I was backstage, crouched and facing a corner, shining my cell phone onto the floor. Nothing. I usually had better luck than this. Now I was on hands and knees squinting in the dark, because that’s what I do on the first day of Tech. It’s a tradition.
While a play—any play—is playing out in front of its audience, other unscripted dramas are transpiring on that stage, containing actual births, peril, live sex acts, and corpses. Everyone’s oblivious to it because, of course, the participants are bugs. On the first day of Tech, I like finding one of these little creatures. I like knowing there are actual lives sharing space and time with the fake ones. Perspective, you know. For obvious reasons, a spider would’ve been nice that day, but I’d have taken a dead pill bug by this point. I decided to give it three more minutes.
Writer on hands and knees. Pull back to reveal:
An enormous auditorium, dark but for the illumination of little desk lamps and lots of computer screens. At a table, house left, the actors were gathered. On the table were dozens of little kits consisting of a microphone, a radio transmitter, and a battery pack. The name of a specific actor was written on each kit. Not only did each microphone fit on each actor’s head a certain way, but each radio also had its own frequency, so that the sound operator could tweak the volume and EQ during the show. The actors were just instructed to attach the microphones to their heads for the first time. We were about to tech the opening scene.
Wooden boards had been laid over entire rows of seats. At one of these makeshift tables, there was a glowing bank of computers and a black phone with a handset. This was where eight-time Tony Award–nominated lighting designer Don Holder and several assistants were ensconced. Most everyone else these days used headsets, but Don was old school. He’d have that anachronistic phone on his ear for most of the next ten weeks, looking dyspeptic, like one of those 1975 police detectives methodically calling his list of leads. Of all the people Julie considered geniuses, she asserted it the most to me about Don Holder. Don’s loyalty to Julie was genuine and deep: She believed in him enough to hire him for The Lion King, which he credited for transforming his career.
On the other end of Don’s phone was a lighting operator who was manning a computer somewhere high up in the theatre. Don’s phone also connected to the house-right balcony, where stage manager C. Randall White, sitting with a computer and headset, would be running the moment-to-moment execution of all the flying cues. Unlike other Broadway shows, this one was so complex that another head stage manager was required (Kat Purvis), to coordinate all the movement of the various set pieces.
A few rows down from Don Holder’s base camp, near the very center of the auditorium, there was a table for Teese Gohl to work on various music mixes and to confer with David Campbell over his musical arrangements. And costume designer Eiko Ishioka was taking notes next to him. Next to her were the assistant director, the associate director, and Danny Ezralow—all poised with laptops and iPads. And at the center of this table, in the center of the auditorium, like the termite queen, was Julie. Resting on the table in front of her was “the God Mike”—a wireless microphone that enabled a voice to be amplified throughout the auditorium. Sometimes Danny got to use the God Mike. Otherwise, it was the exclusive property of Julie.
There wasn’t shouting in the auditorium, there wasn’t bustle—there were a lot of low-voiced consultations. The banks of computers; the headsets; the scattered paper filled with graphs and technical jargon; the palpable vibe of competent folk focused on the narrow bandwidth of stuff that only they knew how to do—it made the whole scene feel like Mission Control, Houston. It was the vibe of a team that knew—as with any NASA endeavor—that anything less than success was a fireball.
Julie and Danny positioned the cast in what would be a tableau of black-trench-coated citizens. The cast began chanting, sounding quite deliberately like something out of Carl Orff ’s Carmina Burana. The floor lifted, revealing Jenn Damiano as Mary Jane “dangling” from a rope underneath the floor. As eyes adjusted, one noticed that the backdrop depicted one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, painted at a dramatic angle. And running toward her (and us), in slow motion, was Spider-Man, who appeared just as the heroic-sounding theme to “Boy Falls From the Sky” kicked in on the rehearsal piano.
“Hold, please.”
In addition to Julie with her God Mike, the other person with the authority to send his voice resounding through the auditorium was stage manager Randall White.
Something was wrong.
Julie had Don adjust the intensity of the lighting while Danny honed the choreography of the actors onstage, but something very wrong was not being addressed. And it was simply this: Spider-Man. Running toward Mary Jane.
