During the first preview, a carabiner was hurriedly unclipped from a cable and dropped on the head of Natalie Mendoza, the actress playing Arachne, leaving her concussed. While swinging from wires in rehearsals, one performer broke his toe and another broke both his wrists. The comics’ signature sequences of web-spinning and wall-crawling were recreated using computer-controlled cables and winches, but developing the machinery was a long, laborious process, and the results were only marginally less dangerous than an arm-wrestling bout with Doctor Octopus. if you’re staging a Spider-Man musical, it’s probably not ideal to have a director who isn’t keen on Spider-Man comics and two composers who aren’t keen on musicals.Īnd then there was the technology that led to the piñata situation, and which drew the team’s attention away from what Berger describes as “some massive holes in the script”. Berger, who was brought in to co-write the book with Taymor in 2005, is quick to defend his comrades: “Every artist has to figure out what they’re responding to and take it from there.” But still. The stadium rockers would “eventually dismiss nearly all the songs as mawkish, dopey, or just ‘pants’”– which could be why the songs they wrote for Turn Off the Dark sounded less like catchy show tunes than vaguely angst-ridden, minor-key U2 B-sides. Bono and The Edge were so unfamiliar with Broadway musicals, apparently, that a producer had to burn them an educational four-CD compilation of “60 songs from the last sixty years of musical theatre”. “If Arachne’s out,” she said, “then I’m out.”Īnother passage in Song of Spider-Man that might get your spider-sense tingling comes a few pages later. So what if her concepts were gloomier, more sexualised, and, yes, more pretentious than Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comics or Raimi’s films? Her greatest triumphs came from her refusal to compromise. Avi Arad, Marvel’s chief creative officer, objected: Arachne had nothing to do with Spider-Man, and her inclusion as a major character would be “entirely wrong”. That something was the Greek myth of Arachne, a woman who beat Athena in a weaving contest, and was transformed into a spider by the jealous goddess. Bono and The Edge signed up soon afterwards, but when the producers approached Taymor, she replied that she would take the job only if she “could find a narrative something to spark her imagination”. The musical was announced in the summer of 2002 to capitalise on the success of Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man film. There are several right at the start of the story. But I’d rather have Spider-Man on my resumé than the Iraq War.”īerger went on to write a candid memoir, Song of Spider-Man, which grips like a murder mystery novel: as you read it, you scan the pages for clues that might account for the bloodbath. “It might end up in my obituary, and I’m not too happy about that. “I’m philosophical about all of it,” says Berger. A sure-fire hit had become a legendary debacle. The show did finally have its opening night in June 2011, but by then its fate had effectively been sealed: and though its run continued for another two-and-a-half years, when it closed in January 2014 it had made a loss of $60 million – a Broadway record. In the months that followed the first preview, the official opening was repeatedly postponed while Berger and his colleagues dealt with bruising, embargo-defying reviews, sackings, injuries, and countless technical snags.īy May 2011, Turn Off the Dark had become so synonymous with theatrical disaster that a headline in The Onion, the satirical newspaper, appeared to be only slightly exaggerating: “Nuclear Bomb Detonates During Rehearsal for ‘Spider-Man’ Musical”. And the financial crisis of 20 had scared off private investors, so that in August 2009, the production found itself $20 million short of cash. Its initial lead producer and guiding light, Tony Adams, had had a fatal stroke in 2005 while in a meeting with The Edge. Before the first preview, Turn Off the Dark was already being gossiped about as a ‘troubled’ enterprise. We’ll keep improving it and improving it, and it’s going to be duck soup by the time we open in January.” But we knew by the end of the night, well, that’s the worst it’s ever going to be. One of the crew members fetched a stick to prod him with, but that didn’t help. It was the worst possible position because no one could reach him. And for some reason he stopped, so you had Spider-Man dangling seven feet above the first two rows. “Then there was a flourish,” says Berger, “when Spider-Man flies off through the audience towards the balcony. But everything was going relatively smoothly until the last seconds before the interval.