So what shall we call the fight between Arachne and Peter? “Last Dance of the Spiders”?
Oh—no—it has to be a tarantella!
A tarantella?
A tarantella! Like Captain Hook in Peter Pan!
I woke up vomiting. It was March 13, 2011. And I had all the symptoms of tarantism except one. In 1370, near the town of Taranto, the first case was recorded. Believed to be caused by the bite of the tarantula, tarantism’s symptoms include vomiting, exhaustion, palpitations, involuntary erections, shameless exhibitionism, acute melancholia, and delirium. I was now experiencing all of these symptoms. Except shameless exhibitionism, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had suddenly gotten the urge to strum on a guitar in my underpants next to that Times Square cowboy. Perhaps having one’s name in ten-foot-tall letters on a billboard in Times Square would count as shameless exhibitionism. But on March 13, I felt so much shame seeing my name up there, I was probably in the clear.
I had been away from my wife and children for seven months. Friends and colleagues had either stormed away from the production, been ditched by the producers, or were in a confused torpor. It was said of tarantism that even the intoxication from alcohol couldn’t bring relief. The only cure (it was said) was music and dancing, which had to be “prolonged and strenuous.” And this was the origin of the tarantella, a galloping dance in 6/8 time—the dance Julie wanted for the end of the show. Arachnologists have now concluded that it wasn’t, in fact, the tarantula that was responsible for the symptoms of tarantism. Rather, it was the malmignatte—a Mediterranean black widow—one of several spider species featuring a female that devours any mates not nimble enough to get away from her after collaborating on a creative endeavor.
Julie Taymor—as Riedel reported—“is said to be hellbent on vengeance.” And in another article he wrote that Julie was “now threatening that if she is forced to go, she’ll take her script with her.” This, of course, would bring down the production.
“Can she do that, Joyce?” I asked my agent.
“Well . . . possibly.”
A month earlier, Joyce explained to me how the typical Dramatists Guild–approved contract worked regarding “approvals” in a musical: In a dispute, all of the “authors” of the musical have a vote—not just the bookwriters, but the lyricists and the composers as well. So if Bono, Edge, and I were all in agreement, we, in theory, could overrule Julie. This seemed like handy information as a last resort, and with my ancient deal memo buried in a file cabinet upstate, I never bothered to confirm that the Spider-Man contract was essentially the same as a standard Guild contract.
It wasn’t.
Julie actually had exclusive approvals over everything in the script—both as the director, and also as the co-bookwriter. Plus—being an author meant she got to approve the selection of the director—which was suddenly no longer a redundant clause. For the first time, I understood why Michael had written a month before about Plan X leading to “lawyers and painful settlements.”
“But—Joyce—what does that mean? What happens if I keep working on a script that she doesn’t approve of?”
The answer was that it would get messy, because my contract also stipulated that I was compelled to fulfill any bookwriting duties as requested by the producers. So no matter what I did and whose stipulations I followed, I was breaking my contract.
But it got even messier. Because neither Julie nor I had actually signed our contracts. We signed “deal memos” years and years before, but the complicated final contracts were still in Lawyerland when rehearsals started, and then everyone got distracted, and then everything got weird, so final versions were never generated for signature. Which now gave Michael Cohl a few more ergs of leverage over both of the original bookwriters. Michael could put the fear in me anytime he wanted (and he did) simply by “innocently” asking, “Have you signed your contract yet?”
Never play poker with this guy.
I was sitting with Michael now—along with Jere and Phil McKinley—in a booth in the back of the Lambs Club. They invited me to this booth-meeting to make a few things clear. Firstly, my back-channel days were over. It was time to get in line. Everything on my mind needed to be directed to Phil and only Phil, and Phil would disperse the information as he saw fit. This included all correspondence with Bono and Edge. No side talks with them.
They assured me that I shouldn’t feel like I was being singled out—new protocols were being put in place across the board. Every department was going to have one representative, and only that representative would present that department’s perspective to Phil. Talk between departments without Phil’s presence was going to be discouraged. There was going to be a tidy chain of command, rigorously enforced, and this would cut down on all the breakdowns of communication that occurred in the ancien régime.
I nodded into my glass of ice water. The wooziness, the clamminess, it was all coming back. They’ve just described a lovely recipe for dysfunction.
Secondly, “Glen, we want you to be open to new ideas.”
“Of course.”
