In Glen Berger’s utterly engrossing autopsy of a disaster, “Song of Spider-Man,” the author writes, “If you’re trying to decide if it sounds better for the press to call you a ‘traitor’ or a ‘toadie,’ things have clearly not gone according to plan.”
If this is what it takes to write a memoir that promises to be an instant theater classic, then bring on the deceit and ass-kissing. As a co-author of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” Berger had a front-row seat to the making of the highly-controversial and trouble-plagued musical, which will end its Broadway run on January 6. In its wake, the show leaves a $60 million loss, a humiliation for its composers, Bono and the Edge, serious accidents suffered by its cast members, a series of lawsuits, a traumatic reversal of fortune for its original director, JulieTaymor, and now this riveting memoir.
During its three-year stint as Broadway’s favorite punching bag, “Spider-Man” generated reams of copy, fodder for late-night comedians, and endless parodies. It seemed as though there could be nothing left to say or write about the much-maligned show. But Berger, stung by what he saw as the gross misreporting in the press, felt compelled to try to set the record straight.
Moreover, he was party to a virtual a coup d’etat when it became increasingly clear that Taymor was unwilling to make changes that the creative team and producers deemed necessary if the show was to have any chance of success. When the director became aware of “Plan X,” a course of action created behind her back, she bitterly told her friend — whom she had picked out of relative obscurity to collaborate with her on the show — “You have no soul.” Taymor was eventually fired and replaced by Philip McKinley. Berger himself saw his own work revised when writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa was also brought in to salvage the musical.
ARTINFO recently spoke with Berger about the experience of working in the trenches alongside a woman he would later betray and what that has taught him about the complex nature of collaboration and the deluded dreams of show people.
Why did you write the book?
Here’s one answer: I suddenly got this overwhelming feeling that I was destined to write it. “Spider-Man” turned me into a superstitious person. After everything was done, I began asking in an existential way, “Why did this happen in the way that it did?” When I was hired for this gig in the first place, I had this sense, “Yes! Finally the universe has figured out how to make everything up to me.” [Laughs] And when all that craziness went down, my reaction to the universe was, “Really?” And so it left me in a sort of perplexity until after we opened. And then I realized I wasn’t destined to write “Spider-Man, the Musical.” I was destined to write a book about the making of “Spider-Man, the Musical.”
Did it give you any pause to write a “tell-all”?
My agent had suggested that I write a book a couple of months before we opened and I thought, “No way will I write a tell-all.” I was thinking that it was just a little sleazy. But then after the show opened, I thought, “Why does it have to be sleazy? Why can’t it be a really earnest recounting full of compassion and hearts worn on the sleeve and all that?”
It reads like an apologia to Julie. Is that what you intended?
Let me put it this way — the story of me and Julie from one perspective? Who cares? But on another general level, just the idea of the blooming and withering of a friendship over the course of a collaboration is sort of a fascinating topic. But an apologia? I mean, there’s just a sort of melancholy for how events unfolded. I think that few relationships are put under such a strain. It’s not that one or the other did anything toxically wrong, you know? It’s just the way that the events played out that made the future untenable.
You don’t spare yourself in the book. You even bring up the press image of you as either a traitor or a toadie.
Look, I don’t feel like I was either one in real life. But my first objective in the book was to get at the truth and to do that you have to be willing to throw yourself under a microscope as much as anybody else. When it comes to the press, the way that one is portrayed is based on the limited number of inches that reporters have and the number of eyeballs they’re trying to reach. Nuance gets lost, things get misconstrued, and people get misinformed. That was one of the objectives of my book, to provide a little more context for how everything unfolded.
In the book, Julie said this show is cursed. Do you believe it was cursed?
Well [laughs], yeah! Early on there’d be people who said the show was cursed and Julie would say, “Pshaw.” And eventually she came around to that opinion and the same thing happened to me. You don’t believe in such things. And then these things start happening. Some of it just snowballs and then it’s hard to escape from it. Once a meme gets formed, it’s very hard to change the narrative.
