Being the true and terrible story of Julie Taymor's doomed attempt to put Spidey on the stage. First published in Empire Magazine, March, 2015
Overture
One day, sometime in the Spring of 2002, an Irish impresario by the name of Tony Adams, a man who was apparently blessed with even more of the luck than is usual in his countrymen, took a call from New York’s Marvel Comics, the venerable purveyor of finest quality superheroes, arch villains and pulpy mayhem since 1961. Marvel, on the cusp of its recent transformation into a multi-media giant and then basking in the outrageous success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie, which was well on its way to making a billion dollars worldwide, was looking for ways to further capitalise on their property’s newly invigorated popularity. The idea of a Broadway musical had been floated years before, but the success of Disney’s The Lion King, a theatrical behemoth that, by the time of this writing, has taken in nearly $5 billion in worldwide box office receipts, had shown that suitable studio properties, if properly handled, could garner both critical respectability and vast, decades-long, revenue streams, and provided a new and irresistible impetus to put the story of the teenage crime-fighter on the stage. Adams, who had started his professional career as John Boorman’s assistant on Deliverance, was a canny choice to midwife such a project having worked both in film, he had produced Hollywood movies, notably the Pink Panther series, and on Broadway. Adams went to his thick Rolodex and began working his extensive Hibernian network. Soon he had all the elements in place. And Marvel was delighted.
Much will happen in the way of turmoil and catastrophe in the subsequent decade. There will be deaths and hospitalisations and accidents and sackings and fights and amputations and lawsuits and staggering amounts of cold hard cash will be lost forever. But for the moment let us look in wonder at what Adams has pulled off. The ‘book’, that is the musical’s story and dialogue, would be by screenwriting Oscar-winner Neil Jordan. The director? Why that’ll be The Lion King’s muse Julie Taymor making her second, no doubt equally spectacularly successful, contribution to the Broadway stage. Oh and the songs? Well, they’ll be by Bono and The Edge, actually. Just the two founding members of the biggest stadium rock act on the planet. And all this talent is to be deployed in the service of one of the world’s most enduringly popular characters; a boy-arachnid beloved worldwide and across four generations, from Boomers to Millennials.
What on earth could go wrong?
Act I: Hubris
“Spider-Man Investors Shaken by Projected $60 Million Loss” - New York Times, November 19, 2013
“It’s not like we were involved in anything criminal,” sighs Glenn Berger, who replaced Neil Jordan, one of the Broadway brouhaha’s earliest casualties, as co-writer. “I mean, all we were doing was trying to put on a play.”
It is late January 2014 and Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, now without any doubt the biggest, most spectacular Broadway flop of all time, has finally taken its terminal curtain call. There is in Berger’s voice a certain sense of sadness mixed with relief; the kind of slightly weary emotion evoked after a familiar and loved but long-ailing family pet is finally put out of its misery. “It really was everything that you get with a closing night anyway, “he continues. “But really I was trying to figure out, not just from simply a career point of view but from a very cosmic point of view . . . what was that? What was that all about?”
There have of course been other Broadway disasters, more than a few of them having their roots in the movies, and tales of them, often well burnished are told with the morbid enthusiasm that film fans like to reminisce on the likes of Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate. Take Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a 1996 adaptation of the Blake Edwards box-office smash that was so irredeemably awful that its producer announced, after a mere four performances, that “rather than subject the theatre-going public to an excruciatingly boring evening” he would close the production with immediate effect. Nick and Nora – a Dashiell Hammett noir to music which featured a memorable sequence in which a chorus line kicked a corpse downstage – closed to vitriolic reviews after nine, count ‘em, nine, performances in 1991. There was the adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank in which the actress essaying the role of the incarcerated teen was so inept that when the Nazis hammered at the door at the end of act one the audience supposedly chorused “She’s in the attic!” Then there was the infamous production of Carrie, co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed by its co-artistic chief Terry Hands no less, that closed within a month and lost the then unimaginable sum of $8 million for its backers.
But Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was a very different species of thespian disaster. While these other examples were short-lived – entertaining side-shows that arrived out of nowhere and departed just as fast, the jeering of critics and cat-calls of enraged theatregoers ringing in their ears – this was a high-visibility fiasco enacted over years; a car crash played out in the most pellucid ultra-slow motion such that every new misfortune could be dissected; each new moment of calamity savoured by connoisseurs of the artistic epic fail.