Phil said that—just as an example—he may want to open the second act with the Chrysler Building and Goblin, with Spider-Man swinging in, and—
“But, Phil, the Tech for that would be—”
“Well that’s another thing, Glen,” interrupted Jere. They all wanted me to stick to my job description and stop worrying my pretty little head about Tech issues. They already had experts who would tell Phil what would or wouldn’t work, based on—
I had stopped listening.
Just before this meeting, my wife had called me, updating me on how life was going back home. It was all good. Except the basement had flooded, and our water heater was dead.
“It’s a shotgun wedding,” said Phil, “but I’m sure you and Roberto will find a—”
Yeah yeah, a “rhythm.” More words about Roberto needing his space to write; Roberto being owed the chance to get a feel for the material; Roberto having some good ideas—
My family has no water. I need to find a plumber.
“. . . and so once Roberto is finished with his pass of Act One, you’ll of course have plenty of opportunity for notes—”
Wait. Wha—
“Roberto’s going to take this week to write his Act One.”
“Oh—so should I start writing my Act One too? Because according to the schedule, the Act One is due at the end of the week, so maybe if we both wrote versions and then—”
Phil repeated what he just said, with a bit of testy emphasis.
“Roberto’s taking this week to write Act One.”
I wouldn’t find out for weeks that Roberto and Phil had already attended the show together. And that Phil, subsequently, made some decisions about what to do with the vestigial writer. But I could already tell where this was going, and if Phil went down that road, I was going to make everyone very miserable. I would pull at these pillars and bring this temple down on all of us. Already I could tell “Sane, collaborative, and competent” was going to be a heavy lift.
I dashed off an e-mail of concern and conciliation to Phil and he responded, “If I gave you the impression that you were not to write scenes then I’ve been misunderstood. I simply wanted to give Roberto an opportunity to catch up to the show.”
I was being played. But I’d deal with it. At least now I had it in writing from Phil that I’d be penning scenes. Phil also offered his opinion of Bono and Edge’s original music demos for the show that I sent him earlier in the day. Before hearing the demos, Phil had been expressing just how underwhelmed he was by our composers’ output. But he heard Edge’s GarageBand demos and got religion:
“I have to say, I feel like I’m hearing the music for this show for the very first time. It’s a beautiful score and the fact is we are not hearing it in any way, shape, or form based on these demos.”
There we go. If Phil can find a way to show off these songs to better effect, we’ll be golden.
An as-long-as-it-takes meeting to beat out the plot with Phil and his two bookwriters was scheduled for the next day. The script would change more in the next forty-eight hours than in the last four months. The last four years. Roberto wrote to his collaborators late that night, “As Stan Lee says, ‘Face front, true believers!’ ”
If Stan Lee was being quoted in e-mails, this really was a new team.
• • •
Phil had a lot of little-people stories. If the years Julie Taymor spent immersed in Indonesian culture were her lodestar for approaching art and life, Phil’s were the years he spent in the circus. To illustrate to Roberto and me the importance of staying flexible as we began the script process, he brought up the time he devised a procession for Ringling Bros. that was led by a little person followed by an elephant with a tiger balancing on the elephant’s back. Phil recounted that before he could implement this scenario, one of the trainers told Phil that the procession was a bad idea.
“But why?” asked Phil. “It’s a great image. You’ve got the contrast—the short midget, the big elephant—”
“Yeah,” said the trainer. “Except the tiger will see the midget as food.”
So Phil, being artistically flexible, decided not to do the little-person-elephant-tiger combo after all.
Nice parable. Point taken.
However, Phil’s story about the incident at a European circus in which a little person was accidentally swallowed by a hippopotamus was the most harrowing thing I had ever heard, with no apparent lesson to be gleaned other than you shouldn’t devise trampoline acts involving both trotting hippopotami and little people.
“He got a standing ovation, though,” Phil recounted. “The crowd didn’t realize that getting eaten wasn’t part of the act.”
Set pieces catching fire, husband-mauling bears—I found all these stories assuaging, as they seemed to suggest perhaps Michael and Jere had found the right creative consultant for Turn Off the Dark. What was needed most was someone who wasn’t easily daunted.
