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. 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. He was an Irish impresario, beautiful man. “Tony Adams was the original producer of Spider-Man. What you want to do is find new ways of telling the story, opening up new perspectives into the story without totally changing it.”
That said, they’re also going to howl if it’s just boringly rote. So I think it is very fair of the fans to expect a lot of respect for the material. 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. 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. “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. So I wrote that scene, and I guess it got me the job.” 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. 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. 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. They were turned on to Broadway musicals in a way they hadn’t been before.” “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. “What gets lost in this story is how many people actually wound up loving the show,” he says. Still, Berger says that for all the drama, most elements of the musical actually worked quite well. 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.īerger chronicles the adventure in his memoir Song of Spider-Man, which should stand beside Oedipus Rex as a warning on the dangers of hubris. 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. “There’s always been this fascination that humans have had with humans fusing with the powers of an animal.”īut soon a string of mishaps plagued the production, from financing woes to technical glitches to injuries on set. “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. But Berger and Taymor both saw the character as exactly the sort of demigod hero that’s thrilled audiences for generations. 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 for a while everything seemed to be on track, with the script and music earning high praise from test audiences. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark suffered an early setback when its charming producer Tony Adams died of a stroke. “It was conceived with a sort of naive idealism, and there were a lot of high spirits early on.” “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.