I suppose I had imagined close-ups, and quick cuts between Mary Jane and Spider-Man. Dramatic angles. In other words, movie editing. Danny Ezralow had Chris Tierney try a sliding motion of a sort to enhance the slow-motion running effect. Chris did it well. But he looked like a mime. A mime miming “A day at the Olympic speed-skating trials.” Could we not use a strobe? Or something? Was I the only one who thought he looked like a mime? Anyone else seeing a mime?
This was our opening. It was a minute long. The somewhat terrifying Orff-esque chanting—which sounded like an angry mob demanding blood—was either daring or pretentious. The rising floor was cool. The reveal of Mary Jane was visually and narratively satisfying. But then the spectacle of Spider-Man—not swinging, not leaping, but running (and not running, but performing a theatrical interpretation of “running”)—managed to pound the message deep and irrevocably into my consciousness for the first time: This show was never going to be The Lion King.
Our original treatment—the one Avi Arad at Marvel rejected back in 2005—opened with the myth of Arachne. With the loom and the weavers and the transformation of a girl into a spider, it would’ve delivered all the opening wow we needed. But Avi felt this choice put an undue spotlight on Arachne. “Why aren’t you presenting Spider-Man at the top?” Fine. We pitched a new treatment to Marvel in 2005 with an opening that contained a half-dozen spider-men battling a half-dozen villains all over the auditorium. That treatment was approved in 2006.
The thing is, Julie had nothing specific in mind for that “Spider-Man opening extravaganza.” And over the years, the vision for the opening scene was pared down and down to what we were now teching. Dramaturgical logic dictated the choice. As the audience would eventually learn when they saw this scene repeated halfway through Act Two, Peter Parker didn’t have his powers anymore. So, logically, the actor couldn’t do any Spider-Man stuff at the top of the show. Run he must. Mime he must.
Narratively speaking, there was no arguing with that. But “pulling out the stops” was Julie’s strategy for the opening of The Lion King, and it’s one of the great coups de théâtre in the history of Broadway. People cry during the opening of The Lion King.
But that just wasn’t gonna happen here. Not this time. Next musical.
The heavy “Iris Wall” descended, because it was time to tech the loom. The wall was actually two large half-walls with a wedge cut out of each, enabling a diamond-shaped hole to be formed when the walls were spaced a certain distance apart. Behind the walls, while the Geek scene played, the loom swing was being installed and the “weavers” were being hooked up for their big swinging entrance. Julie had always imagined the first four weavers would immediately begin swinging out toward the audience as soon as the Iris Wall opened up. But now stage manager Randall was informing Julie that he couldn’t allow it. Julie was ready to argue the point until Randall explained that each weaver was being held in place by a cord. Should one of the cords accidentally release while the wall was still in place, that dancer would begin to swing helplessly toward the wall, ultimately slamming into it at a speed approaching fifty miles per hour. In other words, that dancer? Could die.
Okay. Can’t argue with that.
Making these sorts of determinations was one of Randall White’s key jobs on the show. The previous year, he was one of the main stage managers overseeing This Is It, Michael Jackson’s mega-concert tour that got canceled when one morning, Michael Jackson never woke up. With close-cropped hair and little room in his day job for joking around, Randall seemed tightly wound. But fair enough—stage-managing was a big responsibility. Nobody wanted his job. We were told privately that on several occasions, Randall used the 10-minute breaks to head out to 43rd Street and scream out his frustrations, startled pigeons be damned. It was disconcerting to hear this. Randall had his shit together like no one I've ever met. He was experienced. If he was screaming to the heavens, maybe more of us should have been as well.
So the Iris Wall parted, and we watched the seven weavers, standing in their long swings made of silk, slowly being pulled backward amid fog, eerie lighting, and mysterious, intensifying music. It didn’t look so bad, really. However—“Hold, please”—there was an issue with the automatic cord release. I was starting to get the feeling we were going to hear “Hold, please” a lot.