So Phil, Roberto, and I began the script meetings in a small room in the PRG offices, where Tony Adams once ran Hello, and where David Garfinkle still labored away on . . . stuff, at a desk hidden from view. Later in the day, we moved the discussions to Phil’s newly rented apartment. (Phil had temporarily relocated from Iowa for this job. He wore his Midwestern cred proudly.) After nine hours, we had dismantled and rebuilt all of Act One. It was all work I did just the week before with the Canadian, but with differences.
For one, the Geeks got the axe. Almost no aspect of the show had garnered quite as much scorn from the professional and amateur critics as the Geeks, and Roberto and Phil were positive they wouldn’t be missed. And now there was a chance to replace their scenes with character-deepening dialogue with, say, Uncle Ben or Mary Jane. Almost as importantly, cutting the Geeks would signal to the critics that we were serious about this overhaul. And the last strike against the Geeks: They were “principal performers,” so cutting them would save the production over a half-million dollars a year in salaries.
So four actors (including Alice Lee, who was hired to play Miss Arrow when T. V. Carpio became Arachne) were about to lose their jobs. After performing their roles over a hundred times, they were going to be sitting in the audience instead of taking a bow on opening night. (And actually, three of the four would end up deciding they had better things to do that night.) The stage-left area where they hung out during the show would become inaccessible—used as space for a large speaker instead. Peter Parker was going to sing “Bouncing Off the Walls” alone, instead of being accompanied by four spastic backup singers. And the actors’ dressing rooms—with their mood lighting, computer games, and shelves of comic books—would be converted into soulless prop-repair rooms.
The rest of the day in Phil’s apartment was spent using sentences like “I’m bumping on that plot point,” and “Yeah, I’m bumping on it too,” to express that an idea didn’t make sense yet. Television-writer-room speak.
Our mandate from Marvel and the producers was, yes, to “turn off the dark.” If the show was going to sell volumes of tickets, it needed to be family-friendly, and that meant it needed to be accessible. Sunny. Phil took this mandate to heart, often literally. “Picture This” got its title and refrain temporarily changed to “Sunny Days.” And he wanted different makeup for Arachne—less kabuki, more . . . pretty. Peter Parker was going to lose his suspenders and start looking normal. Mary Jane’s father would no longer be an abusive drunk, just a muddled one.
And Phil wanted the violence in “Bullying by Numbers” toned down. “Frankly,” he reiterated later, “the more we can make this a number about kids having ‘fun’ bullying Peter, we’ll have a better launch to the show as opposed to beginning a show with a suicide, a beating, and two dysfunctional family arguments.” Lyrics like “We’ll burst your nose” got changed to “We’ll punch your nose.” Less graphic, I guess.
And lines like “Peter Peter beats his peter” were right out. It was a lyric currently sung in counterpoint by the high school girls. For teen cred, it couldn’t compete with Spring Awakening’s “Totally Fucked,” but at least it was something for the adolescents in the audience. But Phil wasn’t having it. He knew the Midwestern family of four was going to be our bread and butter, and he wanted them to feel safe.
“And the choreography where it looks like the bullies are jerking off? Come on. There’s no place for that in a family show like this.”
He had a point, and I wasn’t about to get on a pro-masturbation soapbox.
“And these lyrics by the bullies in ‘D.I.Y. World’?—‘Do yourself, yeah, do it to yourself ’? They’re out too.”
Geez—how much masturbation did we have in this show?
And most of all, to brighten the show, they wanted it clear from the top that MJ and Peter were into each other. Our leads should be kissing before the end of the first act. I rolled up my sleeves—the Canadian and I had already come to the opposite conclusion.
“It’ll suck out all the dramatic tension! If we make it too easy for the audience—”
“See, Glen?” clucked Phil. “That’s why your show didn’t work. You guys wanted to make it so hard for the audience.”
Roberto gave me a look. “Why are you being so weird about this?”
I relented. It was out of my hands. In Sardinia, the cure for tarantism required burying the victim of the spider bite up to his neck in a heap of dung. If he laughed while seven women danced around the dung, it was a sign of recovery. If he couldn’t laugh, then the prognosis was death.
Start laughing, fellow.
Roberto sent me a note at the end of the night.
Hitting the hay, my friend, but wanted to tell you how incredibly jazzed I am about this. It was actually . . . kind of . . . really . . . sort of . . . fun today, wasn’t it? Thanks for welcoming me aboard.
I guess we were all competent, collaborative, and (more or less) sane that day. Roberto and Phil seemed genuinely surprised that I was willing to alter the show. So much so, that the next day Roberto would ask me, “If you disagreed with Julie so much from the very beginning, why didn’t you just quit?”
