Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (5 page)

Within minutes, Bono’s sunglasses were off and he and Edge were voicing approval, tossing new suggestions into the air, pointing out how the Girl Geek’s narration matched the
sean-nós
Gaelic singing style Bono had been considering for Arachne. Julie and I acted out the first scene between Peter and MJ—a scene relying on stumbling lines and long, horrible pauses in lieu of content. Through grins, Bono called it “kabuki,” “brutal,” and meanwhile I was marveling over my acting partner’s comic timing. Now Bono was playing Mary Jane’s abusive father, and Edge was convincingly playing gentle, well-meaning Uncle Ben as the four of us volleyed lines with increasing intensity until it culminated in a song yet to be written.

Doing his best Mr. Burns from
The Simpsons,
Bono turned to
me, tapping his fingers together. “How long have you been with us, Smithers? You’re going to get on very well in this corporation.”

Well gee, this was getting gratifying . . .

Your life seems to be going in one direction, and then suddenly you wake up on the ceiling, with strange new powers. That’s when Peter sings “Spun Around” (later renamed “Bouncing Off the Walls”), another song needing music and lyrics.

“There’s an expression in our band which we use all the time,” said Bono. “A ‘throw yourself around the room’ song. I think this might be the place for one of those.”

Indeed. Seeing as Julie wanted to stage the scene with Peter
actually throwing himself around the room
. With the help of cables, the actor was going to leap and flip from wall to wall. And then the whole bedroom was going to break apart, and Peter would dance toward the high school with the Geeks cheering him on.

Bono told us his definition of a “geek”: “a person full of passion, unencumbered by cool.” And he wasn’t wrong. Julie demonstrated a silly ecstatic dance for the song right there in Bono’s living room as Bono scatted a tune, improvising something sounding like the joyous flipside to the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” He and Julie played off each other, flirting and daft, while Edge studied them with a grin, and I gaped at these goofballs who were skipping and gesticulating, pulling faces, exclaiming, and just . . .
playing
.

And like the old fellow in
Krapp’s Last Tape,
this is the scene I rewind over and over again.
Stupefaction
. Rewind. Play again. There’s Julie buck dancing, or doing the Charleston, or whatever the hell she was doing in that room of giggling and twinkling inspiration, and yet almost exactly five years later, the
New York Post
was depicting the
Inferno
reimagined by Julie Taymor. In the ninth circle of hell, “dangling from two of [Satan’s] three mouths are Bono and The Edge, ‘their backs being skinned
so as to leave not a patch.’ In the third mouth, being ground head first, is the greatest traitor of all—Taymor’s cowriter, Glen Berger.”

To get from a scene of collaboration and affection to this vengeance-steeped hellscape . . . well, you’d think, at the very least, it would take a couple dozen implausible plot twists. But no, it just proceeds, step by sensible step. Hooved swamp dwellers evolve into humpback whales. Earnest intentions turn into intractable wars. I’ve never written nonfiction before, but I can tell you the fiction-teller’s directive for millennia has been to simply copy the way life unfolds; to wend an ever-flowing series of circumstances from a beginning to a very different endpoint and make every bend and cataract feel inevitable. These things happen. Just ask any divorcée about her wedding day. These things happen. All the time. Rewind. Play again. We were four jolly sailors, four imperturbable Argonauts set to capture the Golden Fleece. Full of passion, unencumbered by cool, we were also—and this is painfully clear—four geeks. And all I know is . . . those friends will keep dancing and laughing in that Central Park penthouse, but they’ll never be anything again but ghosts.

Now Bono was playing a clip from (of all things)
The Matrix
. He and Edge selected a tune by Radiohead to mix into the scene. The effect was inspirational, mysterious. Bono and Edge had pinpointed a mood for the song they were going to write that would carry an audience from the nihilism sparked by Uncle Ben’s death toward the musical’s defining moment—when Peter vows to fight in the name of love and justice as Spider-Man.

“Rise Above,” suggested Bono. “Rise above the difficulties around you. Above the sadness within you.
Be your better self
.”

The new anthem for our musical was born.

