Berger Glen - Song of Spider-Man: the inside story of the most controversial musical in Broadway history

JOAN MARCUS

T he four drinks I knocked back on an empty stomach in the empty VIP room were finally kicking in. The conversations around me in the crowded lobby had become amplified and muffled, like I was floating in a diving bell surrounded by a lot of classy-looking fish. Fine. Just so long as I didnt have to talk to any of them. Any moment now, the lights were going to blink, and then wed have to take our seats, and Id be saved. Except, no, Id still be screwed. Because there wasnt a drug in the world that would make sitting through the show tonight anything but unremitting torture.

We were already thirty minutes behind schedule. They were holding the curtain because everyone was having such a fine time gabbing with each other. So I had to come up with a plan because hiding would be pathetic, but people were going to try to talk to me, or worse congratulate me. It was opening night. And I was the cowriter. Giant letters spelled out my name on that building-sized sign out front. So congratulating me would seem like the thing to do. But this show was a special case, and I was a special case in this special case, and so collecting congratulations was like collecting a pile of wet socks.

Of course, I imagined it was a hundred times worse for her . And, oh man, how the two of us yattered so eagerly about this night once upon a time. To think there was a time when no, I couldnt think about any of thatI just had to walk purposefully and no one would stop me to talk. So I sidled past Bill Clinton and Lou Reed, Salman Rushdie, John McEnroeit was like being trapped in an updated version of the Sgt. Pepper album cover. I figured Id be fine so long as I didnt run into her , because I wouldnt know what to say. But I ran into someone else, and he immediately walked away which, like a sliding set piece, revealed... her . And I didnt know what to say.

Julie Taymor. She was standing near the doors that led out to Forty-third Street. She wasnt going to come at all tonight, which was boggling. Yet understandable. And, in being understandable, even more boggling. It had been three months since Id last seen her, and the rush of old, cozy feelings smacked against The New Reality, and the impact made me just sick.

Even now, I carry the dream with me every day to make up with her. So it all can be as sunny as it once was. Publishing a book detailing our six years together might not be the most effective way to achieve that. In fact, I was warned not to write about any of this. But I cant help itits a story, and thats what we do with stories. We tell them. In fact, this whole book is a story about storytellingthe story of an epic attempt by earnest human beings to tell a story and to tell that story brilliantly. Only, theres this:

Before something can be brilliant, it first has to be competent.

from My List of Lessons Learned

One should probably begin the story of the making and remaking of a Broadway musical about Spider-Man with that hallowed day in 1962 when Stan Lee, along with illustrator Steve Ditko, came up with The Big Idea: Bullied high schooler acquires spider powers.

Its a trim little setup. And just different enough to be revolutionary. Not only was this teenaged Peter Parker suddenly burdened with great responsibilities, he still had to run the every-day gauntlet every teenager has to runthe social troubles, the money troubles, the dermatological troubles...

A comic-book panel would depict a publisher sitting behind a cluttered desk in the cramped Madison Avenue offices of Marvel Comics staring at a sketch of a figure wearing a bodysuit covered in webbing. Lee and Ditko would be standing on the other side of the desk, looking on expectantly. The publisher would be looking... doubtful.

Several months later... would read the caption in our next panel. Lee and Ditkos new superhero is swinging with a hoodlum under his arm on the cover of Marvels Amazing Fantasy #15. Its our webslingers debut, and its in the final issue of an anthology series already slotted to be canceled. Thats how dubious the publisher was of this new spider-man idea.

The next comic-book panel would flash us forward forty years. It would be a split screen depicting the gleaming offices of media giant Marvel Entertainment on one side and the makeshift office of two almost-entirely-untested Broadway producers on the other. The producers are being informed via phone that theyve just been granted the rights to make a musical out of Marvels most treasured property: Spider-Man . Exclamation points shine above the producers heads.

But if this is a story about storytelling cast through the prism of Spider-Man the Musical , then maybe we should be starting fifty-thousand years ago, back in a time when the world was teeming with Paleolithic ceremonies featuring singing, dancing, and human characters endowed with animal powers. In a large, single-paneled splash page, we would see two prehistoric figures arguing over just how their musical performance is supposed to go. On their hairy facesanger, exasperation. Why? Because collaboration, by definition, requires humans to interact with each other. Which means every moment in a collaboration quivers with the potential for transcendental connection. And also fury, and hair-tearing frustration, and silences as icy as distant planets. Just look at Lee and Ditko. You think they had a falling-out? Of course they had a falling-out.

Another scene to ink and color: a twenty-first-century living room, somewhere in the United States, or Sweden, or South America. Children have commandeered couch cushions and bathrobes. One of them is pretending to be Spider-Man. By the looks of it, their pretending includes a large cast of characters and an elaborate plot.