“Quit?”
Hell, I was almost fired. And then I turned my radio dial to her frequency and never looked back. Quit? What, and give up the chance to learn from a master? Would Roberto have quit? Or would Julie have fired him before he had the chance, like she said she would have done after reading his notes?
“Quit?” I said to my new cowriter. “But there was no proof she was wrong. In fact, it seemed like there was plenty of proof over the years that she was right.”
No, the more pertinent question was this, Roberto: With so many things destined to be decided in these next two days that I so fiercely disagreed with, why wasn’t I quitting now?
• • •
The fourteen-hour-long meeting to remake Act Two the next day was more contentious. The changes to the script were far more extensive than what the Tech staff had signed off on with Plan X. These two didn’t come here to do a little remodeling. This was a gut renovation.
Perhaps the unkindest cut was the excision of “Think Again”—Arachne’s hard-driving song of vengeance that began with the startling sight of Arachne hurtling down from the balcony. I argued until I was hoarse, but it was no use. And it unsettled me because I could feel this cut. It felt like, well, a mastectomy.
“MUTATE OR DIE,” the Goblin says as he reveals his plans for a new world order to the terrified reporters at the Bugle. It was the Goblin’s catchphrase in the new script, and it would become the motto for our entire endeavor for the next three months. Everyone had to get with the program. Turn Off the Dark had to mutate or die. (Very quickly, people began to refer to the version onstage as Spider-Man 1.0, as if it were first-generation software in bad need of an upgrade.)
But Phil and Roberto clearly didn’t understand yet that Turn Off the Dark wasn’t a show, it was a machine built to teach humility. They couldn’t begin to comprehend that I had already seen it all. As the history of the show unfolded, I was there. I was the Ancient Mariner. Or Forrest Gump. Either way, they needed to heed my words of caution. If they started diverging too far from Plan X, the Tech staff would balk.
I honestly couldn’t figure out who these guys were—swaggering revolutionaries putting their feet up in the empty palace of the swept-out rulers? Or sincere servants of the production, unaware of their own baggage and biases? When Phil learned that Bono and Edge’s new song for the top of Act Two was called “A Freak Like Me Needs Company,” his eyes lit up. He just had an epiphany.
“No, no, no—it isn’t company. It’s family. ‘A Freak Like Me Needs Family’!”
He wanted me to e-mail Bono and Edge immediately to inform them of the title change. Because—Phil explained—the Goblin didn’t want to feel like an outcast. More than anything in the world, what he wanted was family. I listened to Phil, trying to understand why this song title was getting him so animated. This didn’t just seem like a plot point to Phil. There was a fervor in his voice as he spun this new scenario.
“I think Phil’s a lonely man,” I said to Roberto as we left Phil’s apartment late that night. “I think he sees himself as a freak who needs family.”
Roberto rolled his eyes. “Get some sleep, Glen Berger.” He was right—this was the last night for that. Roberto was assigned Act One, I was assigned Act Two, and a first draft was due in five days.
And maybe I was just projecting. Maybe I was the lonely man. Where was everyone? It felt like the last episodes of I, Claudius—where were all the characters who once filled these halls? Teese Gohl and Martin McCallum; David Garfinkle and Michael Curry; Dodd Loomis, Jonathan Deans, Danny Ezral—
Yeah . . . where was Danny?
Instead of sleeping, I stayed up until three in the morning updating Danny about the goings-on. He was currently in exile, waiting for the call that would bring him back from Los Angeles. It was a call that would never come if Phil had anything to do with it. And Phil had plenty to do with it. He had begun searching for a new choreographer. Phil would say it wasn’t his choice to cut Danny loose. But he seemed relieved to not have to deal with such an influential member of the old team.
The official word was that Danny was being let go because the stage managers and crew told Michael Cohl that they were confident Plan X could be implemented in the time allotted, but only if Julie and Danny weren’t in the theatre. Apparently Danny had used up all of his Goodwill Points too. Michael also had it on good authority from his spy that the worn-out dancers didn’t want Danny back because they were worried Danny would take the opportunity to rework all the dances again.
“Who’s the spy, Michael?” I asked.
“Guess. He’s in plain sight. He’s there all the time, and everyone talks to him freely in a way they never would with the management.”