Issues with the loom delayed us. Then finding the right lighting for the Queens High School scene took time. “Don, remember what I said about ‘pink’—that’s getting too close to pink!” Julie hated pink. It also seemed as if she could discern gradations of red on the electromagnetic spectrum that no one else could. Humans are “trichromats,” meaning we have three types of cone cells in our eyes. However, it has been surmised that, because of the XX chromosome, some women may possess a fourth variant cone cell, situated between the standard red and green cones. This would make them—like birds—“tetrachromats.” These hypothetical tetrachromats would have the ability to distinguish between two colors a trichromat would call identical.
To date, only a few female candidates for tetrachromacy have been identified. I didn’t tell Julie my suspicions. And I’m not saying she is a tetrachromat. But it sure would explain several of those extra hours in Tech, when Julie had hues finessed to a fare-thee-well. But then again, a writer will fuss over a single word, to the exasperation of a choreographer who will make endless refinements to a dance step, deliberating between differences an engineer can’t even perceive. In other words, an obsession over subtleties may just be an attribute of expertise, rather than evidence of being a mutant. Still, a scientist should check her out.
After four days, we were getting through forty-two seconds of the show for every hour of Tech.
• • •
Brandon Rubendall was one of the dancers. He also played The Lizard. But he excelled as one of the flying spider-men. In fact, he was the one who executed “The Big Jump,” perhaps the show’s signature moment. With Brandon kneeling, the whole back of the floor swiftly rose, elevating him until he was at the top of a twenty-foot-high ramp, raked at a forty-five-degree angle. The lights in the floor then snapped on, revealing the ramp to actually be a skyscraper as seen at a dramatic angle. With the aid of two cables pick-pointed to his hips, Brandon leaped forward, did a back gainer, and landed in a crouch at the very lip of the stage, just inches from the audience sitting in the front row. (The first time this move was performed for Julie, Scott Rogers sat her in one of these prime seats. Fearing Brandon was going to land on top of her, she shrieked like a little girl. It was hard not to.) Upon landing, Brandon stood up and waited for the ramp behind him to lower to a twenty-degree angle. The cables then whipped him upstage as he executed a backward somersault. Landing on all fours, he then began crawling as if he were scuttling down the side of a building.
In the three hours before Tech each day, Scott Rogers and Jaque Paquin programmed and refined the flights in the show. And on the morning of September 26, they were practicing this newly programmed Big Jump with Brandon. The ramp rose. Brandon performed the back gainer. He stood, the ramp lowered, and the cables sent him hurtling upstage. Except . . . the ramp hadn’t yet lowered all the way to its twenty-degree angle. The timing of the cue was just a bit off. Perhaps the ramp was only five degrees off its target, but those five degrees were the difference between being deposited onto the ramp, and being slammed into the ramp.
The force of the landing broke Brandon’s toe, and caused some hairline fracturing in the rest of the foot. By the middle of Tech that day Brandon was cheerily hobbling about on crutches, outfitted in a massive cast already half-covered in Sharpie signatures and drawings of Spider-Man. He was going to be out for several weeks. Randall implemented new protocols, with the temptation no doubt rising again to let loose a primal scream from the sidewalk.
That same week, while Tech continued its glacial progress downstairs, Danny and assistant choreographer Cherice reworked the “D.I.Y. World” number with the dancers in the upstairs rehearsal room. Looking for new steps, Danny encouraged the dancers to improvise, and Gerald Avery—whose inventiveness had already inspired one of the number’s main moves—attempted a flip. He landed on his head. He was out cold. Gerald was taken away on a stretcher that night to a waiting ambulance, his neck immobilized by a brace just in case more undetected damage was done. There had been no culprit but the creative impulse. Nevertheless, “caution” was becoming the new watchword. Even those not dancing or flying were becoming aware that there were potential pitfalls to being an actor in this show.
Literally.
The pit didn’t make such an impression two years ago in George Tsypin’s studio, when little paper figurines stood near the six-inch-deep pit. In real life, the fifteen-foot-deep pit was starting to freak us out. Designed as a platform on top of a large scissor lift, it took up the space the orchestra would have occupied. (The musicians were consigned to two rooms in the back of the basement.) So this sizable amount of square footage was simply part of the stage most of the time. But it was also a “pit lift” that could deliver large props from the basement below. A two-foot-wide “passerelle” had been constructed between the audience and the front of the pit, so that an actor could cross from one side of the stage to the other when the pit was down.