The saga of how Spider-Man arrived on, and then departed, the Broadway stage begins, oddly enough, not with Marvel but in the boardroom of the Walt Disney Company in the early 1990s, a strange result of the creative tension between Disney chiefs Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg (a tension which would later explode and almost devour the whole company). Disney, without a vast back catalogue of films it could leverage, had always been open to creative ways of exploiting its limited assets. It had been the first, after all, to get into the theme park game which, in the late 80s and early 90s, it had aggressively expanded internationally into Japan and Europe while its retail operation, in the form of Disney Stores, spilled onto the worlds’ high-streets seemingly uncontrollably, like water from the Sorcerer’s cauldron in Fantasia. Katzenberg, an inveterate lover of musicals, had always had his eye on the New York stage as a possible further expansion of the Disney brand. He lobbied hard for Beauty And The Beast to be given a theatrical adaptation. Eisner, his boss, was less enthusiastic, but finally caved, having seen an opportunity beyond a mere one-off production not only investing in a show but cannily in real estate too, buying the theatre and then a second. The show was a hit, and when a few years later, The Lion King became a multiplex smash, and with the Broadway infrastructure in place, a proposal for a live-action adaptation was eagerly embarked upon. Julie Taymor, a director famous among the theatrical cognoscenti for her visually innovative productions of Shakespeare but a virtual stranger to the commercial demands of Broadway, was hired to direct.
During the production of The Lion King Taymor worked under the strict, often day-to-day, management of Disney’s creative executives: individuals with not only a deep and abiding knowledge of the characters but also a hefty financial stake in them. (Katzenberg’s hands-on enthusiasm even resulted in his being banned from giving notes directly to the cast.) Taymor’s more outlandish ideas soon ran aground on these corporate breakwaters. Originally, for instance, she had intended the third act to be set in Las Vegas where, King Kong style, Simba was to have become the main draw in a tacky Vegas show. It was a less than subtle ironic commentary on precisely the kind of commercial exploitation in which she was presently a key participant. Eisner nixed the idea immediately and instructed her to stick to the story. When she proposed blending puppets with human actors, a daring idea that she finally pulled off triumphantly, the Disney bosses flew in for a presentation before they would give their blessing. The finished musical was certainly a powerful expression of Taymor’s artistic vision, but it was one made in the service of corporate property and under the close, nervous, supervision of the corporation in question.
Almost entirely the opposite would be true with Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark. It is difficult to find anyone involved in its conception with much more than passing previous interest in the character at all, let alone the kind of fan devotion that had been key to the franchise’s recent celluloid rebirth (Sam Raimi’s movie adaptation was, he told Empire at the time, the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition). Marvel's top brass was, with one early exception, notable mainly for their absence. Nevertheless, the highly visible success of the Disney project hung over Spider-Man from the start. “It was never a sense that we needed to top it or that Julie had to make lightning strike twice,” recalls Berger. “It was more sort of damaging in the sense that, well she did it before so of course she’ll do it again.”
Thus the seeds of Spider-Man’s ultimate failure are sown very early on in the creative process. While Tony Adams was courting Julie Taymor as a potential director she, unsure that she could find anything in the story that would fire her artistic curiosity, had ordered up a stack of Spider-Man comic books. And there, in a few panels in a 1984 Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars comic, was the first appearance of a character called Arachne. In the comics, Arachne is a codename taken by Julia Carpenter, a government-created female superhero of subsequently fluid allegiances. She is a minor character at best in the Marvel pantheon, but in Ancient Greek mythology, of which Taymor is an enthusiastic student, Arachne is a human weaver of great talent who, arrogantly denying that some of her artistic skill is a gift from the gods, is cursed by the goddess Athena to become a spider, and forever spin beautiful webs. Now, this was more like it! This played to her conception of herself as, before and above anything else, an artist. (“All art, all the time,” is a common refrain from people who have worked with her).
The story that she conceived and which Berger wrote dispenses with the familiar origins tale of Peter Parker, Green Goblin and dodgy serum in the first act – which climaxes with a spectacular aerial battle and the early demise of Green Goblin – and introduces a newly imagined Arachne, a kind of phantasmagorical dream-weaver, who at first creates Spider-Man as a work of art and then becomes insanely jealous of him, as the key villain in the second. (Granted, this is just one reading of Act Two which by most accounts was virtually indecipherable.) The heart of the story from this perspective was not the magnified anxieties and wish fulfillments of a teenage boy, represented as a disposable pop culture artefact, but of the eternal plight of the artist, and arguably by extension about Taymor herself. Imagine explaining this to a twelve-year-old Spider-Man aficionado and you get a feel for what a profoundly misconceived idea it is.
