The Inside Story Of The Most Controversial Musical

Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark: The curtain call of Julie Taymor’s co-writer, Glen Berger. 

Thousands of shows have closed on Broadway. Time-lapse footage taken over the last 130 years would reveal how the only constant in Times Square is change, and how only a handful of shows stubbornly persist. Phantom of the Opera is like the horseshoe crab of Times Square—an entity that clearly came into being in an earlier era. Of course, for true perspective, that time-lapse camera should be set up a little earlier. 19,000 years ago, Times Square was under one-thousand feet of ice. 14,000 years ago, Midtown was home to shaggy mastodons wading through black spruce swamps.

So in this light, penning an elegy for the closing of a show feels ridiculous. But Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark was—as producer Michael Cohl liked to say—sui generis. Like the Broadway street itself, the show entered Times Square on a slant, and cut a conspicuously wide swath, all the while blinking, blaring, and glittering. The show reached the one-million-attendance mark faster than any show in the history of modern Broadway. If you include its previews, Turn Off the Dark performed in front of an audience more times than the original productions of Annie Get Your Gun, Damn Yankees, Kiss Me Kate, or Guys and Dolls. In the final week of 2011, it broke the all-time weekly gross record, taking in $2.9 million in ticket sales. In over 150 weeks, it only dipped below $700,000 twice. It has taken in a total of over $200 million in ticket sales. For nearly any show, that would be considered a most-notable achievement, and those numbers would have ensured its continuing longevity. But because the running costs of the show are so high, the string of sub-million-dollar weekly grosses this Autumn made the show finally unsustainable.

But exactly three years ago, it seemed as if all eyes were glued to the doings of Turn Off the Dark. When the hyper-budgeted show (though having nowhere near the price-tag of a typical Cirque du Soleil production), emerged from Tech, and a couple injuries made the news; and then as news of a glitch-filled first preview spread; and then as news leaked that lead Natalie Mendoza was out indefinitely with a concussion; and then as blog reviews began to fill the internet with tales of a dazzling if incoherent and dysfunctional spectacular, the show became a genuine cultural phenomenon. The public watched in perplexity, amazement, and horror—the audacity of trying to put on a Spider-Man musical! For the public, it was riveting in the same way it’s riveting to watch a python trying to swallow a young dead hippopotamus.

And still the cast gamely persisted, even after, on the darkest day of the year, as the full moon was swallowed up by a lunar eclipse, “hero Spidey flyer” Chris Tierney ran down the elevated ramp, froze at the edge, and then fell thirty feet to the floor of the pit.

Vertebrae broke, ribs cracked, his skull fractured. Nevertheless, by opening night, Chris Tierney was flying again as Spider-Man, lighting up the eyes of hundreds of thousands of children, who in turn lit up the eyes of the man behind the mask.

As Chris ran toward the edge, the orchestra was playing a warped version of “A Boy Falls From the Sky”—the first tune Edge and Bono wrote for the show. Few know that the composers took the title of the song from a poem by Auden ("Musee des Beaux Arts"). Which, in turn, was inspired by a seventeenth-century painting by Bruegel: “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” In the foreground, a man plows his field. A little farther off, a shepherd tends his flock. And, barely noticeable at first glance, there in the bay--a splash, and a pair of upturned legs. Auden mused how the Old Masters were never wrong about suffering. How, after a disaster, life for the living always resumes, as it will. How the ship that witnessed “a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

So our show made a wild rumpus for a spell. But like Icarus’ tumble and splash, the events were ultimately a blink in time , and life goes on for the living. But let that plummet into the sea not entirely diminish in any of our eyes—the eyes of us artists and patrons-of-the-arts alike—the rather remarkable fact that Icarus was at least for a time…aloft. The earth-shackled, Labyrinth-lost human was in the sky. And for a time, he flew quite high indeed.

Glen Berger is the author of SONG OF SPIDER-MAN: The Inside Story Of The Most Controversial Musical.