We had now begun to tech the short Geek interlude before the wrestling match. In order for the wrestling ring to be loaded onto the pit lift, the pit needed to remain down for almost two minutes while the Geeks pretended they weren’t delivering lines on the edge of a chasm. We watched T. V. Carpio and Mat Devine cross paths on the passerelle, and suddenly that two-foot width seemed lunatic. Place a foot wrong and you were falling fifteen feet onto unforgiving basement concrete. And this was how it was going to be every night? With adrenaline flowing during the heat of a performance, no one would ever stumble? With eight shows a week, we would have done a hundred shows before we were halfway into our first year. With even just a one percent chance of someone falling, it meant odds were there would be a fall by April. But maybe that was overstating the risk. How about a minuscule .1 percent chance? That still left us with an actor falling into the pit before the end of our third year.
Julie was distressed. How did this feature slip under her radar? Not only was it dangerous, it looked dangerous. Surely it was going to distract an audience from our story. Other shows have utilized a sort-of lid that would automatically slide across the emptiness while the pit was down. But for whatever engineering reasons, the sliding lid wasn’t an option for Turn Off the Dark. None of the actors were crazy about this setup, and some, like Isabel Keating, who played Aunt May, were quite perturbed. And it did no one’s nerves any favors the day the pit lift began to rise from the basement.
“HOLD, HOLD, HOLD,” Randall exclaimed over the mike.
The lift stopped just in time. A member of the crew had been standing in the basement, leaning his head into the lift to check on something, when the hydraulics were suddenly activated. The lift began to rise. A few more seconds and the crew-member’s head would have been a nut in a nutcracker. More protocols were put in place. More curses were choked back. Then tech resumed.
It was now October 5. None of the scenes had been perfected. They were just being sketched in. We had gotten through thirty-seven minutes of the show in fifteen days. We were getting twenty-one seconds closer to the curtain call with every hour of Tech.
• • •
“You’ll keep the show open at least a year, won’t you? No matter what? So that it can find its audience?”
Julie exacted this promise after threading her arm through Michael Cohl’s, while Danny and I accompanied them on a stroll to a Times Square Italian joint during the Tech dinner break. Michael gave her his word. “Absolutely. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to take a year,” he said, and then shrugged. “But then again, maybe it will.”
It had already become a ritual that month. The four of us—producer, choreographer, director, co-bookwriter—would plunge, full of bonhomie, into the Midtown crowd to spend the dinner hour together, chatting about Tech, with Julie and Michael talking airily about all the future projects they would be doing together. Michael only got involved with things that fired him up, whether that meant producing a documentary on folksinging gadfly Phil Ochs or fighting to expand government health care in Canada. The profit margin? For Michael, it was in the mix, but it almost never took precedence. Julie had been looking for just that sort of producer her entire career.
So at the end of dinner, the check arrived. Each night one of the foursome paid for the rest of us. Whose night it was to pay was rigorously enforced. It meant for every four nights, I had three nights of free meals, and one night where I had no choice but to blow through my entire per diem for the week. The staff, the crew, the cast—they were all receiving weekly salaries. The “creatives,” on the other hand, don’t get paid until performances begin.
I had gone over seven months now with hardly any income because I had been working exclusively on Spider-Man. And every week I sent most of my per diem back to my family, as if I were a migrant worker working the orchard circuit. My shirts were getting holes in them but I didn’t have the funds to replace them. It was driving Julie to distraction, and one day she slinked up to me, jabbed her hand into one of the holes, and yanked down until half my shirt was in shreds. But I kept wearing the shirt anyway.
“But promise me when we open,” said Julie, “when you’re rich—”
“I’ll buy a raft of shirts, I promise.”
I was going to make a million dollars off of Spider-Man.
“Oh, even more than that,” assured confident colleagues. Was it possible that I was actually going to be out of debt before the end of the year? That seemed . . . just . . . preposterous. But Julie swore it was going to happen.