I couldn’t think of who it could be, even though it turned out I had talked to him as much as anyone: Jacob Cohl. Not only our documentarian, but also Michael Cohl’s son. In two weeks’ time, nearly all the dancers would recant, desperate for Danny to return. But it would be far too late by then.
Meanwhile, the actors were meeting with their union—Actors’ Equity—to explore their options. Did they really have to keep rehearsing just because they were still “technically” in previews? Weren’t they being exploited? Couldn’t they get some vacation time? Talks between Equity and the producers would be ongoing—this was all rather new territory.
• • •
When we didn’t open on February 7, it was “Fauxpening Night.” March 15 was unofficially dubbed “Nopening Night.” There was no party. The next day, Roberto and Phil introduced themselves to the cast before the show, and Phil whipped out for the first time (but hardly the last) his favorite rallying cry from his circus days: “Let’s make the impossible possible!”
Meanwhile, Bono and Edge were busy working on “A Freak Like Me Needs Company” (they didn’t go for Phil’s proposed title change). They asked me to come down to the near-empty studio that evening and check out what they had so far. Bono was lying on a ratty couch in the middle of the recording room improvising Goblin lines into a handheld mike over an endless groove. He was in character: a dissipated lounge lizard shaking off last night’s bender and warming up for some new kicks. He was scatting, hacking up tar, yawning, cackling into the mike: “Bring out the DANCING GIRLS! The crossroads of the world needs a little resurrection. Heh, heh. It used to be REALLY ROTTEN ’ROUND HERE! Now, can’t even BUY ME AN ERECTION! Hoh, hoh, hoh. Sorry, darlin’.”
We’ll clean it up for Phil, not a problem.
Slurring like he was three sheets to the wind, with stained-silk-bathrobe bravado he sang, referring to our show’s troubles:
If you’re looking for a night out on the town,
You just found me. . . .
I’m a sixty-five-million-dollar circus tragedy . . .
He shifted into a Tom Waits growl, slinging extemporized beat poetry and pausing every time a trio of Edge’s multitracked vocals were heard singing in falsetto, “A freak like me needs . . . com-pa-ny.”
After those twenty-two hours of script meetings with Phil and Roberto, where it felt like the show was turning into a Sunny Delight juice product, this felt like something else entirely.
And then Elvis Costello appeared in the studio, wearing a pair of little red glittery devil horns. Right—it’s March 17—St. Patrick’s Day. He passed out extra pairs of horns to his Irish compatriots. Costello. I threw out my back camping out for tickets to this man’s Blood & Chocolate tour. But I kept my mouth shut about all that. Bono invited Elvis to listen to a few cuts from the unfinished Spider-Man album. Steve Lillywhite played the first track, and all the Irish-inflected banter in the empty studio stopped. Elvis listened intently, hardly moving until the songs were over. And after he said some very complimentary things, and headed out into the night, Bono clucked and said, “Yeah—I heard the songs through his ears, and there are some things we need to fix.”
And that’s what you get with a community of artists. Beyond the compulsory slagging off, there’s also this exchange of ears. An artist is able to step into the shoes of anyone else and get a new perspective on their work, but not every artist is eager to take such a step. It requires a willingness to be self-critical. These guys in the devil horns had it.
I knew I was going to pay for that visit to the studio. Although it allowed me to get a better bead on Goblin’s character, I lost a half-day of writing. My fears were realized when Roberto, Phil, and I convened on Sunday. Roberto had a completed draft of Act One, and my Act Two was patchy. In fact, Roberto had done a very thorough revision of the act. He prepped us with apologies and acknowledgments of the scenes’ shortcomings. But like a true dick, I ignored every one of Roberto’s caveats. Where was the intensity? Where were the attempts to generate moments of transcendence? I figured Phil would instantly see that he put too much faith in Roberto, and he—of this I was certain—would assign the next draft of the first act to me.
And of course, I was wrong. Phil was excited by Roberto’s effort. So much so that he was assigning all of the MJ-Peter dialogue in the second act to Roberto. I smiled. I clomped home. And I started writing e-mails. I urged Bono and Edge to read the script immediately. Because maybe it was just ego, exhaustion, and churlishness making me think Phil and Roberto were taking the characters down the road to Vanillaville. I mean, really—jokes about Applebee’s?! I told the composers I was ready to resign. “Probably within the week.” I really was ready to quit, and—to my surprise—it felt good to say it. In fact, I was hoping Edge and Bono responded with a shrug, because then I’d be done. But, nope, Edge called. After having read the script, he said: “I needed to pour myself a drink.” He was going to send “a howitzer of an e-mail” to Michael and Jere. Bono said similar words in a call an hour later.