Do you think the media was somehow out to get Julie and “Spider-Man”?
I think everybody in the world had some sort of opinion about it but that happens all the time. When Julie’s movie, “Across the Universe,” came out, it was characterized as polarizing. There were some people who loved it and some who hated it with a real vengeance, and it had to do with the fact that she was using the Beatles. And “Spider-Man” was certainly similar.
Do you think Julie got a bad rap on this show?
Among the many reasons that I wrote the book was to push back against some of the conventional wisdom that has formed about some of the people. The idea that Julie was somehow profligate when it comes to budgets, I didn’t see that. Or that Bono and the Edge’s music wasn’t good. If people heard those original demos, they’d hear the music in a new light.
What seemed to get some critics’ ire up is what Mark Harris wrote in his review of your book in the New York Times that the show itself was “conceived in cynicism,” that it was a “craven lunge”—
What the hell! Nothing gets me more upset than that sentence! That sentence has haunted me night after night when I think about this entire dynamic between critics and writers. Did I not spend the entire book saying that was not the case? What that means is that Mark Harris read this entire book with a pair of goggles on. Mark Harris wasn’t there for six years. He wasn’t there with Tony Adams [the original producer] or at the original meetings with Julie and Bono and the Edge. As I say in my book, it was indeed conceived in a sparkly type of idealism, perhaps a naked and naïve idealism. It wasn’t about the money. It was about having a vehicle and enough of a budget to really deliver something that was going to just blow the tops of people’s heads off. And maybe we did that but not quite how we envisioned it.
You mention that the people involved had “a nausea for pop culture.” Then why a comic book?
But the whole point of the show — not just Julie but every true comic book fan realizes that these comic books are not disposable! The themes are ancient and deep and epic. What attracted Julie to it wasn’t the fact that it was pop culture. She mentioned more than once and so did Bono and the Edge that far from being disposable, there was something deeply embedded in it that was truly resonant.
What did you learn about collaboration from the experience?
Well… collaboration is a lot more complex and mysterious than one might even suspect. Respect is important, an open mind and an open heart.
And trust?
Yes. And one thing I hadn’t put together so much until recently — how do I put this? — If you’re too vulnerable then your collaborator is not going to speak as openly and freely as your collaborator might. This is true of all of us. We unconsciously calibrate how we speak to [people] based on that.
Are you talking about Julie? Was she too vulnerable?
Yeah. I hope this doesn’t come across as criticism because it’s not meant as that but the interesting thing about Julie, especially in the business she’s found herself in, is her need to constantly project a strong persona. What you don’t realize on a conscious level is that, in fact, especially in periods of high stress, she’s actually very insecure and vulnerable. And when you’re in that state, if you bring up something that cuts too close to the bone… If that happened at times in the collaboration, then Julie would just get up and leave the room.
And so you didn’t bring up issues that you should have because you were afraid of what? Unleashing her formidable anger?
In the case of Julie, you didn’t tell her, not because you were intimidated by her but because you could sense the vulnerability behind the persona. Maybe you don’t want to be yelled at, maybe you don’t want to set her off, but it also puts a spanner in the collaboration and in the work. In a potentially fruitful collaboration, you should be able to say anything. But we’re always making these unconscious assessments and calibrations based on vulnerability and fragility. And that happens in all relationships — friends, parents, a husband and wife.
Do you think “Spider-Man” will indelibly mark your career?
I will not let that happen. It’s just a show! It’s a play! I’m working on a new musical now [“The New Frontier”]. It’s about a folk trio in 1962 who used to get along famously and create these fantastic harmonies and now they can’t be in the same room together to finish one more album. I worked out this plot before “Spider-Man,” but I wouldn’t blame any reviewer for bringing up some parallels. The title is inspired by a 1960 speech by John F. Kennedy. But he wasn’t talking about a piece of land. It’s the landscape of hopes and dreams, that space between people that we’re always trying to cross.