In the meantime, lunches and breakfasts were out of the question. I borrowed an awl from a stagehand to put another hole in my belt. Julie was losing weight too. She was simply forgetting to eat, to go outside even. There were too many details to work out during breaks: The inflatable Bonesaw McGraw kept leaking. The walls of Peter’s bedroom were too heavy for the puppeteers. And then there was the bed.
After Uncle Ben died in his arms, Reeve was supposed to stagger in a daze toward his bed and sing “Rise Above.” How would the bed get there? It was a remote-controlled bed with concealed wheels and motored by a friction drive mechanism. It could putter to the precise spot you needed it.
So as Reeve sang in an outpouring of bitterness and grief, the bed trundled onstage.
When the ones who run the firehouse . . .
The bed stopped short, and then inexplicably wheeled stage left.
Are the ones that start the fires . . .
Reeve was singing directly to the memory of Uncle Ben, groping for answers to a senseless death. The bed, meanwhile, was making a three-point turn. Reeve would have really liked to sit on that bed, but it was heading downstage now, on a diagonal. Reeve followed it, as he honored his murdered uncle:
And you said rise above!
Open your eyes up! . . .
The bed finally looked like it was parked. So, still singing, Reeve began to sit, but there was no bed underneath him, because it had just lurched backward. Julie grabbed the God Mike.
“Can we try this again, please?”
A solemn piano vamp accompanied Reeve walking downstage with heavy tread.
When the ones who run the firehouse—
The bed meanwhile inched forward. Then zipped forward, missing its mark. I could hear Julie mutter, “What the—? Who’s controlling this?”
And you said rise above! . . .
The bed backed up a little. And then a little more. Reeve was spiking the high notes with lacerating regret. Julie eyed the bed.
Open your—
The bed zoomed forward.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake—!”
“Hold, please.”
Julie asked Rob Bissinger what the deal was. Rob reported: “There might be something wrong with the remote control. But we suspect it’s the wheels. They’re having a hard time with the crevices in the floor.”
The bed required the sort of solution NASA engineers devised for the Mars Rover to get over rubble. The bed was sent to the shop. Money would be spent.
I had a dream one night that week that Tech was going so slowly, we were beginning to witness creatures evolving onstage, as if we had shifted into a geologic time frame. There were days, however, when we were positive the show was going to be a mega-smash because everything once in our heads was now happening right there onstage. Look! The buildings were lit as if it were dawn in heaven. And now the floors were rising, and Brandon Rubendall’s replacement—Kevin Aubin—was set to do the Big Jump.
The drums kicked in, the guitars howled, and Kevin launched into the air. After he landed, the tilted skyscrapers straightened, the lights bathed the set in violets and reds, and Kevin was sent backward toward the fully lowered ramp.
“WHOO!” shouted Julie. Meanwhile, right behind her, Stan Lee was one big grin. That’s right—Stan Lee himself. About to turn eighty-eight, he showed up the evening of October 6 in his leather jacket and aviator glasses, looking more hale and with-it than any octogenarian had a right to be.
And now he was watching the stage turn to strange sumptuous purples as Kevin Aubin was lifted straight up twenty feet and swung off stage right, with skyscrapers gliding toward the center of the stage before leaning in a variety of unexpected angles. Another Spider-Man zipped across on a cable. And all the while, the entire Upstage Cityscape Backdrop (actually one huge dial) turned around in circles to give us all vertigo. It was all just so cool.
“WHOO!” exclaimed a bunch of us.
Blinding reds shifted to trippy sepias as still another Spider-Man swooped stage left to stage right near the front of the stage.
The aerialist got a nice long “WHOOOO!” from Julie.
“. . . And hold.”
While we were whooing it in the orchestra seats, Randall was in his box sweating bullets. Losing years off his life. Strategizing just how he or anyone was going to make it through this whole number without stopping. Without dying.
We did make it through other sequences that night, including several featuring Chris Tierney, who was assigned the swinging Spider-Man role known as “the hero flyer” because it had the most difficult aerial parts.