Michael Cohl, of course, was sharing my fantasies about being free of the show. From the threats coming from Julie’s camp about litigation, to the complaints from his composers, it was the most tempting thing in the world to just close the show down and write the damn thing off come tax time. He told me “we either get something good done within a week or it’s over.”
Roberto, being a dramatist and, in his words, “a student of human nature,” could tell I was annoyed. So in a small office at PRG the next day he promised that the final draft would not be cheesy. It would be taut, entertaining, and—by trading pages back and forth until opening night—it would be of one voice.
“Be totally frank with me, Glen. I have no ego in this. I swear. Anything you want changed, change it! It’s done!”
I was swayed. I think we even hugged. I didn’t want Roberto demoted. As Edge wrote me later that week: “I think our prospects for success rest squarely on the new book. If you and Sacasa can thread the needle, I think we’re in business.”
Then adding: “No pressure!”
• • •
Friday, March 25. As the actors performed for yet another preview audience that evening, echoes of a Turn Off the Dark from a parallel universe sounded in their heads. Because that afternoon, they crowded into the conference room at PRG for their first read-through of Turn Off the Dark 2.0.
There’s always a nervous excitement in the room on the first day a new script is read. But this cast had already had that day. Seven months ago. This felt a little too much like attending the wedding of a groom’s second marriage, with no one wanting to talk about the spectacular failure of his first marriage. In addition to the nervous excitement, there was awkwardness. Julie’s absence was conspicuous. As was the absence of our four Geeks. Our Jameson, Michael Mulheren, gave me a big hug and said, “Just so you know—we all think it’s awful what Julie has been saying about you.” He was sitting down at the conference table before I processed his words, and now it was too late to ask him to elaborate.
Stephen Sondheim, in the lyrics compendium I had gotten for Christmas, nailed the source of my ambivalence about the new script:
[The content] has to be clear . . . but it must also be mysterious. . . . Something should remain unsaid, something just beyond our understanding. Of course, if it’s only mysterious, it’s condescending and pretentious and soon monotonous. . . . But if it’s only clear, it’s kitsch.
That was it. Our new show was kitsch.
And yet today in the reading there were laughs at lines that hadn’t seemed funny the day before (and they didn’t seem funny today either, but every new laugh just seemed to further prove that I was being a grouch). There was a delighted shock from the actors at discovering the sheer extent of the rewrite. And they had every reason to be shocked—it had been only a week and a half since Roberto, Phil, and I met for our first script meeting. And you could feel the morale of the company lifting as the scenes progressed; you could see hope flicker behind the actors’ eyes—maybe they wouldn’t be out of a job come June after all.
Patrick Page (who had seen his part expand more than any other) summed up the consensus of the actors afterward: “It’s clearer, funnier, and shorter.” Ken Marks (Uncle Ben), after first taking time to sing the praises of Julie’s vision, admitted that the original script and directing style were something of a straitjacket, with the skills of the actors suffocating under layers of “style.” Reeve, psyched, said, “It feels more like a hit, doesn’t it?” And Matthew James Thomas took me aside for hardly any words other than a very italicized “Yes.”
But amid all the positivity in that PRG conference room, T. V. Carpio was undisguisedly miserable. She was miserable for her dear friend Julie; she was miserable because her part had been cut down to a sliver of what it had been; and she was miserable because—as far as she could tell—the new script sucked. If Phil couldn’t find a way to change her attitude, it was going to be a problem.
Meanwhile, Danny Ezralow was beginning to suspect a new choreographer was coming on board, and he was seriously contemplating having his union, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), pull all of his work from the show. All the dance and all the aerial work. The loom. Everything. If Michael Cohl and Phil couldn’t find a way to get through to him, it was going to be a problem.
Phil wanted to begin rehearsals on Tuesday, and so he wanted the actors to have a relatively final version of the first act in two days’ time. Even if Roberto was totally chill with having any line in the script changed to my satisfaction, Phil was a different story. In the name of giving these actors something they could start memorizing, he wanted to start locking this thing down.
And that was going to be a problem.