The rest of the summit was spent chewing over plot points.
From one scene to the next Edge and Bono dove into the weeds of dramaturgy with the ardor of regional theatre literary managers.

Also, with nary a half-minute of discussion, the musical’s title was decided upon. Bono and Edge suggested it. It was inspired by the bedtime request of the young daughter of a friend of theirs.

So, good, now the project felt a little more real—we had a title. But it was a secret title. And it would be a secret for four more years. No document could contain the title, lest we blow the surprise. Later the title would blaze with unintentional irony. After that, the title would endure a fusillade of Internet mockery. Still later, the title would point the way to a new beginning for the show. But on that day, all we knew was that we woke up that morning thinking about
Spider-Man,
and went to sleep that night thinking excitedly about
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

•     •     •

We were going to land this show right in the middle of the zeitgeist. Gordon Cox was reporting in
Variety
how “musicals are once again becoming part of the pop-culture consciousness,” with musicals referenced in everything from
The Sopranos
to Gap Khaki advertisements and the music videos of Beyoncé. Broadway musicals took in a record $850 million in the 2006–07 season alone.

I finished a draft of the whole script by the beginning of 2007. We were seven months away from the big presentation that would showcase a revised script and all the completed music in front of our investors. Right, yes.
The investors
. David Garfinkle had tapped a network of monied folk based mainly in his hometown of Chicago to put up the funds for the show, and they were anxious to see what their money had bought them to date.

So in January 2007, our two producers, along with Julie and me, went to Ireland for another summit with the boys and to get an
update on their progress. After a bracing hill climb through gorse and sheep dung with Julie leading the way like Tenzing Norgay and with David Garfinkle laboring behind in dress shoes, we rang Bono’s bell, and then joined him for a stroll to Edge’s house down the road, discussing on the way how the Democratic Primary was shaping up to be a battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “Oh, it’s win-win,” said Bono, who then began riffing on a
Sesame Street
tune, singing, “Oh, a rock star is a person in your neighborhood,” as he waved at honking cars passing by.

In Edge’s little guesthouse, the espresso machine was fired up, and we plunged into the new batch of melodies he and Bono had put together. First up was a sound unlike anything in U2’s catalogue. Playing around with the Phrygian mode, they had laid down an otherworldly wall of sound that could have been constructed by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir. With these harmonics, the audience would be introduced to Arachne. The hubris-infected young woman boasted in her lyrics that anything the gods created,
she
could make
more
beautiful, for she was an
artist.
Julie was thrilled. “Elton John, Andrew Lloyd Webber, eat your heart out.”

But some songs were proving more elusive. There’s a fine line separating the crystalline and the clichéd, the resonant and the cloying. Bono and Edge would sooner impale themselves on sticks than be caught crossing that line, but if you wanted to write the big anthem, you had to dance right up next to it. “Rise Above” was their current concern. Bono stood up—he was getting passionate: “If I’m gonna actually plop something like that onto a fucking page, it better be something that people will sing in football finals in ten years and make everyone cry. I just mean it has to be a classic. In the ‘rising-above-it’-type genre, if you follow me.”

We were following him. The “rise-above-it” genre was a perilous one.

He added, “It better be as good as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ which is one of the greatest songs ever written.”

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is from
Carousel,
the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

I need to back up. Between the last summit and this one, David Garfinkle decided Bono and Edge needed a crash course in the Broadway musical. The two lads grew up in a rough-and-tumble section of Dublin; they started the rock band when they were teenagers.
Bye Bye Birdie
?
A Little Night Music
?

“Em . . . not really on our radar, David.”

So David had the office burn a four-CD compilation. Sixty songs from the last sixty years of musical theatre, divided into the strictest of categories. There were exposition songs, eleven o’clock numbers, Act One closers, charm songs, anti-charm songs, show-stoppers, character-driven songs, torch songs—a fantastic mix, really, if you were into that sort of thing. Bono and Edge would eventually dismiss nearly all the songs as mawkish, dopey, or just “pants.”