“I’ve trained a lot of people on the wires over the years, but I’ve never seen someone take to it as naturally as Chris,” marveled Scott Rogers. Chris Tierney had a photograph of himself as a toddler in a Spider-Man costume. It was a dream for him to swing around the theatre, and you could tell by that extra little panache he put into his moves. Yes, we only got through two minutes of stage time that night. (We were conditioned by now to not expect more than that.) But when Chris Tierney swung over our heads at fifty miles per hour, we were all seven-year-olds again, especially eighty-seven-year-old Stan Lee. The “circus” part of our “circus-rock-and-roll-drama” was still on track.
An hour later, in the lobby, Stan Lee was signing the scripts of several starry-eyed actors and dancers, slapping backs, slinging jokes, posing for pictures, and proclaiming for Jake Cohl’s cameras that the show was going to be the most magnificent thing ever. He gave Julie several hugs—“You’re a genius, and I love you,” he said—and then headed out to the limo waiting for him. Did any fanboy want to pick a fight now? We had Stan the Man himself, on camera, giving the show his blessing. If that didn’t inoculate us from the doubts of the doubters, what would?
And yet. These confidence-boosting days alternated with other days. Days where the distance between our ideal and our reality was so vast it was difficult to fathom. Just a few days after Stan Lee’s visit, we had come to the scene where Patrick Page (as Norman Osborn) was supposed to step into a massive DNA something-something contraption, and then emerge through lights and smoke sixty seconds later as the Green Goblin in all his hideous, startling DayGlo glory.
But that didn’t happen. Sixty seconds wasn’t nearly enough time for the quick-change. So we watched Patrick cradling his dead wife, delivering a Shakespearean revenge-tragedy monologue, but meanwhile looking like a guy who took off his shirt and then had a little incident while grilling some steaks.
And there was nothing we could do about it. Come opening night, we were going to be a laughingstock. Julie turned in her seat and looked at me with a strange expression. Then she said, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking and feeling, “Just watching it all disappear down the dreamhole, huh?”
I didn’t say anything. Did she really just intuit the thoughts jackknifing through my head? And did she really just suggest she was thinking them too? That all our aspirations, all our work, were going to be for naught? I don’t know how deep she buried her fears after that day. But she would never say anything like that out loud again.
She tasked the costume department to come up with a solution. Fingers were crossed. And we couldn’t sink too far down in despair anyway because now we were working on the Spider-Man–Goblin climactic battle. And everything Scott Rogers described back in August? His whacked-out plan? We were watching it happen above our heads. Thirty hidden motors were controlling the speed, height, and trajectory of these two dancers wrestling and winging through the air. And it was amazing.
Michael Cohl laughed. “There’s the climax of the show, right there. And we’ve put it at the end of Act One!”
Hah, hah—yeah, it was quite a spectacle. But of course, it wasn’t the climax of the show—we trump it at the end of Act Two with an immense funnel-shaped web that descends from the—oh. Right.
We didn’t have that anymore.
Back at my apartment that night, I thought about what Michael said. Five and a half years earlier, I landed this musical bookwriting gig by writing the very scene we teched tonight—the scene that culminated in the Spidey-Goblin aerial battle. I wrote it as a lark. Took me a night. I of course had no idea at the time how much money and hardware and ingenuity and effort would go into actually rendering the thing. And when I wrote it, I had no notion where it would go in the show. It was a scene that opened with the Goblin singing a takeoff of Rodgers & Hart’s “Manhattan”—“I’ll take Manhattan / And then I’ll flatten / All of Queens . . .”—and ended with the weight of the Steinway dragging Goblin off the side of the building to his death.
The piano was in the scene because in May 2005, instead of going to sleep thinking about baseball or sex, I went to sleep every night fantasizing how not even Fox News could spin President Bush’s assassination as something heroic if it was due to a large piano falling on top of him. Up for this Spider-Man gig the same month, grasping for some musical-theatre-appropriate method for the Goblin to murder the citizens on the street down below, I remembered my nightly sleep aid. And that was why a piano was in the Chrysler Building scene.
So . . . should Michael’s casual comment get some consideration? Could you put the Spider-Man–Goblin Chrysler Building scene and aerial fight at the end of the show? I spent three minutes that night gaming it out. It would mean the Goblin doesn’t die at the end of Act One. Oh. Well that would mean there wouldn’t be a web-fight between Spider-Man and Arachne at the end of the show because Arachne wouldn’t be the main villain of Act Two. So, of course not—you can’t move the Goblin fight. Good. Glad we settled that. I went to sleep that night thinking about sex and baseball.