And far from no one noticing the fatal flaws in the show’s very conception at least two people were very clear about what they, or rather she was. Neil Jordan had fled the project precisely because of Taymor’s insistence on placing Arachne at the centre of the show. At early creative meetings at Bono’s house in the South of France, matters came to a head. “ I thought she was out of her mind,” he is reported as having said. “She kept going on about this Arachne thing, I thought this is insane. It’s just a comic book and so I said look, this isn’t for me.” With Jordan gone Taymor cast around for another writer and found Glen Berger. It took a while for Berger to drink the Arachne Kool-Aid but finally, he quaffed deeply. Actually, there wasn’t much of a choice. “There's no question that if you’re working with her it’s going to be a Julie Taymor project,” he says. “This was not going to be a Glen Berger script. It was going to be a Julie Taymor script that I would try as hard as I could to render. I suppose there are many different flavours of collaboration . . .”
But someone entirely resistant to the idea was Avi Arad, then Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer, who had to sign off on the script. “The concept is entirely wrong,” he wrote in a stinging memo. “The tone of the treatment, which is quite dark, is not what Marvel anticipated receiving at all.” He ended with an ultimatum: “Get rid of Arachne and we’re in business.” Taymor was apparently girding herself for a fight. “If Arachne goes, I go!” she asserted, perhaps inadvertently further revealing her identification with the character. But in the end, none materialised. Arad was the victim of a reshuffle at Marvel (soon to be bought out, ironically enough by Disney). As of then Marvel’s involvement in the conception of the show was dangerously distant and limited mainly to an expression of concern about sexual innuendo, which was waved off by the producers to be addressed at a later date.
Turn Off The Dark’s problems, though, had been invisible, lurking under its surface. But things were about to get very public indeed. Enter, stage left, The New York Post theatre critic Michael Riedel. And if Arachne wasn’t a convincing enough villain for Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, Riedel was going to fill the role admirably.
Act 2: Nemesis
“There was twitching on my web this week and when I crawled out to see what I’d caught there – all tangled up and weary from the struggle – was Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man. The show is in chaos, plagued not only by financial problems but also by a nasty internal power struggle . . .” Michael Riedel, New York Post, August 2009
Michael Riedel is the New York Post’s theatre correspondent and to say he is a polarising, love him or hate him, figure in the industry doesn’t quite capture his reputation. In fact, he’s mostly just hated. Before his arrival on the scene coverage of Broadway had become a somewhat genteel affair; shows were reviewed when producers decided they were ready and gossip stayed, for the most part, in the dressing room where it belonged. Riedel changed all that, re-injecting a tabloid attitude, an irreverent tone and an unslakable thirst for backstage drama. His network of spies fed him gossipy tidbits which he gleefully printed. The continued chaos at the Foxwoods Theatre was, for him, manna from heaven. When one employee of the show begged him to leave them alone for a while he was pitiless in his response. “I’ve got my boot on the neck of this show,” he said. “And I’m having way too much fun to take it off.” It was courtesy of Riedel’s relentless coverage that Spider-Man’s problems became first a local obsession for New Yorkers and then metastasised into national and then international news. For Berger, Riedel would personify the malign forces he felt were ranging against his and Julie Taymor’s vision. “[Michael Riedel] was not just some blood-sucking mosquito,” Berger wrote later. “He was a parasite-carrying bloodsucking mosquito depositing the larvae of an elephantiasis-causing filarial worm under the skin of our show.”
“Yeah well, I’ve been called worse,” Riedel tells Empire from the Post’s Avenue of the Americas offices. “Look they were incredibly vulnerable and that’s when I’m at my best. Sure, I was torturing them.”
Riedel had at first heard rumours that the production’s budget was running out of control in mid-2007, but soon the story mushroomed into something much more entertaining, and gossip-worthy. “At first it was really a financial story. I knew it was going to be something bigger when a source of mine tipped me off to the first injury which was when a kid was doing a ticket sales agent presentation and he did one of the stunts and he broke both of his wrists when he landed. A friend of mine heard the crack. I ran that in the paper and it got picked up all over the place and then I was able to brand the show as not only being a financial catastrophe but also a danger to the actors themselves. And then of course these things began to pile up . . .”
“Glenn Riedel reported that this was going to be a very expensive production,” remembers Berger of the early days of the media firestorm. “And we were all OK well, that’s going to be the narrative for this one. And then that would have been the only story and that would have been fine if, three months later we hadn’t run out of money. For several months it really did appear as if the thing wasn’t going to happen, and it was during those months that Michael Riedel and the NYT really started covering our woes. This was before anyone knew what the script was, before anyone had heard the music, all they knew was that there was this huge ship which was potentially going to go down before it left the dock.”
