Kathy Willens/AP
It’s too bad Glen Berger doesn’t have spidey sense; it would have warned him to run away. But in 2005, when Berger was hired to work on a Broadway musical adaptation of Spider-Man, it seemed like a dream come true for the well-respected but financially struggling playwright. In the wake of the Spider-Man films, a musical version seemed like a surefire hit, especially given the director (Julie Taymor of The Lion King fame) and composers (Bono and Edge of U2). Everyone involved thought the show would be brilliant.
“A New York Times reviewer said this was a show ‘conceived in cynicism,’ and he couldn’t be more wrong,” says Berger in Episode 135 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was conceived with a sort of naive idealism, and there were a lot of high spirits early on.”
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark suffered an early setback when its charming producer Tony Adams died of a stroke. But for a while everything seemed to be on track, with the script and music earning high praise from test audiences. The only complaints came from comics fans, who feared a cheesy musical would tarnish Spider-Man’s image, and from critics, who thought superheroes were too lowbrow for Broadway. But Berger and Taymor both saw the character as exactly the sort of demigod hero that’s thrilled audiences for generations.
“Musicals being done around the fire 40,000 years ago, that’s what it was, it was singing and dancing, gods and monsters,” says Berger. “There’s always been this fascination that humans have had with humans fusing with the powers of an animal.”
But soon a string of mishaps plagued the production, from financing woes to technical glitches to injuries on set. Theater critic Michael Riedel set his sights on Spider-Man, whipping up so much notoriety that the show’s troubles became the subject of a New Yorker cover. When Taymor refused to change course, producers replaced her with former circus director Phil McKinley, whose family-friendly revamp became a fair financial success, while falling far short of brilliance.
Berger chronicles the adventure in his memoir Song of Spider-Man , which should stand beside Oedipus Rex as a warning on the dangers of hubris. Still, Berger says that for all the drama, most elements of the musical actually worked quite well.
“What gets lost in this story is how many people actually wound up loving the show,” he says. “For a lot of people, because it was Spider-Man, it was their first musical ever, and for some it was kind of a gateway drug. They were turned on to Broadway musicals in a way they hadn’t been before.”
Listen to our complete interview with Glen Berger in Episode 135 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Glen Berger on inspiration:
“I was sort of fed up with George W. Bush at this moment, and I was trying to think of a way to do him in without making a martyr out of him, and I kept thinking about, ‘Well, if only a piano could drop on him.’ And then I was thinking more and more about what sort of cynicism it would require to drop a piano on somebody so as not to make a martyr out of them, and that got me thinking about the Green Goblin on top of the Chrysler building, throwing a piano down on the citizens of New York—on the little ants down below—because he had such disdain for them, and from that point forward the scene wrote itself, with the Goblin and Spider-Man on top of the Chrysler building. And a piano, because in a musical a piano made perfect sense—you could start the scene with ‘Green Goblin does Liberace‘ and end it with that. So I wrote that scene, and I guess it got me the job.”
Glen Berger on adaptation:
“It’s a tricky balance because every artist needs to feel like they’re not just doing data entry, they need to feel like they’re contributing something to the iconography. There was a meeting we had early on with Joe Quesada over at Marvel, and he did convey to us this sense that Spider-Man has been around for—at that time—almost 50 years, and all these inkers and artists and writers had been contributing and adding—with a lot of thought and artistry—to just who Peter Parker/Spider-Man is, and what this universe is. And he did convey this sense, certainly to me, that it wasn’t really fair for us to mess with that, that we needed to respect how Spider-Man got to this place in the center of our culture. So I think it is very fair of the fans to expect a lot of respect for the material. That said, they’re also going to howl if it’s just boringly rote. What you want to do is find new ways of telling the story, opening up new perspectives into the story without totally changing it.”
Glen Berger on setbacks:
“Tony Adams was the original producer of Spider-Man. He was an Irish impresario, beautiful man. He’s the one who convinced Marvel in the first place to let him do Spider-Man: The Musical, and he could have persuaded anyone to do anything, he was just that sort of person—he’s the one who persuaded Bono and Edge to get on board. And after a whole lot of wrangling—this was early on in the process, back around 2005—he finally got all the contracts in order and went over to Edge’s apartment to have him sign the deal—Bono had already signed, Julie had already signed, everything was finally coming together. And Edge went to go get a pen, and when he came back he found Tony Adams slumped over, and Tony Adams, who was still in his 50s, was dead the next day, from a stroke. And that, early on, put a wrench in things. It didn’t really occur to anyone at the time that that was going to be in some ways a fatal blow [to the project].”
Glen Berger on political subtext:
“Back in 2005, when I was first writing with Julie, we made Norman Osborn—the reason he was doing these things with genetics was he was convinced humans needed to more quickly adapt to what was clearly going to be a climate change catastrophe in a few years. And Julie was saying, ‘If we make him seem liberal in that way, is that going to turn off all the potential conservative audience members?’ And then she thought, ‘Oh, but he turns out to be the villain.’ So maybe a lot of conservatives would see—you know, people would read into the show whatever political ideology they wanted to read into it. And that turned out to be true, years later, when Glenn Beck saw in the Spider-Man show an affirmation of everything he had been talking about, in terms of the individual rising above the situation, to fighting for liberty and justice, to this climate change proponent getting his comeuppance and all that. So he went on his radio show more than once and was a huge advocate for the show.”
Glen Berger on the new director:
“And so Phil [McKinley] came on board, and he felt like one of the large problems in the show wasn’t just the [story] structure, but also just the tone in general was too dark, and he thought the choreography in certain numbers was too violent, and so he came in and really tried to brighten things up. … This was around the time that Charlie Sheen was having his meltdown, so people saw a lot of similarities between Charlie Sheen and Spider-Man—they called us ‘the Charlie Sheen of theater.’ And he had a thing about his ‘goddesses,’ and at one moment in rehearsal, Phil McKinley, it came to him, ‘Oh, Goblin’s Goddesses, that’s perfect!’ We could have these sort of mutant assistants of Goblin wear these [Goblin’s Goddesses] T-shirts. And then other people on the team are thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s going to date itself within a month.'” That idea fell by the wayside eventually, but there were any number of ideas that were flying around, and of course the tech staff were all freaking out, because they felt like we didn’t really have time to implement even half the changes that were being proposed.”
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