But here Bono was extolling “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from one of the more sentimental midcentury musicals. And the song wasn’t even
on
Garfinkle’s Fabulous Broadway Mix.

“So did you go out and download
Carousel
from—”

Edge shook his head—the song happened to be one of the most popular football anthems in Ireland. Of course—
football anthems
. If you were European, and a musician,
that
was the brass ring you were going to be reaching for,
that
was the—

“I’ve got to make a few serious calls.”

Suddenly, Bono was heading out of the room.

What?

“I’ll just excuse myself for half an hour. There’s some stuff I just can’t avoid.”

Rats.
We were only in town for three days, and we wouldn’t see each other for another three months. Hadn’t we all vowed to stay focused on this musical for eight lousy hours? Surely whatever Bono thought he needed to do could wait—he had assistants, hadn’t he?

Bono returned in a better mood. The U.S. Congress had originally committed to give funds to African AIDS relief but then, just before Christmas, the commitment started to look ropey. So, Bono was in the other room getting assurances from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi—
Pelosi herself
—that $1.2 billion in AIDS funding would be reinstated. That was how he had spent the last half hour. I spent it polishing off an espresso.

Julie and I killed time the next morning taking a too-long walk down Vico Road in the blustery wind to Dalkey. I lent her my scarf, which she wrapped like a babushka to protect her freezing ears, and we were exchanging grins and gazes, and I didn’t know what to make of any of this. She was too young to be my mother, too old to be—what—I didn’t know what, but this was getting heady. A maternal, powerful, alluring artist recognized a kindred spirit and they met on a dream-plane outside the workaday world. This was Act Two, scene two.

“With me alone you have nothing to hide,” whispered Arachne to a bewildered, flattered, turned-on Peter.

“And then she starts to pull threads out of his body,” Julie was explaining to Bono.

“It should feel disorienting, and a little terrifying,” I added, suddenly feeling like I was speaking from personal experience.

We were back at Edge’s guesthouse, trying to pinpoint the mood for “Turn Off the Dark,” the title song.
Spring Awakening
was on Julie’s mind—“Teenagers are lining up—they think it’s gonna be hip and edgy and sexy.”

Steven Sater’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play of adolescent angst, with music by Duncan Sheik, had nothing in it
production-wise
to make Julie envious. Michael Mayer had directed it with minimal design elements, and—by Julie’s estimation—middling rock music.

However, the show had “cred.” It had the most devoted teen following Broadway had seen since
Rent
. It had songs about masturbation, and songs with titles like “Totally Fucked.” Marvel Entertainment was pretty clear on the latitude we had for
Spider-Man
. We could have a song called “In a Pickle,” maybe.
“Fucked,”
no.

So here we were, seeking an angle for Mary Jane’s big Act Two song that was going to get the teens saying “righteous,” or whatever teens were saying these days. The composers played a tune we hadn’t heard yet—a tender, haunting piece, with a strong melody, played with nothing but an acoustic guitar. Best thing they had turned out so far. Sounded like a classic.

“Too French,” Julie pronounced.

Too
French
?

She was ready to send it to the bin, but then she started thinking out loud—thinking about how she began work on this show just months after 9/11, when life in the city had an apocalyptic tenor, and we all felt a certain vulnerability.

“Because I think when people come up against the end, there’s that honest-to-God clarity about what matters. ‘The world is ending, but if you’re with me, it’s okay.’ It’s the husband and wife holding hands as the plane goes down. It’s Romeo and Juliet, vowing to kill themselves together. A double suicide.”

She laughed. “If the Marvel people heard what I’m saying now . . .”

Putting a suicide pact between Peter and MJ in the show
wouldn’t make the suits so happy. But this comic-book musical was parched for some authenticity. Call the song “If the World Should End,” said Julie. Act Two was getting dark, and it felt good.

Martin McCallum and David Garfinkle decided lunch on this last day together was the time to have “the serious discussion” about the schedule. As Edge and Bono began going through their calendars, I could see the color drain from Martin’s face. The days our composers had cleared to generate the songs for this show . . . well, they hadn’t really cleared any.