Disaster piled upon disaster, and they started early and close to home. The first and most tragic catastrophe to hit Turn Off The Dark took place in The Edge’s Manhattan apartment. In mid-October 2005 Tony Adams, the human dynamo who had pulled the original deal together, had arrived to sign the final contracts tying the musicians to the project. That chore completed The Edge went to the kitchen to get something suitably fizzy and expensive from the fridge to celebrate. When he came back Adams was lying on the floor unconscious. Two days later he was dead; the victim of a massive stroke. He was 52. Thus at an early stage, the production lost its driving force and his undoubted expertise, both in raising money and in keeping volatile artistic types in check.
“Tony [Adams] was able to control all those crazy types because he had worked with Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers for years,” says Riedel. “I think he would have been able to rein Julie in a bit, he could handle these personalities.”
Only weeks after the production had finally moved into the Foxwoods Theater, which it had spent millions of dollars on gutting to make room for the state-of-the-art flying rigs (which would require no fewer than 34 individual computer-controlled winches and bespoke software in order to swing the dozen or so stunt performers at speeds touching a terrifying 50 mph) it emerged that the $25 million budget that Adams’s replacement had assured Taymor was in place was, in fact, non-existent. In mid-August 2009, all work ceased and The Foxwoods theatre went dark. It would remain that way for nearly seven months.
Bono and the Edge noted with alarm that this thing was beginning to stink of incompetence and failure, phenomena with which the pair were unfamiliar and which they and no intention of embracing. Bono finally hit pay dirt when he put in a call to Michael Cohl, a seasoned concert promoter with whom U2 had collaborated, and who had pretty much reinvented the world rock tour. Cohl came by the theatre, looked at the books, promptly declared the show bankrupt and set about raising more money. But the hiatus simply threw fuel on the rumours that the show was a disaster of entertainingly gargantuan proportions. By now production was the talk of the town: and not in a good way. At the Tony Awards, Broadway’s Oscars, host Neil Patrick Harris told as many Turn Off The Dark gags as he could in thirty seconds (“I sent Bono a congratulatory cable, it broke. . . Julie Taymor knew it was all over when she found War Horse’s head in her bed . . .”). An invitation to a swish charity do at The Lincoln Center had, engraved in copper plate at the bottom: ‘NO DISCUSSION OF SPIDER-MAN ALLOWED’.
And then there were the accidents. Injuries are not unusual on Broadway shows, but they were a distressingly frequent occurrence on Spider-Man. There had already been the dancer who broke both wrists after being slammed into the stage by the cutting-edge computer software. Natalie Mendoza, who essayed the role of Arachne was concussed by a falling carabiner, and subsequently left the show; a second actor was slammed into the stage in an apparent homage to the first and sustained a broken foot. In a potentially fatal accident stuntman Christopher Tierney fell 30 feet onto the concrete floor of the orchestra pit after a safety line was not properly fixed fracturing his skull and shoulder blade and breaking four ribs and three vertebrae. After yet another dancer was carted off to hospital Stephen Colbert joshed that the musical had been retitled Spider-Man: Inform Next Of Kin. The New Yorker ran with a cover illustration of a hospital ward full of convalescing Spideys. As recently as August 2013 a dancer became trapped in the onstage lift resulting in multiple operations and the amputation of much of his right foot resulting in yet another multi-million dollar lawsuit against the production. Observers speculated that whole legal departments were being set up to deal with Turn Off The Dark claims.
If the mounting casualty list wasn’t bad enough there was a growing realisation, shared by almost everybody apart from Taymor, that there were fundamental problems with the conception of show. The technical foul-ups were bad enough, but they might get better with rehearsal. But there were the songs. Key to Spider-Man’s appeal on paper was the music by Bono and the Edge. At first, each new tune was greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm. But the more they rehearsed them in the theatre, well . . . ‘meh’, is the word that comes to mind. “I think about that one a lot,” says Berger. “Every single person who heard the original demos between 2005 and 2010 were nothing but excited. But it was much more difficult than people had anticipated, figuring out how to convert Edge’s very particular sort of garage band demo into something that could be delivered as convincingly in a theatre. When we did Boy Falls From the Sky as part of a Good Morning America promo piece there were thousands of youtube comments saying ‘this song isn’t any good’. And when Bono and Edge did it as part of the U2 tour there were the same number of comments saying this is the best song yet. What we didn’t solve was how to convert what Bono and Edge do best. That was many hours of deep thinking that ultimately wasn’t done.”
