Free Oh Myyy! by George Takei

sound like that big of an ordeal, but try doing that after over seventy years spent with your feet mostly on the ground. I had done some of my own stunts for my appearances on NBC’s Heroes , including one where I had to lie on my stomach — on a body-form pedestal — nearly horizontally in mid-air with my arms and legs suspended by thin wires for quite some time, and I knew how exhausting it could be.
    My Spidey costume was something our production assistant had purchased online as a one-size-fits-all, so to make it look like I wasn’t wearing a pillowcase, it had to be stretched taut around my arms and legs and safety-pinned in the back. Brad, who is used to dealing with such last-minute fixes, set out immediately to find some pins, while I practiced singing the theme song: “Spider-man, Spider-man, George Takei should be Spider-man!” I wanted to prove I really had the chops for a Broadway audition.
     

     
    The truly hilarious moment came when they finally got the harness on me. It accentuated, shall we say, certain parts of my body that no one had expected. You see, the straps came under each leg right around the crotch and tended to push everything else forward.
     

     
    When they lifted me up, there was an embarrassed silence for about five seconds before the entire team burst out laughing. It was decidedly absurd. But the producers loved it, so rather than adjust the harness (or get me some kind of dance belt), we decided instead to run with it, adding a line to have me say, “As you can see, I’ve got the whole package!”
    There was another unexpectedly hilarious aspect of this. Once I was airborne, there was no way to predict which direction I would be facing. So I literally had to “swim” my way around to face forward. The mechanics of that were so awkward that, again, the producers decided to use it to underscore the absurdity of the shot.
    The video (which you can see at allegiancemusical.com/Road-Broadway ) has me fending off some super-villains, all of whom were played by the same volunteer (thank you, David Rae from Los Angeles). Because we were improvising the way the hoist was positioning me, the fight choreography was also something we had to invent on the spot, and given our budget, had to shoot again and again from different angles. Here are some of my favorite screen shots:
     

     
    On occasion, the choreographers and our director (a talented young man named Ryan James Yezak who has made many terrific short films on behalf of the LGBT community) would consult on how to achieve the next sequence without killing or injuring me, forgetting that I was still dangling in the air above them. After a minute or two, I’d have to remind them with a gentle, “Can I please come down for a few?” (The crew later told me that I actually had been a terrific sport about it all, and that by comparison another better known actor who had recently worked with the crew, and who was known for his tough-guy image, would complain every few seconds about being left dangling. Let’s just say his name rhymes with Snarky Snark.)
    I don’t think the world was quite ready to see me as Spider-man. When the video launched, nearly every major blog picked up the story, as well as much of the mainstream entertainment media. It wasn’t clear if this was so epic that it had to be seen…or so awful. Either way, the producers had hit upon a great combination — someone of my years going out for one of the most dangerous roles on Broadway. Nobody seemed to mind that it essentially was a gigantic advertisement for our show, done in an entertaining and subversive way. I still get fan mail asking whether I got the part. After all, as I told the viewers, not only do I have great vocals, I’ve got great insurance.
    My second “Road to Broadway” video had me cross-dressing. I portrayed “Sister Mary Teriyaki,” and I was bent on crashing the set and joining the cast of Sister Act on Broadway.
     

     
    Of course, we shot