhage in The Edge’s Soho apartment while signing the contracts for the show. David Garfinkle, Adams’ lawyer, took over.
In the summer of 2009, as the show set was being built in the Hilton (now Foxwoods) Theatre, Berger was strapped for cash. The production had promised to pay rent on an apartment he took in the city, but the money was not forthcoming. He called the show’s general manager, who said: “We can’t give you the money . . . I wish I could tell you. But I can’t.”
A few days later, I broke the story that work had stopped at the Hilton Theatre. Garfinkle was out of money.
“It’s bad,” Taymor told Berger. “David is 20 million short.”
Bono later said he learned his show had no cash when “I read it in the New York Post.”
The slack — $20 million worth — was picked up by Michael Cohl, an old hippie who had made piles promoting rock bands, including U2. Although a billionaire, he dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. With his bushy hair and beard, he looked like a homeless man, which I duly noted in a column. When I met him for a drink, he showed up carrying a tin cup and wearing a cardboard sign that said, “Will produce for a quarter.”
Cohl lined up investors, and within the year, “Spider-Man” was back in business.
But Berger began having doubts. He wondered if their script, with its geek chorus of comic-book nerds and Arachne subplot, was sound. But when he mentioned his concerns to Taymor, she jumped down his throat.
“I’m sorry — I think story theater, where you show everything, is a drag,” she barked.
His doubts grew during technical rehearsals, which moved at a snail’s pace. It took days to create what would amount to a few minutes of stage time. And the multimillion-dollar sets seemed to Berger to be, well, dangerous.
All the while, the budget grew. Taymor wanted to drape the theater in a spiderweb, and the production designer created a giant steel ring to rise to the top of the theater and release a net over the audience. It was installed at the Foxwoods.
But one day Berger looked up and saw it was no longer there.
“Where’s the thingy?” he asked.
“They took it down,” a production manager replied. “The whole thing was going to get in the way of the cables . . . The flying wouldn’t have worked with that thing hanging there.”
Berger was stunned. “A ring of money $1 million in diameter” had been “hauled away to some big dump.”
After several postponements, “Spider-Man” finally went up in front of an audience for the first time on Nov. 28, 2010.
Berger quotes a line I wrote the next day in The Post: “An epic flop, as the $65 million show’s high-tech gadgetry went completely awry amid a dull score and a baffling script.”
(The phrase “epic flop” was picked up by papers as far away as India, earning me much enmity from the cast and crew. To relieve tension, Taymor would beat up a giant inflatable doll called Bonesaw McGraw that appeared in the show. She renamed it “Michael Riedel.”)
Injuries began piling up — a broken foot, a concussion. And then, most horrifically, a dancer doubling as Spider-Man tumbled 30 feet into the orchestra pit because his harness hadn’t been fastened properly. He had a fractured skull, a punctured lung and four broken ribs.
The cast, exhausted and frightened, met with the producers the next day. Cohl told them their safety was paramount.
Veteran actor Michael Mulheren raged, “You I don’t trust!”
Others began to weep.
Reeve Carney, who was playing Spider-Man, “looked like he wasn’t even in the room. For the next month, he’d be there in body but not in spirit.”
Meanwhile, a media firestorm was raging, with reporters trying to sneak into the dancer’s hospital room. The press, Berger writes, “seemed ready to tie Julie to the stake.” Taymor was losing control, of her show and herself. One day, she disappeared from the theater. Berger called her cellphone. “I don’t know where I am,” she said.
She’d find out soon enough — out of a job, with a knife in her back.
Bono, The Edge and Cohl had had enough of Taymor. She resisted making major changes to the show, despite terrible reviews. Quietly, a Plan X was being hatched: Bring in a new director, a new writer, close the show, revamp it and relaunch it.
And nobody was to breathe a word of this to Taymor.
Berger agonized about it, but he went — and cast his lot with Plan X. Taymor was fired; Berger remained. So much for “whatever happens, stick with Julie.”
Taymor wound up suing the producers for royalties and production credits. Berger wanted to help her settle the dispute. He wanted her to know he was on her side. Until he found that he, too, was named in the suit. (It was settled out of court.)
Three years after its first performance — and despite my best attempts to bring it down — “Spider-Man” is still running on Broadway.
There never has been, and I doubt there ever will be, a show so expensive and so engulfed in controversy. The official cost has since ballooned to $85 million, a folly of epic proportions.
Berger’s book is an accurate and candid account of this “epic flop,” and I’m flattered he has recognized my, er, contribution to the story of “Spider-Man.”
After somebody leaked me an early draft of “Song of Spider-Man,” I e-mailed him, “I’m enjoying your book!”
He wrote back, “You know, I had a feeling you would.”