Michael Riedel has a different, more pragmatic explanation for the musical mediocrity. “ I think people were deluding themselves,” he says. “Bono and the Edge were turning in their first songs and people were all ‘yeah, they’re great!’ But they weren’t around all that much while it was in rehearsal because they were too busy [on tour] scooping up all that money in New Zealand and Australia. The only way to do a musical is to live it, day in and day out. Musicals are just a series of problems that have to be solved, you might have to write three songs to find the one that’s right for the spot. And you can’t solve a problem if you’re composer and lyricist are 8,000 miles away.”
But. according to Berger, the general feeling was that these were just the regular snafus typical of a giant project in the midst of rehearsals. “There was no absolute proof until we were well into previews that anyone could think that their doubts were anything other than the doubts that everyone has when they're developing a project,” he says.
But then they did go into previews. Lots of previews.
The average Broadway show might be in preview for twenty or so performances. Turn Off The Dark would have 183 previews, comfortably smashing the previous Broadway record of 72. Getting through a complete performance without the thing grinding to a halt, the actors more often than not left dangling helplessly over the audience’s heads, victims of the show’s increasingly HAL-like computer software, was the rule rather than the exception. Finally, as another supposed opening date whizzed by, Broadway’s critics chorused “bugger it, we’re reviewing” and descended on the show en masse. The results weren’t pretty. “The sheer ineptitude of this show loses its shock value early,” wrote the New York Times’s Ben Brantley. “After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from ‘How can $65 million look so cheap? to ‘How long before I’m out of here?’” The much-vaunted songs meanwhile “blur into a sustained electronic twang of varying volume, increasing and decreasing in intensity, like a persistent headache.” This, though, is positively kittenish when compared to New York Magazine, whose Scott Brown opined that the experience was “savage and deeply confusing – a boiling cancer-scape of living pain.”
“It was just dreadful,” remembers Riedel. “A pretentious hodgepodge of Julie’s crazy, rather juvenile readings of Greek mythology. She clearly fancies herself to be a big intellectual. I’m not sure how much of an intellectual she actually is, she certainly isn’t an artistic genius. She ladled on all this Greek mythology and her view of what it means to be a hero and an artist and all, that kind of stuff. She convinced herself that she found these themes in the comic book itself. She’s capable of tremendous self-delusion.”
That the show was fundamentally broken was now indubitable. Questionnaires given out to audience members, much to Taymor’s disgust, just proved what everybody already knew. Arachne and the confusing second act were choking off the goodwill built up in the more conventional opening. Things finally came to a head in Spring, 2011. “Michael Cohl had come to put the pieces back together, and he knows how to handle Julie, and that was by firing her,” says Riedel bluntly.
Julie Taymor left to be replaced by Phil McKinley who shut Spider-Man down and retooled it, virtually eliminating Taymor’s beloved Arachne. Though the changes cleared up much of the confusion that bedevilled the second act, the alterations were not transformative. “I guess it was a bit clearer,” shrugs Riedel.
Final Curtain
Possibly the most striking aspect of the greatest flop in Broadway history is how much money it made along the way. In the Christmas week of 2011, it took a gross of $2.9 million, an all-time Broadway record. But financially it could never overcome those millions spent in development. At the beginning of 2014, with running costs of just over a million a week and ticket sales sinking towards half that, the writing was on the wall and Michael Cohl announced the show’s closure. At the final performance the cast, past and present took their curtain calls but neither Julie Taymor nor Bono or The Edge were mentioned or present. “They had pretty much moved on,” says Riedel. “I think it was embarrassing for them. Bono is used to being celebrated for his songs, and his humanitarian efforts, not being ripped apart for a crappy Broadway musical.”
Michael Cohl has promised that the show will be resurrected in some form or another, perhaps in Vegas, though no one is holding their breath. “It’s the biggest flop ever, nothing else comes close,” says Michael Riedel of the show’s legacy. “I don’t think they really know how much they’ve lost. The money was flying all over the place. I don’t think $75 million is out of the question.”
For its last few weeks Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark had run virtually without incident. But, halfway through act one of its very final performance, a relatively small technical hitch forced a stagehand to run on and fix a broken piece of scenery. It was a moment freighted with symbolic meaning of the kind that might appeal to Julie Taymor. It was as if the show’s essential nature, what by then was its perversely appealing brokenness, was taking centre stage and taking a final bow.
And the audience roared.
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