The last time we had a group sales presentation, it was back in 2009, a few months before David Garfinkle found nothing but lint and mouse droppings in his coffers. Any excitement and goodwill we kindled with those agents at that sneak preview got dampened a year ago. So now, on October 19, a number of sales agents and ticket brokers were filing into the Foxwoods to get wooed anew. A presentation was going to cut into precious Tech time, but we didn’t have a choice—we couldn’t sneeze at the folks who were wondering just how much energy they should put into selling Spider-Man tickets.
The program began with Kevin Aubin performing the Big Jump. Four sales agents sitting in the front row shrieked in fear and delight. So far, so good. Kevin sprung backward, and . . . eesh . . . he landed pretty hard on that ramp. But he seemed okay—he was now scuttling down the ramp, and . . . oh God, was that a grimace flickering across his face? The presentation continued. The sales agents seemed impressed with the stunts. They filed out of the theatre at the end of the demonstration chatting chirpily. Maybe there wasn’t quite the same level of enthusiasm as the 2009 showcase with Bono and Edge. But at least none of them guessed that Kevin Aubin broke both of his wrists right in front of them.
A fluke. The timing of the cue got off again. And maybe the scramble that morning to prep the stage for the presentation upped the odds that something like this would happen. Kevin was sanguine about it—“just one of those things.” Nonetheless, the burden of safeguarding this show was now really weighing heavily on Randall. But he couldn’t quit—no one else could possibly take over his job. Everyone was sick about it—particularly Scott Rogers, and also Jaque Paquin, who had seen his share of accidents in his twenty years at Cirque du Soleil but especially couldn’t stand the “stupid” ones—the ones that got repeated. More safeguards were instituted—this time they were built into the computer program itself. There was no way this screwup was happening again. No way.
Would the incident get leaked? A few days went by. Nothing in the press. Looked like the coast was clear. I didn’t even want to contemplate the sort of hay Riedel would’ve made out of this.
So Tech plodded on at its surreal pace. We were getting through less than three minutes of the show per day. It didn’t feel like we were making theatre so much as stop-action animation. A giant human-spider dove from the mezzanine and hurtled over our heads as we tried to carry on conversations in the murk. Over and over again giant spiders swooped. We had been in this cavern in the near-darkness for thirty-three days. It felt like we were all trapped in a coal mine, on acid.
• • •
Months earlier it was decided that the last scene of the show needed to be set to music. As per Julie’s instructions, orchestrator David Campbell based his arrangement on trip-hop group Portishead’s musical style, attempting to replicate their heroin-fogged, spy-jazz sound. And of all the artistic risks we were taking in the show, going for quasi-operatic recitative in the mode of Portishead between a spider-lady and a superhero as the two leaped about on a net just might have been the riskiest.
The dialogue-ish lyrics sounded shoehorned into the choppy melody lines. Worse, it just didn’t sound like something Edge and Bono would ever write. However, Edge and Bono were finally done with Leg 3 of their tour. They began swinging by the theatre, and I sat down with Edge one day in the upstairs rehearsal room to give him the lowdown on the final scene.
“It’s a fight to the death, but it’s also a mating dance. It should feel intense between Peter and Arachne. Like they belong together. And yet, at the end of it, Peter demands to know where Mary Jane is.”
Edge suggested: “It’s like calling out someone else’s name during rough sex.”
Yes. That was it exactly. “So can you think of a song from U2’s past that could be a model for the scene? Something that sounds like fight music?”
Edge thought for a moment, and then mentioned “Exit” from their 1987 mega-platinum The Joshua Tree. We listened to it together. About a minute and a half before the end of the song, there’s a fantastic guitar solo—raw and relentless. It was just what we were looking for. I took the song to Julie, who was in her orchestra seat waiting for more lights to get programmed.
She stuck in some earbuds. She was into it. She tried some words over the guitar solo: “Love me or kill me! / Love me or kill me!”
Her eyes were shut. She was really concentrating. She turned to me and did that thing people do when they’re wearing headphones—she started shouting, unaware that she didn’t need to shout.
“THIS IS GREAT!!”
Now she was singing louder in the middle of the hushed auditorium, oblivious to how loud she was getting—“LOVE ME OR KILL ME!”
Everyone could hear her now; a director yelling what, after thirty-six days of Tech, sounded like a reasonable request. But she was actually singing Arachne’s soul-sick plea to Peter. It was Arachne’s entire story boiled down to five words.
It was decided that David Campbell’s scoring would be retained for the first half of the scene, but the next minute and a half should be wild U2-sounding rock, with three voices wailing—Arachne’s, Peter’s, and Mary Jane’s.
So the next day, in the small upstairs rehearsal room, a couple of guitarists, a drummer, and a keyboardist were plugging in. These were serious studio musicians—guys who had been playing songs from this show since the 2007 workshop. Bono and Edge had to come up with a song in the next hour. Julie was busy with Tech downstairs, but she had given them their orders: Come up with something as fierce as that solo in “Exit.” So when Bono said to the musicians, “I want something like ‘Cars.’ Do you guys know ‘Cars’?”—eyes squinted and eyebrows cocked.
“ ‘Cars’? You mean . . . Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’?”
Yeah, they knew it. It was a New Wave hit from 1980. It made famous use of the Polymoog synthesizer. Few songs in the universe sound more “1980.” It had that stiff, staccato sort of groove that made it fun to do the robot dance to. If you were eleven years old. Nonetheless, Bono started humming the groove. And keyboardist Billy Jay Stein, looking amused (he tended to look amused), started playing the theme. Bono kept humming, but now he was putting his throat into it. Repeating the groove slowly. Moving his body just a bit. And something in the room shifted. You could feel it. As if, watching and listening to Bono, we all suddenly heard something in “Cars” we had never heard before.
Sex.
Guitarist Matt Beck began to take up the groove. Now Bono was humming another musical phrase over the groove. Edge had his guitar out, and something new and wilder was emerging. And the room was getting loud. Conductor Kimberly Grigsby was smiling in disbelief. She glanced my way—Are you digging what’s happening here? Musical alchemy was what was happening. “Most incredible hour,” Kimberly said afterward, nerves still tingling. Onstage this was going to be a very righteous tune. And yet . . . it wasn’t.
This “Love Me or Kill Me” session was the culmination of all the music—all the multivaried soundscapes—Bono and Edge had generated for the show in the last five years. All the infectious grooves, hummable hooks, moving anthems. And the audiences that began arriving a month later just couldn’t hear it. There were issues—orchestration issues and profound mechanical issues, and mysterious hard-to-nail-down issues that banjaxed the composers’ efforts; killed this enterprise’s whole sonic dimension. And the first inklings of the issues only came to light when the full orchestra was finally assembled and the music was played through sound designer Jonathan Deans’s speaker system in a full auditorium.
The result: Despite demos exhibiting a wide and unpredictable palette, Ben Brantley of the Times said nothing at all about the music when he wrote his review in February. Nothing except that it “blurs into a sustained electronic twang of varying volume, increasing and decreasing in intensity, like a persistent headache.” Not great material to pull for a marquee quote. Except maybe “Intensity! Like!”
Anyway, that was in the future, which was not for us to know. It was the present that we had to deal with. And the present included a new Michael Riedel New York Post article. He broke a story on October 28 with the headline “ ‘Spider-Man’ Safety Scare: Actor breaks both wrists in failed stunt.” I scanned through it that morning with a good idea where all this was heading:
. . . The most expensive and technically complex show ever produced on a Broadway stage. It may also turn out to be the most dangerous . . .
. . . blood-curdling accident . . .
. . . stunt went horribly awry . . .
This was the day it started. The day the heat lamps got turned on. They would take a while to warm up, but eventually they would be glowing something crazy. Within a week, news not only of Kevin Aubin’s wrists, but also Brandon Rubendall’s foot, was out. News would beget news, which would beget scrutiny, which would beget news. The Foxwoods was going to become a fishbowl. Containing a bunch of increasingly stressed-out fish.